So this is my first post on here, because I thought you all might enjoy this little tale about my childhood. People tell me it’s pretty creepy, and it does have some religious themes, so reader discretion advised I guess.
When I was a kid, me and my family lived in, pardon my French, buttfuck nowhere. We had a little farmhouse out in rural Nebraska. Looking back, my childhood was fairly uneventful. This is mostly because my social circle was pretty small, consisting almost primarily of my family and a few neighbors. My family was me, my parents, and my younger sister who I’ll call Eve. The neighbors I’m not really gonna bother naming because I barely saw them. The farms were pretty far away from one another, with miles of nothing but endless cornfields between them, so social hours were pretty much limited to a few yearly potlucks and get togethers.
There is one neighbor I’ll name: Jenkins. I kind of assumed that was his last name, and I never knew his first because whenever anyone would talk about him it was always just “Jenkins” or “Old Man Jenkins”. I realize now that was probably a nickname given how stereotypical it is, but regardless he played into it. He was crotchety and surly, which of course made him a prime target for hooligan shenanigans. It didn’t help that he was also the closest to not only my farm, but also the only other farm with kids.
Now is probably a good time to mention the suckiest part about living in Butt-Fuck Nowhere Nebraska: there is butt-fuck all to do. This is especially bad for the kids. The adults were usually farming, or drinking, or both, but for someone who was too young to do either, the days could really drag on. And given how busy our parents always were, it became our job to self entertain. This usually consisted of exploring. Corn fields are all the essentially the same, but what made them worth checking out is that sometimes there were treasures to be found inside the long plant passage ways. And when I say “treasures” I mean tools that farmers had forgotten, or a well that you can’t see from the road. It doesn’t take much to get labeled “exciting” when the baseline is corn.
Old Man Jenkins’ farm was always the prime spot for exploring. He didn’t tend his crops well, so they were often overgrown with tall weeds that made it extra fun to trek through. You really felt like you were Indiana Jones if you went in there with a spade and cut your way through. Not to mention that with him being an old geezer, there was always the added thrill of the risk of getting caught. Another thing that made exploring Jenkins’ property extra fun was the weird stuff you’d find in there. Jenkins was a bit of a religious zealot. Now don’t get me wrong. Everyone around there was Christian, but he just took it a step further than the rest of us. For one, his scarecrows weren’t mounted on posts like everybody else. Instead he had crafted crude splintery crosses to nail them to. Another weird thing was the confessional.
It was a blazing hot Saturday about mid summer and me and Eve were playing jungle explorers at Jenkins. I don’t know why, but the heat always made us go crazy. Like you’d think that it being so hot we’d want to stay inside in the shade, watching tv and sucking on a popsicle or something, but no. Hot days were always exploring days. We’d put on our backpacks, fill them with random stuff that we assured our parents was necessary for the journey, and set off into the 100+ degree morning, returning only for lunch, if even that. This day was especially hot. Cutting through the tall grass was itchy and dry. It was also harder to cut, as the dry stalks got caught on my spade. Eve was complaining and wanting to go back, which was unlike her. She was never one to quit on an adventure, but the heat was getting to both of us. But I promised her that we’d find some shade soon.
After about an hour of whacking weeds and ducking through corn, we found it. It was far back of the property from the road, away from the house, right near the edge of the woods. Me and Eve never explored the woods. Not because of some ultimatum from our parents, though there were many, but because they were terrifying. The nice thing about a cornfield is that it is linear, one line that you can follow back to the road. The forest was chaotic, and impossible to navigate. Kids had gone missing, and we were not about to be one of them. Now, it feels important to say that I don’t think there was anything paranormal about the woods. Forests are just easy to get lost in. That said, given the story to follow, I can’t say I’m sure everyone who disappeared got lost.
But back to the wooden box. Unlike everything else on the property, it was not ramshackle. The weeds, the scarecrows, and the random objects laying around would lead one to believe that Jenkins was lazy. This wooden structure said otherwise. It was so clean that it almost seemed polished. There was no dirt clinging to the sides, and the weeds in a square perimeter had been trimmed away. Well, I say trimmed, but it looked more like they were just prevented from growing. Maybe some sort of weed killer or something, but it was a little spooky how nothing grew at all. It was like God had just decided that nothing would grow there.
Eve didn’t think it was spooky. She was just happy to finally have some shade. She walked right up the three wooden steps, and tugged on the shiny silver doorknob. It opened up and inside was just a seat. To the right of the seat was a sort of thick wooden mesh. You could see through it, but you really had to put your eye real close to the holes because it was thick and the holes were small. On the other side was another seat. What was weird to me is that there was no door to the other side. It was completely enclosed. We tried to find some way in from the inside, but couldn’t. So we decided to give it a go from the outside. I swear we were only in it for a half hour tops, but when we came out it was dark. We may have explored longer than I thought, but we were usually pretty good at keeping track of time and getting home for dinner. We did make it to the edge of the property which we usually didn’t, but we kind of beelined it, so I don’t think it would have taken that long. But kids are stupid and my memory is not the best, so maybe its not weird. But it seemed weird at the time.
Anyways, we went home, and we told our parents. They scolded us for going on Jenkins’ property and staying out late, but explained that what we found was probably a confessional, which Jenkins probably used to talk to God. The idea that someone could talk to God confused me at the time, because I thought he was more of like a concept. My parents were kind of progressive Christians, so they went more for the God as a guideline rather than like big bearded man in the sky. But my parents explained to me that Jenkins was a little more rigid in his beliefs than we were. Little did we know how rigid they really were.
We found out two years later, which is also when we moved away. I wasn’t the one who discovered it. That misfortune befell the other kids from the property down the road on the other side of Jenkins. It was winter, so the crops were dead. It was probably easier for them to find the confessional than us, not having to navigate the corn field or weeds. It also probably helped that there was a light on inside, and it was night. Me and Eve didn’t like exploring at night, because it was spooky, but I guess these kids didn’t have a problem with scarecrows leering down at them from crosses in the darkness. I wasn’t told any of this at the time, because my parents thought it would traumatize me. It was only in my twenties, years and years after we had moved away, that they spilled the beans.
The facts of the case are a little elusive, as Jenkins was the only witness and his testimony is a little suspect. But ignoring all the rumors and hearsay, here are the facts of what happened: the kids entered the property at around nine o’clock. They explored for about an hour until ten, when they found the confessional. Jenkins was inside praying. He had candles lit. The kids apparently mocked him from outside, and he ran out to shoo them off. As he was searching for them, the kids snuck inside the confessional, and locked it behind them. As I said earlier, me and Eve went into that confessional and I don’t remember a lock, but that is the official story. As they were locked in there, one of the candles toppled over, setting the confessional ablaze. The two kids were trapped inside and burned to death.
On the surface, this seems to just be a tragic accident born of some mischief gone awry. But what got the local area abuzz, and got Jenkins put behind bars, is that the bodies of the two boys were not found positioned as you might expect. For one, they were not clawing at the door, or trying to escape. They were just seated. Like they hadn’t tried to fight it at all. And the other thing, the thing that still keeps me up at night and the real reason that I’m posting this, is that they were in the wrong side of the confessional. They were in the compartment with no door. The wall between the two, though charred, was still in tact when they were found and had to be removed in order to recover the bodies. I don’t know how they could have gotten in there. Me and Eve spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way in and couldn’t. So maybe they were just more resourceful than us, but I doubt it.
We moved out within the week, so I didn’t get much more of the gossip and certainly didn’t go to the court proceedings, so that’s all I know about it. I tried asking my parents for more info or contacts to ask, but they said they’d rather just let it go. But if any of you are from Nebraska and heard about this, or just have any info in general, I’d love to hear it. Personally, I think Jenkins snapped and locked them in there somehow, but the mystery of it still gets to me, and I’d love to see it solved.