Stull Cemetery — The Gateway to Hell
A tiny prairie graveyard that a hundred articles have called one of the 'seven gateways to hell' — the town has spent decades paying for it.
Case File No. 099
FILE 01 The Legend
Stull, an almost-vanished farming town outside Lawrence, Kansas, acquired its 'gateway to hell' reputation in the 1970s–80s through student newspapers and urban legend: a 'witch's grave' with a tree said to be used for hangings, a vanished church where, by legend, the devil appears on the spring equinox or Halloween, and claims that a staircase in the church floor led downward 'to somewhere'. The legend grew through coverage in books like 'Weird America' and decades of Halloween invasions.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
Reported over the years: voices, a lone figure on the church ruins, falling temperatures, and the famous claim that Popes have prayed to contain the gateway (a rumor attaching to papal flights over Kansas). By the 2000s hundreds of trespassers were arrested each Halloween.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The documented truth: the church was torn down by the diocese in 2002 partly to deter trespassers; the 'hanging tree' fell in a storm in 1998; no missing persons, no stake in the historical record. The town's residents — who have lost the privacy of their dead's resting place — are the legend's real victims. Grade 'C' for evidence, kept on the map because Stull is the purest American example of a legend destroying a place it claimed to haunt.