Posted on 09/16/2004 7:09:25 AM PDT by Cagey
WILKES-BARRE - To hear Jake Jenkins tell it, he's battening down the hatches in a battle against evil.
As he opens the door on his Waller Street home, the sound of scraping metal and wood escapes through the cracks. He's pulling back the bars and beams that keep his family secure.
And the witches out.
"Yeah, wood and steel," he said, standing in the open doorway. "Nobody's getting in."
Jenkins, 51, and his wife spend much of their time hunkered down in their two-story home along with their eight children ranging in ages from 22 years to 1.
He said he home-schools his children.
"I'm no fool."
Wilkes-Barre Area School District Superintendent Jeff Namey said parents who home-school their children must submit an application to the district, a curriculum, and a portfolio of students' work at the end of the year.
Asked if Jenkins was registered with the district as a home-schooling parent, Namey said he didn't know but would check.
Jenkins doesn't really want to talk about himself, or his family for that matter.
"The witches are after us, so I don't really want to get into any personal stuff," he said.
He told a Times Leader photographer "witches are trying to kill me." Asked why, he said, "I really don't know."
His protection against dark forces extends beyond his front door.
A tree stump in the center of his small front yard is adorned with wooden stakes: nine point skyward, and seven jut from its side along its circumference.
"It's a map of the neighborhood," Jenkins said. "Each spike points to where a witch lives.
"There's a whole bunch that live up there," he said, pointing north up Waller Street.
The horizontal stakes, painted red, point out the witches, he said. The purpose of the vertical ones? To gently dissuade witches from using his stump for ceremonies.
"What they used to do is come by and sit on it," he said.
An orange plastic fence on either side of his home is yet another anti-witch precaution. "They would always try to sneak over."
Jenkins won't name names, but says he's got the dirt on the neighborhood.
"The one up there, she drinks human blood," he said. "The one ... there, she's the real high-level witch, but she's real slick."
Standing on his porch dressed in warm-up pants, a T-shirt and a sweat-stained army cap, Jenkins explains Luzerne County is the location of the largest witches coven in the state.
"Police know about it," he added.
"No one has come to me and said we have a problem with witches on Waller Street," said police Chief Gerry Dessoye.
He said records of police responses to the South Wilkes-Barre street would be available today.
Police respect the freedom of individuals to practice Wiccan, followers of which are often referred to as witches, he said.
As Jenkins spoke from his doorway, to his right hung a "Ghostbusters" poster with a witch standing in for the ghost, attached to the worn siding of the home. "A family project," he calls it.
"You have the witches that want to play at it, and then you have the real serious bastards, deadly," he said.
He should know - he said his own brother, who used to live next door, is one of them.
Bill Jenkins was convicted in 1998 on 10 federal charges for trading machine guns for marijuana and sentenced to 47 years. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the guns - semi-automatic weapons converted to automatic - were being sent to members of a white supremacist group, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Dirty Dozen motorcycle gang.
It was Bill Jenkins who tipped Jake Jenkins off to the existence of the witches. "Basically I started watching my brother. That was back in the 1990s."
In the early morning hours of June 20 - the same month Jenkins put the stakes around his tree trunk - his brother's old house went up in flames under what fire officials say are suspicious circumstances.
Fire Chief Jacob Lisman said the individual in charge of the investigation was away on vacation Wednesday and more information might be available today.
Jenkins said he's happy the home burnt; it's another blow against the witches.
Jenkins' neighbors, on the other hand, don't seem too concerned about any supernatural activity or the front yard display.
Chris Foote, 23, lives across the street and a couple of homes away. Foote said he never thinks about Jenkins' stump display. "I don't really know what the deal is with that. They've always been weird, so I really thought nothing of it."
Gene and Becky Dill live directly across Waller Street from Jenkins. He warned them about the neighborhood activity, they said.
They just shrugged their shoulders. "We said OK," Becky Dill said.
Are there witches on Waller Street?
"I have no idea," Becky Dill said. "I don't even know what a witch is."
"Yeah," Gene said with a grin. "I live with one," he added, nudging his wife.
We'll figure out a way to break in your house yet, my pretty!
Now, why did you find this story important enough to share with us Freepers?
so, a paranoid is now supposed to be the example of a typical home-schooler parent? Good thing there are no parents of kids in Public School that have such problems, or the paper might seem them out too.
This has nothing to do with witches, Wicca, or the neighborhood. This guy is mentally ill, probably paranoid schizophrenic, and it's scary that he's got small kids bolted into the house with him.
LQ
"Bill Jenkins was convicted in 1998 on 10 federal charges for trading machine guns for marijuana and sentenced to 47 years. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the guns - semi-automatic weapons converted to automatic - were being sent to members of a white supremacist group, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Dirty Dozen motorcycle gang. "
I'm just curious a bit. Why isn't he serving that sentence?
Otherwise, it's just another nutcase story.
Have they turned him into a newt yet?
Oh, never mind. The gun guy is his brother. I somehow missed that.
Eight sentences in, they get the Home School slam. "Looky! Looky! We found a nut! AND he home schools! Shouldn't homeschooling be illegal??"
No, they turned him into a nut.
You're not one of them, are you?
Actually, this story made a major Northeast PA newspaper and it is a story concerning "property rights" and homeschooling to name two topics. Some people here find that makes for interesting discussion.
If Tah raz ah and Hillary were after me I'd be afraid to. That is the stuff of nightmares.
"I'm not a witch I'm your wife."
This has nothing to do with Witches, but is a classic example of mental illness.
Well, it does have some entertainment from a "Weirdness Factor" point of view...
That said, this nut is NOT doing Christianity or homeschoolers any favors, and as Lizard Queen says, it is scary to think of his little kids being in there with him
If you check out the linked source, you'll notice they took a shot at homeschooling in the subtitle.
http://www.witchvox.com/xbasics.html
The witches he's talking about could be people just as cray as he is. There are 15 or so self-described witches in our small (50,000) town.
It has nothing to do with homeschooling, but advocates of unrestricted homeschooling (of which I am one) would do well to seriously address what should be done about cases like this. Paranoid schizophrenics probably really are disproportionately inclined to "homeschool" their children, but homeschooling clearly isn't the issue here. What are the proper steps for a free society to address a group of siblings who are being held in a house with an absolute nutcase (and possibly violent/dangerous nutcase, if he's responsible for his brother's house burning down), getting brainwashed by all this paranoid nonsense, and most certainly not getting anything that any sane person would regard as an education? They'll all be unemployable and mentally ill themselves whenever they finally get out of there.
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