Stull Cemetery

Stull is a tiny unincorporated farming community between Lawrence and Topeka. It began in the 1850s as Deer Creek, a settlement of German and Pennsylvania Dutch families, and took the name Stull when a post office opened in 1899. The Evangelical Emmanuel Church, organised in 1859, built a small limestone church in 1867, and the cemetery beside it was established in 1869. Around 1922 the congregation moved to a newer church nearby, and the old stone building slowly weathered into a roofless ruin. For a century, Stull was known for nothing more than its fields and its neighbours.

That changed on 5 November 1974, when the University Daily Kansan, the University of Kansas student newspaper, published “Legend of Devil Haunts Tiny Town.” The piece claimed that the Devil appeared in Stull twice a year, on Halloween and the spring equinox, and quoted students describing eerie experiences there. According to Lawrence historian Paul Thomas, it was written as spooky seasonal fare, but a paper shortage pushed publication past Halloween, so it read like reporting. The legend grew quickly: a witch buried in the graveyard, a child of the Devil, a hidden stairway to hell beneath the church, and a tale that Pope John Paul II ordered his plane to avoid flying over Kansas – which the local sheriff has called flatly untrue.

The cost was borne by the people of Stull. By the late 1990s hundreds of people were arriving on Halloween night; gravestones were pushed over and stolen, beer cans left among the graves, and the ruined church vandalised. Sheriff’s deputies began patrolling and issuing trespass fines, a fence went up, and the church that owns the cemetery now presses charges against trespassers. After a wall collapsed, the ruined church was torn down as a safety hazard in 2002. The families whose relatives are buried at Stull have asked, repeatedly, to be left in peace.

Stull’s story is best understood as a case study in how a modern legend is made: a student article, college-town word of mouth, rock-music references and, later, television and the internet. The graveyard itself is an ordinary rural cemetery still in use – the resting place of Stull’s farming families, not a portal to anything.

The legend – not first-hand reports – claims that the Devil appears at the cemetery on Halloween and the spring equinox, that a stairway to hell lies hidden there, and that visitors experience lost time, strange winds, sulphur smells and faces in photographs. Celebrities and visitors have repeated such claims, but none has been documented.

The stories focused on the old stone church ruin (demolished in 2002) and the graves around it. Halloween night and the spring equinox are the legend’s supposed dates – and exactly when law enforcement patrols the area.

Stull has been referenced by the band Urge Overkill (whose 1992 EP is titled Stull), by the TV series Supernatural, whose story arc ends at Stull Cemetery, and by countless “gateway to hell” lists. In 2013 the singer Ariana Grande described a frightening visit during a Kansas City concert stop, sending a new generation searching for it.