Stull Cemetery, Kansas

Everything written about Stull traces back to one page: the front page of the University Daily Kansan of Tuesday 5 November 1974, five days after Halloween. Read in facsimile, reporter Jain Penner's article makes a single claim about the graveyard of this unincorporated hamlet west of Lawrence — that it is "one of the two places on earth where the devil appears in person twice a year". No gate to hell, no number seven, no Halloween, no equinox: those arrived later, and in versions that contradict each other. The same article quotes the local Methodist pastor saying he had never heard the legend and suspected students had invented it. What followed was real enough for the people who live there: five decades of trespassers, broken and stolen headstones, and a sheriff's car parked at the gate every 31 October. The roofless stone church that drew them was bulldozed in March 2002 and no longer exists. The cemetery is private property and entering it is a crime.

Stull is not a town and never has been. It was never incorporated, and the sentence the University Daily Kansan used to place it in 1974 still fits: "Stull covers about two blocks on one side of Douglas County Road 442 at the intersection of County Road 1025. On one side of the road are two churches, a garage and a few houses. On the other side, nearly as long as the town itself, is a graveyard." The same article admitted that "because the town has never been incorporated, its early history is hard to trace": in the 1860s it was a hamlet in Kanwaka township, Douglas County, with no post office and no railroad, dependent on its neighbours. The 1910 census counted 30 inhabitants; by 1974 the paper put the figure at about 20. Lawrence is some sixteen kilometres east, Topeka a similar distance west. Before it was Stull it was Deer Creek, after the stream the 1974 reporter described as "the only body of water near Stull, which isn't even shown on most maps". The Kansan reported in 1998 that the community took its present name from Sylvester Stull, the postmaster, in 1899 — and that the stubborn rumour of an original name of "Skull" is false. Local histories compiled for the American bicentennial in 1976 date the first appearance of Deer Creek on territorial maps to 1857 and describe the first settlers as German speakers, some of them out of Pennsylvania Dutch country. I have not been able to read those volumes, so I pass them on as what they are — local tradition rather than something I have checked. One correction does not need them: "Pennsylvania Dutch" is Deutsch, German. There were no Dutch settlers at Deer Creek. The congregation's stone church went up on the hill in 1867 as the Evangelical Emmanuel and Deer Creek Mission, with a cemetery chartered beside it. Steve Jansen, then director of the Elizabeth M. Watkins Community Museum in Lawrence, told the Kansan in 1994 that its sermons were preached in German until 1908. In the early 1920s — the sources say 1921 or 1922, and I cannot separate them — the congregation raised the money for a new frame church with a bell tower across the road, and left the stone one to the weather. There was no fire, no murder and no witch trial. The building, as the reporter who interviewed Jansen in 1994 put it, simply wore out its usefulness. Then came Tuesday 5 November 1974. On the front page of volume 85, number 50 of the University Daily Kansan — election day in Douglas County, five days after Halloween — reporter Jain Penner published "Legend of devil haunts tiny town", alongside a photograph of the graveyard by Joyce Mendelsohn captioned "Silent Stull". The claim, in full, is one sentence: "According to legend, this graveyard is one of the two places on earth where the devil appears in person twice a year." That is all of it. The article names no gate, no number seven, no Halloween and no equinox. It also says, of the story it is printing, that it "has been told and retold, although it has probably never been recorded". The witnesses in that first piece are worth reading, because everything since is a copy of a copy. Julie Day, a freshman from Bonner Springs, said her grandmother had told her the story and taken her there one October when she was ten or eleven; on the way she saw a house that "appeared to be all red, as if it were on fire" and looked ordinary again when they passed it. Rick Walker, an assistant instructor in western civilization, had heard of visitors suffering three-or-four-hour memory lapses. An anonymous junior described driving out with two fraternity brothers to "find some excitement", sudden rain that stopped as abruptly as it started, and a cold hand on his arm that turned out to belong to nobody: "I'll never forget how cold the fingers felt." Gary Mason, an associate professor of journalism, remembered a student turning in a photo story about a witches' coven at Stull. What happened next did not happen to Stull; it happened to the people who live there. Carloads came from Lawrence, Topeka and the surrounding high schools. The hill was fenced and posted. On Halloween night 1994 a Kansan reporter, Carlos Tejada, staked out the entrance with the sheriff's deputies and filed a piece reporting that the devil had failed to appear. By 1998 the paper was quoting a student who had heard from friends "that it's one of the seven gateways to hell" — the first version of that formula I have been able to date. The Chicago band Urge Overkill had already put the ruined church and one of its headstones on the cover of its 1992 EP, titled simply Stull. The ruin came down on Friday 29 March 2002. The Lawrence Journal-World reported the next morning that tracks showed heavy equipment had pushed the limestone walls inward, and that nobody would say who had ordered it: Major Weiss, of the Harvest Hills company that owned the ground, told reporter Mindie Paget "I didn't authorize it to be torn down", and added, drily, "Halloween will be really nice. You won't have to stay up late." A previous owner, Dennis McCarthy, was blunter: "It needed knocked down a long time ago. It's caused a lot of trouble and headaches. It's cost the county a lot of money, sending deputies to sit there every Halloween." Eighteen months later the Kansan had the answer from Lieutenant Don Crowe of the Douglas County Sheriff's Department: the owners had taken it down for safety. "The walls were leaning and we didn't want anybody to get hurt." The surviving church across the road, the one the congregation built in the 1920s, is the building most photographs of Stull actually show. On the afternoon of Monday 25 July 2022 its bell tower caught fire; a neighbour called it in at about half past one and Consolidated Fire District No. 1 had the flames out by four. Chief Mike Baxter described "significant damage to the bell tower area" and concerns about structural instability; Brenna Wulfkuhle, a church trustee, said members reached the scene fast enough to hand firefighters the building's blueprints. Because the building was a church, the fire was referred to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Fire officials pointed to a lightning strike recorded in the small hours as the likeliest cause. The tower and interior were restored and the congregation, now called Stull Community of Faith, is still meeting there.

The honest answer is: do not go. Stull Cemetery is private ground, it is fenced and posted, and the sheriff's office patrols it. Trespassing there is a class B misdemeanour in Kansas; the Kansan reported in 2003, quoting Lieutenant Don Crowe of the Douglas County Sheriff's Department, that people walking up to the site are issued a notice to appear in court, that the offence carries up to a $1,000 fine and six months in jail, and that anyone uncooperative is arrested outright. Crowe's own summary was "stay away unless you want to go to court". Deputies have been posted at the entrance every 31 October for decades — the practice was old enough by 2002 for a former landowner to complain about what it cost the county — and it has not stopped: the sheriff's office was still stationing a car there in 2010 and the site was still being patrolled around Halloween in 2016. The thing most people go looking for has not existed since 29 March 2002. The roofless limestone church was pushed over that Friday; by 2010 all that was left on the hilltop was rubble and a few cornerstones. Any account written in the present tense about walking into a ruined 1867 church, or about a staircase in its basement, is describing something that has been gone for more than twenty years. What is there is a working village of a few dozen people and a living congregation. The frame church across the road, whose bell tower burned in July 2022 and was restored, is now Stull Community of Faith, at 1596 East 250 Road; its pastor is Kyle Scheideman and it runs a Harvesters rural mobile food distribution on the fourth Thursday of every month, from 10 to 11 in the morning. That is the part of Stull that welcomes visitors. The graveyard, where Paul Bahnmaier of the Lecompton Historical Society has grandparents buried, is not. If what you want is the history rather than the dare, it is available without trespassing on anybody: the Lecompton Historical Society in nearby Lecompton holds the local record, and the University of Kansas has digitised the entire run of the University Daily Kansan, including the front page that started all of this, free to read online.