THE WOODED SWAMP JUST behind her house always seemed like her own private playground to Shannan Streeter. She felt happy and safe when she explored it, especially when she was with her best friend, Megan.
But Shannan and Megan haven’t been back to the woods of Moon Lake, a rural neighborhood near New Port Richey, since last October — not since the day, just before Halloween, when the two 14-year-old girls saw something that made their skin prickle.
It was one of Shannan’s favorite places, a pond just past a stand of cypress. In the middle of the pond was a tiny island. When they crossed over a rickety bridge to the island that day, what they found looked like something out of a horror movie.
Lying on the ground, encircling the island, were little plaster-of-paris ovals, decorated with hieroglyphics and strange figures — a man who looked like he was part of a tree, a woman whose hair was in flames.
Under the shade of a bottle brush tree was a small platform propped up on sticks, with candles on it, like some sort of altar.
Three gnarled limbs had been driven into the earth to support a hanging black pot. Inside the pot they could see something dark and gummy.
Was it wax? Or was it…dried blood?
Shannan raised her hand to her cheek and looked at Megan, wide-eyed.
“What are all these candles,” she whispered, “and what are we living next to?”
AS IT TURNED OUT, THE GIRLS WERE living next to a witch.
That made Marigold Drive, where Shannan Streeter lives, a neighborhood with quite an interesting religious mix.
Down at the corner of a gravel road lined with mobile homes and bungalows are Art and Sherry Grey. They are devout Baptists. At the other end of the road are the Streeters, Ron and Linda, who are on-again, off-again Jehovah’s Witnesses. In between is Linda Cornwell, a witch, a good witch. At least, that’s what she says. The Streeters and the Greys disagree.
Both families have been keeping a close eye on Cornwell ever since Shannan and Megan made their discovery. They contend that Cornwell and her consorts have been up to evil doings in the swampy woods behind Marigold Drive.
“I saw them one night out there on the island, smearing blood on themselves,” says Art Grey.
“I think they’re killing animals,” says Ron Streeter. “We heard pigs squealing in terror one night — and then the squeals suddenly stopped.”
“They have pentagrams burned into their skin,” says Sherry Grey. “Not tattoos. These are burned in, the way you would brand cattle.”
“I believe they are worshiping Satan out there,” says Linda Streeter.
Cornwell, a registered nurse who cares for terminally ill patients, says her neighbors have narrow minds and vivid imaginations.
“I’m a witch, but I’m a peaceful witch,” says Cornwell, who moved to the neighborhood a year ago. “We do not sacrifice animals or worship Satan. Neither do we brand ourselves or smear blood on our bodies.”
Adds Ron Parshley, an honorary member of Cornwell’s coven of 10 witches: “Insect repellant, maybe. Not blood.”
Cornwell says ian invention, and have no devils in their own pantheon.
Pasco County Sheriff’s deputies became unwilling referees in this religious debate last June, when, after a year of bickering, the neighborhood erupted in gunfire, with both the witches and the neighbors blasting away in the cypress woods.
As far as anyone can tell, the half-hour volley was only chest-thumping on either side, consisting of warning shots that did more damage to the cypress trees than anything else.
But when deputies arrived, the shooting match had turned into a street brawl, and the witches, some still in their black ceremonial robes, were having it out with the neighbors in the middle of the street.
The deputies told the witches to quiet down. They told the neighbors that as far as they could determine, the witches were not doing anything illegal and to leave them alone.
The only arrests involved two boys who egged Cornwell’s house and left a threatening note. The boys, 13 and 14, were charged with extortion for leaving the note, which read: We are the ultimate enemy. We are out to kill. I hear you are Satin (sic) worshipers, and this is a warning!
It’s hard to tell just how seriously to take an extortionist who includes a stick-figure drawing of a devil with his note and dots all his i’s with little circles.
But the juvenile scrawl set the tone for the witch wars of Moon Lake, where the spelling iake the anti-witch side in the New Port Richey debate.
Far from it. Niles is a witch.
“I saw lots of different religions as a boy,” says Niles. “I had relatives that my grandfather used to call ‘those dirty-foot Dunkards.’ They belonged to a religious sect that went in big for foot washing. We also had relatives who were Mormons, cousins who were Christian Scientists and some others who were Catholic. My grandfather was Lutheran. When our whole family got together the quickest way to start a fight was to say something about unions or religion.”
One more creed was tacked on to the formidable Niles family repertoire two years ago, when Curtis became a witch, having been attracted to the religion by his wife, Mary. Both of them are now part of the coven of four men and six women who meet at Linda Cornwell’s home. They conduct their rituals at the island out back, which is actually part of Cornwell’s property.
Niles doesn’t measure up to the green-skinned, wart-nosed, old-hag image that the word “witch” generally conjures. But then, neither do any of the other witches in the coven.
Cornwell is a big, boisterous woman who cheerfully admits that she owns a black cat and a collection of mystical-looking figurines. But there is weirder looking stuff in the action-figure section at Toys R Us.
Mary Niles, high priestess of the coven, does tell some pretty wild stories about premonitions and past lives, but you can hear stranger stuff from Shirley MacLaine.
Wicca, practiced by perhaps 50,000 Americans, involves ritualistic services usually held to mark changes in the seasons and in the phases of the moon. Wiccans sometimes callhis space, they believe, is sacred, a sort of way station between our world and the next.
Sometimes they perform “magic” as part of their ceremonies, although it sounds a lot like what some would call positive thinking. Asked for an example of her magic, Cornwell says that she once had trouble with a disc in her back but imagined it getting better, and it did.
Witches believe in reincarnation and psychic powers. They believe that any good you do in this world comes back to you threefold. The same goes for the bad. That may account for their motto: “Do what you will, but harm no one.”
Outwardly, Wicca (the word is from an Anglo-Saxon word that means “to weave”) might seem ominous enough, with the dark cloaks, the daggers and the torchlit ceremonies in the woods. Outsiders also are thrown by one of their symbols, the pentagram, a star that has been appropriated by Satanists, who use it upside-down.
WHEN SHANNAN STREETER TOLD her stepfather what she had seen, Ron Streeter went out to investigate the island, which he had always thought of as part of his property. He threw most of the strange figurines into the pond, hoping to discourage whoever it was from coming back.
The next day Cornwell confronted him, telling him that the island was her property and that he had “desecrated” it.
Streeter, a 29-year-old cable-service repairman, didn’t know what to make of all her tal a stray mixed-breed pit bull that the Streeters had been feeding.
It took six stitches to close the wound. Streeter agreed, a little grudgingly this time, to pay Cornwell’s medical bills. By now he was getting irritated at what she wanted him to pay her for the figurines — $300 seemed too high, so the Streeters didn’t pay her right away.
Cornwell took them to small claims court, and the judge ruled in her favor. Now the Streeters owed her another $300 for her medical bills.
The whole thing left bad feelings, and the Streeters were also bothered more and more by the witches’ ceremonies.
Ron and Linda would look out their windows at dusk and see people in black robes filing out to the woods twice a month. Some nights they would hear chanting. Once they thought they heard pigs squealing in terror, the sound building up to a crescendo and then stopping suddenly.
The island where the witches hold their rituals is about a hundred yards from the back of the Streeters’ double-wide mobile home, with a thick swath of cypress trees and other vegetation in between.
The Streeters called the police several times to complain about the noise, but the police were reluctant to take action.
“They said, ‘What do you want us to do about it?”‘ recalls Ron Streeter. “They said it sounded like a civil matter to them.”
In other words, the Christians and pagans of Marigold Drive were pretty much left to work it out on their own.
WITCHES HAVE BEEN GETTING THE short end of the broomstick for more than 400 years.
The evil image attached to them has its roots in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, when Christianity was attempting to stamp out her the fields with their broomsticks between their knees, hopping up and down to show the crops how high to grow.
Pointed hats — once fashionable, but at the time a sure sign of a country bumpkin — were also associated with peasants and country people who followed the old ways. Out of that evolved the caricature of the witch as an old hag who rode a broomstick and wore a pointed hat.
Eventually, the church took an even tougher approach toward witches, and thousands died for such trumped-up offenses as “causing plagues of hailstones and snails.”
Under the church’s onslaught, practitioners of the old ways went underground and disappeared. But a modern resurgence of Wicca began in England in the 1930s, and soon found its way across the Atlantic. A more recent surge in popularity was connected to the rise of feminism in the ’70s; Wicca is one of few religions with a feminine god at the top of the order.
But the onus of the word lingers: witch. So why not simply call yourself something else?
“Well, I’m a Jew as well as a witch,” says Lady YGraine Osborn of Jensen Beach, the director of the Witches Anti-discrimination Union, which has members in 14 states. “Should I stop saying I’m a Jew because the Nazis spread lies about us?”
ONE NIGHT LAST JUNE, LINDA Cornwell found the note on her door accusing her of Satan worship.
Half angry, half frightened, she decided that she and ward the island, there was an addition to the torches and robes and daggers: under his robe, Curtis Niles was carrying a .357 Magnum.
At the beginning and again at the end of the ceremony, the witches fired four shots into the ground — to the north, south, east and west. In rural Moon Lake, where there is often hunting and target practice going on in the swamp, the sound of gunfire is not uncommon. The shots were a symbolic gesture, the witches say — their way of encircling themselves with protection.
But there was nothing symbolic about the sound Niles heard in the underbrush as the witches walked back toward the house.
“I was a deputy sheriff for 16 years, and I know that sound,” he says. “It was a shotgun being cocked.”
The next sound was equally unmistakable. Most of the witches hit the ground as the shotgun blast sent pellets ripping through the foliage over their heads. Niles ran toward the house, coming back out with his own shotgun and firing a half-dozen blasts in quick succession.
Cornwell was convinced that her neighbors were the ones doing all the firing. But the Streeters say they were in their bedroom, watching television when they heard the shots. The Greys say they were home too and heard the pinging of pellets raining on their roof.
By now the witches were back in the street looking for their attacker. When they saw Art Grey with a gun, they thought they had found him. Several of the witches ran to his fence line.
“They were screaming at us,” says Sherry Grey. “They said, ‘Do you want to shoot a witch? Well, go ahead.”‘
“They were shouting at us,” responds Cornwell. “I told everyone to come balack assassin?”‘
It was about that time the police arrived.
THE GUNFIGHT MADE THE WITCHES celebrities for a while. They even staged a ceremony for the benefit of the TV news cameras. The Streeters responded by having friends over and singing Christian hymns in their back yard.
Ron Streeter also chopped down the underbrush at the back of his lot so that he would have a clearer view of the witches’ island.
“If they were doing something bad back there,” Linda says, “we didn’t want to help them hide it.”
The Greys, meanwhile, have been keeping their distance.
“My Bible tells me to stay away from witches and sorcerers,” says Sherry Grey. “Everyone in our church is praying for us, to create a hedge of protection around our home.”
There won’t be any hedge of protection for the Streeters. They have decided to sell their house and move away.
“We don’t feel safe, raising our daughter here,” says Linda Streeter.
“I know they are killing animals back there,” insists Ron Streeter. “I know they are not as innocent as they seem.”
His daughter nods assent. “Yeah,” she says. “And we have three kittens missing.”
Not long ago, the Streeters’ house was struck by lightning, and the power surge destroyed the circuitry in some of their appliances.
“Don’t look at me,” says Linda Cornwell. “We didn’t do it. Maybe their God was mad at them.”
– MICHAEL McLEOD is a aim the witches engage in animal sacrifices on an island behind their home.(COLOR)
Some neighbors call it spooky and evil, but the witches say their ceremonies are peaceful. “We do not sacrifice animals or worship Satan,” says witch Linda Cornwell.(COLOR)
