So the summer of 1999 that movie The Blair Witch Project came out. I was in high school, and this was August so that meant on thing: band camp! Yep, I was an alto saxophone player and I was in Marching Band.

Band camp was a week of practice from 8am - 10pm, where we would learn all the music and the choreography for the show. I don't really know how I was able to stand out in the sun for hours like that, but we all did it. It was actually pretty fun, mind-melting heat aside.

The tradition was that one person would volunteer their house and have a sleepover every night during the week. That year it was my friend Annie, who's Mom was always really nice (and extremely patient) by letting a whole bunch of smelly teenagers crash at her house. It was really fun, but we didn't exactly get a lot of sleep.

One night, a bunch of us were watching a movie, probably Labyrinth, and the doorbell rang. Annie went to answer it and nobody was there. However there was a GIANT stick figurine, like the one in The Blair Witch Project, propped up against the side of the house. This thing was like six feet tall. Everybody was scared.

"What does it mean?"

"Pssh, it's probably a prank."

"It's creepy. I don't like it."

"It's probably the drummers."

Annie's half-sister started really freaking out though. Half-sister was a cheerleader, and let's face it, fairly fucking dumb. "Oh my god you guys this is seriously messed up. We should put like a circle of salt around the house or something to keep the evil away."

She was deadset on the salt idea. Although I had never heard of this remedy for "evil" before, I thought it was just for slugs. I won't lie; I was kind of glad to see half-sister so scared, because she was openly mean to me on more than one occasion. Eventually us band kids gave up on trying to figure it out and went to bed.

The next day at practice it was revealed that the stick figure was in fact a prank perpetrated by the drummers. Not really a very difficult mystery to solve since they were laughing their asses off about it.

The Blair Witch Project wasn't like a great movie or anything, but it really jump-started the whole ultra-low budget faux documentary/found-footage horror niche, which was cool. Looking back on it, that whole band camp thing was an excellent set-up for a slasher film. The twist of course would be that I was the killer.