Rural Kansas Burying Ground at the Center of a Modern Urban Legend
Stull Road, Stull, KS 66060
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Public rural cemetery. Visitors are advised that the surrounding township strictly enforces trespassing rules, particularly after dark.
Access
Limited Access
Grassy rural cemetery on a small hill
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1867 · Nineteenth-Century German-American Evangelical Settlement · Modern Urban Legend Case Study
The community of Stull, formerly known as Deer Creek Community, was settled in the mid-nineteenth century by German-American Evangelical and Lutheran families. The Evangelical Emmanuel Church was built on a hilltop overlooking the surrounding farmland in 1867, and the adjacent burial ground served the community for the next century. The post office took the name Stull in 1899 in recognition of Sylvester Stull, the community's postmaster.
The church congregation declined through the twentieth century, and the original stone church fell into disrepair after its last services. The roof collapsed in the late 1990s, and the remaining walls were demolished by the property owners in March 2002, in part to discourage trespassers drawn by the cemetery's modern folkloric reputation. The cemetery itself remains in active family use.
The site's current reputation traces to a November 1974 article in the University Daily Kansan, the student newspaper of the University of Kansas in nearby Lawrence. The article was framed as Halloween-season fiction and claimed that the Devil appeared in Stull twice annually, on Halloween and the spring equinox. Subsequent retellings stripped the framing and treated the claims as documented folklore. By the late 1970s, the cemetery had become a site of nightly trespass that the Stull township was unable to suppress.
Additional embellishments to the legend, including the claim that Pope John Paul II's plane diverted around Stull during his 1993 Colorado visit, are unsupported by flight records or papal-itinerary documentation. The Snopes investigation and successive newspaper interviews with longtime residents have consistently described the entire portfolio of Stull legend as twentieth-century invention. The community has repeatedly asked that visitors respect the cemetery as a working family burying ground.
Sources
Local tradition built atop the 1974 University Daily Kansan article holds that Stull Cemetery contains one of the seven gates of hell, and that the basement of the adjacent Evangelical Emmanuel Church contained a staircase that descended without end. Variants describe a witch buried near a now-removed stone, claims that the witch's pine tree grew from her grave, and reports that crucifixes hung on the church's interior walls would invert without explanation.
The story has been embellished in successive retellings. A widely-repeated addition claims that Pope John Paul II's plane diverted in 1993 to avoid flying over Stull during his Colorado visit. The Snopes investigation and contemporary flight-tracking research found no evidence for this claim. A separate addition involves a young man's hair turning white after a single night spent in the cemetery; the original 1974 article did not include this detail.
Longtime Stull residents have given repeated interviews stating that no community memory or church record supports any of the modern claims. The 1867 Evangelical Emmanuel Church was a working congregation for more than a century, the cemetery is in active use, and the property has been the target of recurring trespass and vandalism that the township and the Douglas County Sheriff's office have struggled to control. The dramatic 2002 demolition of the remaining church walls was an effort to remove the most magnetic feature of the legend.
Readers interested in Stull should approach the site as a case study in how a single newspaper article seeded a durable contemporary legend rather than as a documented haunted location. Daytime roadside viewing is the appropriate level of engagement, and the surrounding community's request for respect should be honored.
View the cemetery and the foundation of the former Evangelical Emmanuel Church from the public road. Local residents have asked visitors to stay off the cemetery grounds outside of daylight hours and to refrain from disturbing family burials. The associated church ruins were demolished in 2002.
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