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WILKES-BARRE, PA -
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.
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."
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.
"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.
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.
Jenkins said he's happy the home burnt; it's another blow against the witches.
Gene and Becky Dill live directly across Waller Street from Jenkins. He warned them about the neighborhood activity, they said.
"Yeah," Gene said with a grin. "I live with one," he added, nudging his wife.
More: www.timesleader.com...