THE HELL WITH KANSAS

Many travelers speeding through the sleepy unincorporated hamlet of Stull, Kansas--located between Topeka and Lawrence--do not realize that it is more than just a wide spot in the road--it actually is rumored to be one of the seven places on earth which is a direct gateway to Hell.

Stull consists of a United Methodist Church, a bait house, a few homes, a cemetery, and not much else. No longer present is the Evangelical Emmanuel Church which had been constructed in 1867 by the German settlers in the area. That church, located on the north side of the graveyard, was abandoned in 1922 and eventually demolished in 2002 by unknown individuals or forces and without the permission of the landowners. The cemetery (pictured below) during daylight appears non-spooky and exceedingly prosaic.

Depending on the version of the story, a stairway to Hell is underneath a seal next to the site of the former church or under one of the graves in the cemetery. The seal opens only on Halloween and the vernal equinox, and the devil emerges during those times to roam the area. Some believers state that anyone who descends down the stairs never returns; others claim that the journey to the nether regions may take several days but that the person eventually re-emerges--however, without any recollection of where he was or of the passage of time.

The roof of the diabolical church caved in 1996, several years before the demolition of the building, yet rain purportedly would never fall into the structure. Pope John Paul II allegedly ordered his plane to detour around eastern Kansas during a visit to the USA in the 1990s in order to avoid flying over unholy ground. It is said that a witch was burned in Stull and buried in the graveyard (there is a tombstone with the name "Wittich" on it). There is supposed to be the ghost of a child who haunts the area born of the union of the devil and a witch. There are rumors that a large tree in the cemetery was used to hang witches.

The actual inhabitants of Stull have no trouble believing that visitors to the cemetery may in fact lose their memory of events and the passage of time while they are there; however, the Stull citizens attribute this phenomenon to the fact that many of the interlopers imbibe heavily of alcoholic beverages or pharmaceutical compounds during their visits. The people who live in Stull have grown weary of thrill-seekers, college students, and reporters invading the cemetery in the middle of the night in the hopes of seeking something supernatural and leaving behind used condoms and empty liquor bottles. The cynics among the residents point out that nobody seemed to have known that Stull was possessed or haunted until an article appeared in November of 1974 in the University of Kansas newspaper describing many well-established legends of its long supernatural history--legends which apparently no one had ever heard prior to the publication of the article.

Nonetheless, Stull is not totally without honest notoriety. In the early 1900s, a farmer accidentally killed his son by burning a field without realizing that the boy was in it, and, in a separate incident, a missing man was found hanging from a tree. 

There are numerous websites describing the infamy of Stull. An example of one can be found here.

By Ryanmetcalf (Ryanmetcalf)
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