HAUNTED LAWRENCE

H AUNTED L AWRENCE
117
However, the writer Bob Curran claims it was only around 1965 that the
first recorded story cropped up, which dealt with an old, gnarled pine tree.
Located next to the long-abandoned Evangelical Emmanuel Church, this
tree (which was then considered the oldest and largest such specimen in
Kansas) had become so overgrown that it had cleaved in two a nearby
tombstone that marked the graves of Bettie and Frankie Thomas. These two
had died almost a century earlier, in 1879, and due to the strange natural
occurrence that had damaged their grave, baseless stories began to spread
that they had been practitioners of witchcraft.
Eventually, these tales morphed into rumors that blasphemous rites
had been carried out in the small town. Some said that the church had
been erected in penance by the early members of the community for their
supposedly wicked ways. Stull’s relative proximity to Topeka’s infamous
“Devil House” (a derelict—and now-demolished—building that was
alleged to be possessed by a demonic presence) may have also contributed
to such rumors, per Curran’s research.
It was said that for many years, legends about Stull were whispered from
local to local but were largely unknown to those outside the area. This all
The ruins of the Evangelical Emmanuel Church prior to its destruction. The tombstone
in the foreground is that of Isaac Stull, the father of the town’s namesake, Silvester Stull.
Courtesy of Sarah Cutright, Blueghost Studio.
H AUNTED LAWRENCE
118
changed on November 5, 1974, when the University of Kansas’s student
newspaper, the University Daily Kansan, ran an article titled, “Legend of Devil
Haunts Tiny Town.” This piece contended that Stull was one of the most
abominable locations on the planet, stating:
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 [, which is]
haunted by legends of diabolical, supernatural happenings.…The legend of
Stull is perfect for telling by the fire on a dark winter night and is repeated by
great-grandparents and great-grandchildren alike.
Citing local lore, article writer Jain Penner claimed that supernatural
happenings often occurred in the graveyard and that at midnight on
Halloween and on the spring equinox, the devil himself would materialize
in Stull.
To bolster these assertions, the article included the testimony of supposed
witnesses. Rick Walker, an assistant Western civilization instructor, claimed
that he had heard tales of people going to Stull and experiencing three- to
four-hour lapses of memory. Julie Day, a freshman from Bonner Springs,
recounted how she and her grandmother had once visited the cemetery
and “lots of weird things happened,” including a vision of a burning house
that—upon closer inspection—was not burning at all. Finally, the paper
included the testimony of an anonymous University of Kansas student:
One University of Kansas junior, who wished to remain anonymous, said
that he and two of his fraternity brothers visited the Stull cemetery last year.
“We decided to [visit Stull] to find some excitement,” he said. “It was a
beautiful night out, but as soon as we got to Stull, it started raining. We sat
in the car for a few minutes, then it stopped just as suddenly as it started.
It was weird,” he said. The student said they got out of the car and started
walking across the graveyard. “All of a sudden I heard a noise behind me
and felt someone grab my arm. I’ll never forget how cold the fingers felt,” he
said. He said at first he thought it was one of his friends who had tripped,
but when he turned around, both of them were 25 yards behind him.
As ominous as the article is, it seems that it was intended to be nothing
more than a bit of seasonal entertainment. According to Jeffrey Stinson,
who was an associate editor of the University Daily Kansan in 1974, sometime
H AUNTED L AWRENCE
119
earlier in the year, he and his fraternity brother Kim Mandle had taken dates
out to the graveyard. It was on this occasion that Stinson had first heard the
legend. He explained, “It was an old country graveyard, and the local rumor
was that it was a gateway to Hell or something.” Thinking this tale would
make for an amusing Halloween story, Stinson subsequently assigned the
story to Jain Penner. However, due to material shortages, the story was held
back until a few issues after the holiday.
But the story quickly took on a life of its own, and over the years, it has
grown more and more embellished. Stull was supposedly one of the seven
gateways to hell, it was said, and concealed somewhere in the cemetery was
an incredibly well-hidden staircase, fastened with a seal. If one were unlucky
enough to access these steps, time would begin to move at a supernatural
rate. Following these steps would lead one directly to hell. According to Bob
Curran, some said that these diabolical mystery steps were hidden within
one of the cemetery’s many burial plots, whereas others swore that they were
behind the chapel or in a nearby field.
In the mid- to late 1970s, most of the rumors pertained to the graveyard
at large, but by the 1980s, the cynosure of almost all the Stull legends was
the ruined Evangelical Emmanuel Church. Prior to the University Daily
Kansan’s article, the structure had long been abandoned but was seen
more as a scenic ruin rather than a paranormal hotspot. However, after
the University Daily Kansan published its now infamous story, perception
of the building changed, and it was quickly seen in a much more sinister
light; the Pacific Standard, for instance, described the chapel as “an eerie,
ramshackle building [resembling] something Guillermo Del Toro would
put up in his backyard.”
As the years progressed and the legend spread, the building began to
acquire a number of quasi-mythological characteristics. For instance, it was
claimed that if one were to throw a bottle marked with an inverted cross
against the wall, it would not break; if the bottle did break, the thrower was
doomed to soon die. On October 31, 1989, the Kansas City Star featured an
article that ludicrously claimed “the walls of the drafty church even bled
during Lucifer’s visit” and that, because the building’s datestone had been
removed, the church was possessed by some sort of evil spirit. Another
legend claimed that a large decaying crucifix bolted to the interior wall of
the chapel would turn itself upside down when visitors stepped into the
building at midnight. After the roof of the building was blown off in 1996
during a storm, some contended that when the clouds rolled in, rain never
fell inside of the ruin.
H AUNTED LAWRENCE
120
The interior of the Evangelical Emmanuel Church. Note the decaying cross attached to the
wall. Courtesy of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library.
H AUNTED L AWRENCE
121
While some members of the local community hoped to one day see the
chapel refurbished and restored to its former glory, such efforts never came
to fruition. On March 29, 2002 (Good Friday, of all days), the chapel was
demolished; one of the walls had recently collapsed, and the locals had it
dismantled for fear that falling debris would hurt—or even kill—someone.
Today, only a pitiful pile of rubble remains.
Of course, the question soon emerges: why would the Fallen Son of
Heaven take time out of his busy schedule to visit a desolate village in the
middle of Kansas and also designate it as one of the seven passageways to his
unholy abode? One explanatory legend claims that in the 1850s, the devil
impregnated a witch, to whom was born a horribly disfigured child. This
baby lived to be no more than a few days old and was promptly buried in the
town’s cemetery. As a result, the devil returns twice a year to visit the grave
of either his scion or the beloved witch who bore him his offspring. Skeptics
agree that a gravestone in the cemetery with the unique name “Wittich”
engraved on it produced this tale. Another variant of this story posits that
the devil’s child did not die but rather assumed the form of a hellhound that
prowls the cemetery during the full moon.
Still others assert that the town’s diabolical nature is due to a brutal murder
of one of the town’s early leaders. According to this version of events,
sometime during the 1800s a scoundrel killed the mayor of Stull in a barn.
Though the townsfolk tried to purify the barn by turning it into a church,
it was thereafter evil—permanently marred by slaughter. The problem with
this tale, however, is that Stull was never incorporated (and thus never had a
mayor) and Evangelical Emmanuel Church was never at any point a barn.
After the publication of the University Daily Kansan’s 1974 article, the
pastor of Stull Church (the church across from the cemetery that had been
constructed following Evangelical Emmanuel Church’s abandonment)
denied the rumors, claiming that they were patently untrue. The experts
at the University of Kansas were wont to agree with him. Anthropology
professor Robert Smith contended that the stori es were complete and utter
hogwash, not even remotely based on local history or folklore. German
professor Heide Crawford told the Kansas City Star, “Just the idea [of the devil
in Stull] fascinates people, so they start making up stories.” Paul Mirecki, a
professor of religious studies who discussed the rumor with Lawrence.com,
argued that the stories were the inventions of imaginative but mischievous
youth and that he was unaware of a biblical basis for portals to hell.
Bob Curran, a writer and researcher who studies Celtic folklore and
culture, suggests in his book Mysterious Celtic Mythology in American Folklore that
H AUNTED LAWRENCE
122
the legends of Stull may have been inspired by Celtic interest in portals
to the underworld. Curran’s hypothesis is well reasoned, although perhaps
he is overthinking things a bit. It seems likely that the legend of Stull
became so popular simply because the idea of a gate to hell is an exciting
cultural archetype found the world over. From Cumae in Italy to cenotes in
Mesoamerica, almost every major culture or civilization has a location that
they consider the gateway to either hell or the underworld. Consequently,
when a legend emerges that says there is a gateway to the underworld in
Kansas of all places, people cannot help but be intrigued.
Immediately after the University Daily Kansan article was printed, hundreds
of curious individuals, most of them students, wandered into the sleepy town
to see if they could spy the devil for themselves. (On March 20, 1978, for
instance, over 150 people showed up en masse.) For years after the original
University Daily Kansan article brought the hamlet to their attention, dozens of
college students would sneak into the cemetery, many of them littering the
ground with beer bottles and even vandalizing and destroying tombstones.
Others took to defacing the interior of the chapel’s walls with either obscene
or demonic graffiti. The nightly disturbances got so troublesome that to this
day, police hawkishly monitor the area, keeping an eye out for impish youths.
Stull Cemetery today. Courtesy of Ayleen Gaspar (CC BY 2.0).
H AUNTED L AWRENCE
123
Indeed, the most disturbing part of the Stull story is not its focus on the
devil but rather its revealing of the ugly side of humanity. People who were
so wrapped up in the legend failed to realize who they might be hurting
by encroaching upon a cemetery, littering, vandalizing private property and
damaging reminders of deceased loved ones. By all accounts, the locals in
Stull—who firmly assert that the legend is merely the product of fantasy-
prone university students—wish the tale would dissipate so that they can
reclaim their town and their cemetery. Stull and its cemetery truly have been
victimized by the tale.
But regardless of its veracity, the story of Stull’s haunted cemetery has
ingrained itself into the American consciousness. Alternative rock band
Urge Overkill released an EP in 1992 titled Stull, which features the ruins of
the Evangelical Emmanuel Church on its cover; one of the record’s tracks,
“Stull Pt. 1” explicitly references Stull, locates the hamlet forty miles west of
Kansas City and urges the listener to be not afraid. In an interview with Spin,
the band’s singer and guitarist Nash Kato explained that the band chosen
to pen the song because they had heard that Stull was “some kind of cult
location for Satanists,” “one of the seven gates of Hell” and, ultimately, “a
really frightening place.”
Supposedly, Kurt Cobain of the popular grunge band Nirvana once made
a “pilgrimage” to the site to test out the aforementioned legend concerning
bottles. In a 1992 interview with Jim Crotty and Michael Lane, Cobain said:
What’s that place in Kansas?…It’s supposed to be a satanic place?…
There’s a church—there’s an old burned-out church there, it’s in this really
small town…not too far away from Lawrence.…And all this weirdness
keeps going on about it, happened for years, a lot of people have seen
ghosts.…Stull—that’s what it’s called. We went there one night.…I swear
to God there is some kind of scary stuff going on. I just remember walking
toward it, and it seemed to be getting further and further away—it was
really pitch black.…It just wasn’t normal at all—and we felt this weird
presence, this weird, evil presence. We just ran back to the van.
Several bizarre urban legends recount how noted individuals have avoided
Kansas for fear of Stull. Arguably, the most famous of these stories is that
in 1993, Pope John Paul II, while flying to attend the World Youth Day
conference in Denver, asked his pilot to plot a course around Kansas because
he did not want to fly over “unholy ground.” This story was supposedly
reported in Time magazine in either 1993 or 1995. Similarly, a rumor has
H AUNTED LAWRENCE
124
persisted for many years that Stull was the reason why the Cure did not play
shows in the state. Both of these assertions are not based on any shred of
truth but are still often believed (and consequently repeated) by the gullible.
Part of the fifth season finale of the CW series Supernatural, titled “Swan
Song,” takes place in Stull cemetery (although it was actually filmed in
Vancouver, British Columbia). Supernatural’s take on Stull is highly romanticized;
eerie trees shade decaying tombstones, an ancient windmill stands guard at
the cemetery’s entrance and a wooden prairie chapel can be seen just on the
horizon. Fans who visit Stull expecting such sites will be disappointed.
Finally, in a 2013 interview with Complex, pop star Ariana Grande related
her unsuccessful attempt to visit the cemetery. According to her, en route to
Stull, something went awry:
I felt this sick, overwhelming feeling of negativity over the whole car and
we smelled sulfur, which is the sign of a demon, and there was a fly in
the car randomly, which is another sign of a demon. I was like, “This
is scary, let’s leave.” I rolled down the window before we left and said,
“We apologize. We didn’t mean to disrupt your peace.” Then I took a
picture and there are three super distinct faces in the picture—they’re faces
of textbook demons.…I deleted the picture [but before I did] I tried to
send the picture to my manager, and it said, “This file can’t be sent, it’s
666 megabytes.” I’m not kidding.
Sure you aren’t, Ariana.
Stull is located roughly ten miles west of Lawrence on North 1600 Road.
The cemetery * itself is located on a knoll on the north side of the road. The
remains of the chapel can barely be seen at the crest of the hill. Be aware
that nighttime trespassing is strictly forbidden and doing so can result in a
fine or possibly jail time. It is also important to note that members of the
local community have family members buried in the cemetery, and carelessly
trampling on these graves is both insensitive and cruel.
* A minority of people claim that the Stull Cemetery most people know of is, in fact,
the wrong one. These people assert that the demonic legends actually pertain to another
graveyard, just south of the hamlet. At least part of this story is true, given that two miles
south of Stull there sits another graveyard known as Mound View Cemetery. While this
burial ground was officially chartered on November 1, 1890, there are a number of graves
here that date to the mid-1860s. Because these tombs predate the establishment of today’s
Stull Cemetery, Mound View is sometimes referred to as “Old Stull Cemetery.” With all this
said, no paranormal events have ever been credibly reported in this cemetery. Mound View
Cemetery is situated at 244 North 1400 Road.