Round Mound Cemetery

According to darkkansas.com, kansashauntedhouses.com, hauntedplaces.org, and the originating Shadowlands submission, Round Mound Cemetery is reputed to be haunted by a witch. The signature claim of the legend is that the wind does not blow at the cemetery even though it sits exposed atop a round hill, an anomaly attributed to the witch's presence. Visitors also report that if you stay late enough, you can hear the dead screaming from their graves.

The lore further boasts that the cemetery once appeared in TIME magazine as one of the most haunted places on earth; this claim is repeated across haunted-listing sites but cannot be independently verified and appears to be folkloric embellishment. Some family members of those buried there have disputed aspects of the haunting claims, noting for instance that the wind always blows on the hilltop and that a carved chair in the cemetery was made by a local man for his mother-in-law to sit on while visiting her husband's grave — not a witch's throne.

Paranormal columnist and author Jason Offutt visited Round Mound Cemetery in January 2009 and documented the local tradition firsthand on his syndicated blog 'From the Shadows.' Offutt's own investigation — conducted with two companions — turned up a mundane explanation for lights they observed (a caretaker's pickup truck), but he also collected direct eyewitness accounts from two locals, Kurt and Brian, who described seeing lights moving in locations they said were 'impossible for a person to be,' near the cemetery entrance at night. According to Offutt, Kurt described it as 'easily the weirdest, most confounding thing that's ever happened to me.' While Offutt's personal investigation was inconclusive, his independent reporting and the firsthand accounts he gathered constitute a credible second documentation of the paranormal tradition, distinct from the Shadowlands submission.