Stull Cemetery

Stull began as Deer Creek in the 1850s; the congregation built a stone church — Evangelical Emmanuel — in 1867, preached in German until 1908, and chartered the cemetery beside it the same year. In 1922 the community raised twenty thousand dollars for a new frame church across the road, and the old stone chapel was abandoned to become the decrepit landmark the legend needed. Headstones in the yard read Wulfkuhle, Bahnmeier, Deister, Eberhart — real families resting in a real graveyard, which is the part visitors tend to forget.

In March 2002 the ruin came down under circumstances that remain the file's only genuine mystery. A windstorm had caved in the west wall weeks earlier; on a Friday in late March, demolition equipment pushed the remaining walls into the middle of the church. Nobody — not the land's former owner, not the cemetery caretaker, not the authorities — admitted to authorizing it, though the former owner called the demolition a blessing: the roofless shell had been drawing trespassers for years.

The 1974 article supplied the original claims — the twice-yearly diabolical visit, a staircase beneath the church that led down to Hell and compelled anyone who found it to descend. Later accretions arrived by way of a 1990s KU student project that manufactured additions to see whether they would spread. They did: the story that Pope John Paul II ordered his plane rerouted rather than fly over Stull, the claim that the cemetery is one of seven gateways to Hell, the grave of the Devil's own child marked by a twisted tree.

Hollywood filed its share. The legend turns up in Supernatural — the Winchester brothers are Lawrence boys — and in the aircraft horror film Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal, and Ariana Grande once claimed a visit to Stull left her followed by something unwholesome, which remains the cemetery's most unexpected celebrity endorsement.

The people of Stull have spent fifty years filing the counter-report: vandalized headstones, beer-drinking college kids over the fence at Halloween, sheriff's tickets and the occasional arrest. The church is rubble, the gate is posted, and the gateway to Hell has a No Trespassing sign on it — the archive's preferred ending, a legend that survived its own debunking and a graveyard that would like, at last, to be left alone. The dead of Deer Creek never asked for the company, and the living of Stull have been saying so, with diminishing patience, since 1974.