The 1974 Article That Invented the Stull Cemetery Legend

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 10, 2026 · How we verify

Almost everything frightening about the Stull Cemetery legend can be traced to print rather than to the ground it describes. A student newspaper story in November 1974 put the Devil in a Douglas County graveyard, and fifty years later the claim has outlived the church, the school, the post office, and nearly all of the settlement that surrounded it. Stull sits in eastern Kansas at a quiet rural crossroads, and the people who still live there did not ask for any of it.

Stull at a glance: an unincorporated community in Douglas County, founded in 1857, roughly 7 miles west of the outskirts of Lawrence and 10 miles east of the Topeka city limit. As of 2018 only a handful of structures remained.

Deer Creek Before It Was Stull

The settlement first appeared on territorial maps in 1857 under the name Deer Creek. The first European settlers there spoke German as their native language; some came from Pennsylvania Dutch Country, others had recently left the German Confederation. Sermons in the small chapel were preached in German until 1908.

The name changed because of the mail. A telephone switchboard was installed in the house of a resident named J. E. Louk in the late 1890s, and on April 27, 1899, a post office opened in the back of the same building. Sylvester Stull was the town’s first and only postmaster, and the Post Office simply took his surname for the place. The office was discontinued in 1903. The name stayed.

This matters for one specific reason. A popular version of the legend holds that the haunting began with the murder of Stull’s mayor in the 1850s. Stull was never organized as a town and therefore never had a mayor.

The Stone Church That Stood Until 2002

A handful of families organized a congregation in the late 1850s that met in members’ homes until 1867, when they built a stone structure called the Evangelical Emmanuel and Deer Creek Mission. A cemetery was chartered next to it that same year. In 1922 the community raised $20,000 for a new wooden-framed church across the road, and the old stone building was abandoned.

What followed was ordinary decay rather than anything stranger. The stone church slowly fell into a greater and greater state of disrepair across the twentieth century and was finally demolished in 2002. The ruin had by then become the single most photographed prop in the legend, and the stories about what lay beneath it outlived the walls themselves.

Two Real Deaths in a Very Small Place

The settlement was tiny. In 1912 only 31 people lived in the Stull area, and at its largest the community numbered about 50. The school closed in 1962 and students went to Lecompton. In a place that size, two deaths were enough to anchor decades of rumor.

The first was a young boy named Oliver Bahnmaier, who wandered into a field his father was burning and died. From that came the rumor that stepping on Oliver’s tombstone sends you to Hell, a piece of folklore built directly on top of a family’s grief. The second was a man found hanging from a tree after he went missing. Both are recorded as tragedies in the community’s history. Neither is evidence of anything supernatural.

What the University Daily Kansan Printed in November 1974

The modern reputation of the cemetery starts with a November 1974 issue of The University Daily Kansan, the student newspaper of the University of Kansas, which claimed the Devil appeared in Stull twice a year, on Halloween and on the spring equinox. From there the story accumulated the usual accessories: that the cemetery is one of seven gates to Hell, that the abandoned stone church was possessed, that a staircase in its basement descends to the entrance of Hell and takes weeks to climb back out of. Another widely repeated claim says Pope John Paul II diverted his plane during a 1990s trip to Colorado to avoid flying over the unholy ground. There is no evidence that this happened.

Most academics, historians and local residents agree that the legend has no basis in historical fact and was created and spread by students. That is an unusually clear verdict for a haunted site, and it is worth carrying with you.

What Thrill Seekers Report at the Graveyard

After the 1974 article, visitors began arriving and bringing stories back. The accounts are consistent and vague in the way such accounts usually are: strange noises, lapses of memory, a general sense that something was wrong. These are reported experiences, not documented events, and they circulated among high school and college students from Lawrence and Topeka who were already expecting them.

The retold legend also includes an old tree said to have served as gallows for condemned witches, voices of the dead that strangle trespassers, and a woman in a white dress who, on the night before Halloween, lures drivers off the edge of the highway. None of it corresponds to anything in the historical record of the settlement.

Supernatural, Urge Overkill, and the Legend’s Long Afterlife

The story escaped Kansas early. The band Urge Overkill released Stull in 1992 with the church and a cemetery tombstone on the cover. Films including Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal (2001) and Nothing Left to Fear (2013) built plots on the legend. The cemetery is the setting for the final confrontation between Lucifer and Michael in “Swan Song,” the season five finale of Supernatural; creator Eric Kripke said in a 2006 interview that he made the Winchester brothers natives of Lawrence because of its closeness to Stull. One persistent claim, that The Cure canceled a Kansas show because of the cemetery, is false.

The Church Fire of July 25, 2022

On July 25, 2022, the newer Stull church caught fire between 1 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. No injuries were reported, but the building sustained substantial damage and there was concern the bell might fall. Officials quoted by WIBW hypothesized that a lightning strike caused the fire. Predictably, a burning church in Stull fed the legend further; the proposed cause was weather.

Can You Visit Stull Cemetery?

Treat this as a place to drive past, not a place to walk into. Decades of excursions and vandalism damaged the graveyard badly enough that the cemetery is now locked at night and the area is patrolled by law enforcement, with extra attention around Halloween. Trespassing can bring a fine of up to $1,000 and as much as six months in jail, and people are arrested for it.

Stull sits at the corner of North 1600 Road and East 250 Road in Kanwaka Township. The remaining residents live with the consequences of a story students invented about their families’ graves, and the legend has caused ongoing friction with them. If the history interests you, the published accounts of the community are the better route in.

Address: North 1600 Road and East 250 Road, Stull, Douglas County, Kansas

Sources

• Building's Demolition a Mystery
• Fire at Stull church under investigation
• Can You Visit Stull Cemetery?
• Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) details for Stull Cemetery, Kansas; United States Geological Survey (USGS) (Usgs (official))
• Hell Hath No Fury
• Wikipedia: Stull, Kansas

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