Stull Cemetery
A small Kansas country cemetery that a 1974 student newspaper article turned into one of the seven gates of hell, complete with a devil who visits twice a year and a grave said to hold the child of Satan.
Field Guide Entry
Stull is an unincorporated crossroads in Douglas County, Kansas, settled by Pennsylvania Dutch farmers in 1857 as Deer Creek and later renamed for its postmaster, Sylvester Stull. Its cemetery, on a low rise called Emmanuel Hill beside the ruin of the old Evangelical Emmanuel Church, was an ordinary rural burial ground for over a century. That changed in November 1974, when a University Daily Kansan article claimed the Devil personally appeared at Stull twice a year, on Halloween and the spring equinox, and that the cemetery marked one of seven gateways to hell scattered across the world.
The legend grew fast once it had a foothold. Retellings added a grave said to hold the deformed, short-lived child of Satan and a witch, a claim that no rain ever falls inside the roofless church ruin no matter the weather outside, and a story that Pope John Paul II had his private plane reroute around eastern Kansas rather than fly over the cemetery's unholy ground. None of these claims predate the 1970s in any known written record. The legend has outlived the building it was originally attached to: the Evangelical Emmanuel Church ruin was demolished in 2002, and the newer Stull United Methodist Church across the road, built in 1922, suffered a serious fire in July 2022. Despite the demolition, the cemetery's reputation as a gate to hell remains strong enough in popular culture to have been referenced repeatedly on the television series Supernatural.
Historians, folklorists, and Stull's own residents are near-unanimous that the story has no basis before its 1974 appearance in a college newspaper, most likely built from older, vaguer regional devil folklore that predates any specific claim about this particular cemetery. The church the legend was originally about no longer exists. What remains is an active, sometimes locked and patrolled small-town cemetery, still used by local families, that has to live with visitors chasing a story its own community did not create and would generally like to see stop arriving at 2am.
Visiting Information
Stull Cemetery is a working cemetery still used by local families, not a tourist attraction, and it is locked at night with law enforcement patrols; trespassing after hours can carry up to six months in jail or a $1,000 fine. Visits are expected to be respectful and in daylight only, and the private farmland surrounding the site is off limits. The Evangelical Emmanuel Church ruin the legend centers on was demolished in 2002, so there is no structure left to see beyond the cemetery itself. The conduct that fits is the conduct owed to any small-town burial ground with living descendants, because it is one.
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