“The Headless Witch in the Woods” is perhaps “Bones” at its most “X-Files”-ish, pitting Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan’s (Emily Deschanel) hardline skepticism against her relatively agnostic crew over a case involving a mysterious death in a forest said to be haunted by the specter of an accused witch beheaded centuries ago. At one point, even the typically level-headed Cam (Tamara Taylor) spills her guts about the time her mother visited her from beyond the grave … or so she imagined. The rest of the “Bones” team prove just as skittish. It doesn’t help that strange occurrences keep piling up, from the unexplained appearance of ominous talismans in the woods to the disturbing, confounding footage captured by the murder victim, himself a film school student.

The “Blair Witch Project” influence should be glaringly obvious by this point, although it manifests itself most plainly in the episode’s amateur-documentary-gone-wrong subplot. In Paul Ruditis’ “Bones: The Official Companion,” director of photography Gordon Lonsdale said the episode’s second unit sought to shoot the recovered footage in the exact same manner as Myrick and Sánchez’s horror classic. “It was a handheld camera the whole time,” Lonsdale noted, which is readily evident in its shaky, unfocused quality. That and the sight of petrified young people filming themselves as they run around at night can’t help but evoke Donahue and her castmates’ flights of terror.

Tempting as it surely was to go fully supernatural, “The Headless Witch in the Woods” ultimately ends with the reveal that its killer is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill human. It does, however, leave a little room for doubt about the existence or lack thereof of the titular ghost in one of its final scenes — because what’s a Halloween-adjacent outing without a last-minute scare?