Meet the man keeping the haunt alive at the Witch’s Hut

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This article was published 21/07/2015 (3912 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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That witch in Kildonan Park should best be brewing up a spell to make Jim Zacharkiw’s arthritis and bad back a whole lot better.

She owes it to him.

For the past decade, the 64-year-old retired parks worker has put in more than 3,000 hours tending to that witch, to the entrapped Hansel and Gretel, to the giant spider and all the other creepy and colourful denizens of The Witch’s Hut.

This summer, Zacharkiw is doing it all by himself.

“I love when the kids walk in,” Zacharkiw said Monday. “I enjoy it — I like the kids. I get 10-to-15,000 visitors a summer. I try to keep it open until mid-October.”

Zacharkiw is a volunteer, nary a penny for all those hours.

Until this year, he said, the city hired post-secondary students as Kildonan Park ambassadors, and they were able to help him operate The Witch’s Hut 56 hours a week, open every day for eight hours.

“That got cut from the budget,” he said. “They would walk around and meet and greet people. It started at 20 students years ago, then down to 14, then 10, and last year eight.”

Alas, none this year.

And so Zacharkiw has had to cut the hut’s hours to 20 hours a week, from 1-5 p.m., Thursday through Monday.

And he hopes to keep on doing it for a long time yet: “It’s all health. If my health is good, and they (the city) don’t have anyone else, I’ll volunteer.”

A city spokeswoman said no one should worry about the Witch’s Hut’s future: “There are no plans to close the Witch’s hut at Kildonan Park. If the volunteer that currently works there can no longer volunteer we would look for new sources of volunteers,” said the city official.

It was a Centennial gift in 1970 from Manitoba’s German community, said Zacharkiw, who has performed maintenance, painted, fixed the fence, and encouraged the kids to feed corn to the ducks in the adjacent Lord Selkirk Creek.

He can talk about all the artists and architects and sculptors who had a hand in the intricate design, including a diorama that tells the whole story of Hansel and Gretel’s fateful encounter with the witch — pay attention, kids, it’s a cautionary tale.

Peter Langes, John Nelson, Elfriede Berger are among the people with skills who saw the hut as a labour of love. “Technically, it’s the Fairy Tale Cottage,” Zacharkiw confided, though, it’s universally The Witch’s Hut.

Like anyone would argue with the witch over the technical fine print.

Upstairs, where lurk the witch and her evil-looking witch’s cauldron amid critters boding ill for those who come too near, look up, look way up, and you’ll see something really, really scary.

“That spider is famous,” laughed Zacharkiw. “People will come in and say, ‘Do you still have that giant spider?’ ”

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca