Some might say that the closest place to Hell on Earth would have to be either Miami-Dade, Florida, or maybe the Jersey Shore, the one place said to be literally a portal to Hell is in fact a tiny rural village in Kansas. It sounds like something from an episode of Supernatural: appropriately, because the legends surrounding a tiny hamlet in Kansas inspired the show’s creator, Eric Kripke. Characters Sam and Dean Winchester hail from Lawrence – just 20 kilometres from Stull, said to be home to a cemetery so haunted that it contains a direct portal to Hell.
You might imagine that a hamlet harbouring the very gates of the infernal abyss would at least possess a certain Gothic grandeur: perhaps a smattering of gargoyles or a perpetually brooding sky choked with sulphur. Sadly, no. Hell is, it turns out, not other people, but almost no people and a sleepy, mid-western nowheresville.
Instead, Stull is a thoroughly soporific speck on the map, founded back in 1857 by a gaggle of German-speaking Pennsylvania Dutch settlers who surely had more mundane things on their minds, such as crop yields and livestock, than hosting Lucifer’s annual garden party. For the better part of a century, life in Stull ticked along with all the breathless excitement of a damp tea towel. Its population never cracked 50 souls and its crowning civic achievement was a modest post office that barely outlived the Edwardian era.
Then, in the mid-’70s, with occultism all the rage, some bored students at the nearby University of Kansas, just 20 kilometres away at Lawrence, decided to spin a rattling good yarn for the student newspaper one Halloween.
Far removed from the horrible story of The Exorcist or the bizarre black masses recently discovered in Los Angeles, and tucked away on a rough county road between Topeka and Lawrence is the tiny town of Stull. Not unlike the town of Sleepy Hollow, described by Washington Irving in his famous tale, Stull is one of those towns motorists can miss by blinking.
Thus breathlessly began a 1974 article in the student rag by one Jain Penner, penned for a Halloween edition that apparently suffered from a notable shortage of actual news (this was Kansas, after all). Suddenly, a sleepy rural graveyard was thrust onto the international stage as the premier tourist destination for ghouls, thrill-seekers and teenagers with cheap cider and questionable judgement. Twice a year, on Halloween and the spring equinox, carloads of suburban adolescents would descend upon the peaceful resting place of the local farming community, convinced they might catch the Prince of Darkness popping up for a quick brewski.
A graveyard of such Satanic repute required the appropriate architectural accessories and Stull at least delivered on that front. Chief among these was the old stone Evangelical Emmanuel Church, erected in 1867 and subsequently abandoned in 1922 when the congregation decided they fancied a snazzier wooden-framed house of worship across the road. Left to rot on its grassy hill above the graves, the stone relic duly spawned its own folklore. The local gossips whispered that its basement led straight to the fiery pit or that rain miraculously refused to fall within its roofless walls.
One of the legends swirling around Stull Cemetery was that of Oliver Bahnmaier, a two-year-old boy who died after accidentally wandering into a field his father was burning in Lecompton. The boy was buried in Stull Cemetery, and a story began that if one stepped on Oliver’s tombstone, they would be transported to Hell.
Naturally, the authorities could not leave well enough alone. In 2002, the crumbling ruin was mysteriously demolished, much to the bewilderment of the property owner, who claimed he knew nothing about it until the bulldozers had finished their work. Even the replacement Methodist church couldn’t escape the town’s alleged curse, suffering a rather dramatic and mysterious fire in the summer of 2022.
The catalogue of paranormal occurrences associated with the site is wonderfully unhinged. There is the tale of two young men who fled the graveyard only to find their motor vehicle inexplicably transposed to the opposite side of the highway, facing backward. They presumably swore the beer had nothing to do with it. There is also the persistent rumour that the village was originally named ‘Skull’ before nervous churchgoers hastily rebranded it to throw Old Scratch off the scent. And, my personal favourite, the splendidly unverifiable urban legend that Pope John Paul II allegedly ordered his pilot to steer the papal aircraft on a wide berth around eastern Kansas to avoid flying over unholy airspace. One can only picture His Holiness nervously clutching his rosary as the aircraft skirted the Kansas state line, terrified of a mid-air collision with a stray demon.
The long-suffering actual residents of Stull, of course, viewed these annual invasions of urban degenerates with the kind of weary exasperation only rural folk can truly muster. When your grandmother’s final resting place is routinely desecrated by half-witted teenagers reenacting low-budget horror flicks, patience tends to wear remarkably thin.
To prevent unwelcome visitors, a chain link fence was erected around the cemetery grounds, and the site is patrolled regularly by security. “No Trespassing” signs were also installed on the fence. These precautions caused the number of visitors to die down, except around Halloween.
Today, the gates are firmly locked, and trespassers face the distinctly un-infernal penalty of a hefty fine or a spell behind bars. The thrill-seekers have largely moved on to greener, less litigious pastures, leaving Stull to return to its rightful state of rural oblivion. Yet the legend stubbornly persists, immortalised not only in suburban folklore but as the primary inspiration for Supernatural. It’s a comforting reminder that humanity will always prefer a rattling good ghost story to the dull, quiet, reality of a Kansas cornfield.
