Stull Cemetery

A 1974 student-paper story that grew into trespass and a demolished church

Stull is an unincorporated community in Douglas County, Kansas, 7 miles west of the outskirts of Lawrence and 10 miles east of Topeka. German-speaking settlers, some from Pennsylvania Dutch Country and some recently out of the German Confederation, called it Deer Creek when it first appeared on territorial maps in 1857. In 1867 they built a stone church, the Evangelical Emmanuel and Deer Creek Mission, and chartered a cemetery beside it, and the sermons were preached in German until 1908. The name came from Sylvester Stull, the first and only postmaster, after a post office opened on 27 April 1899 in the back of J. E. Louk's house. At its largest the settlement held about 50 people. In 1922 they raised $20,000 for a new wooden church across the road, and the stone one was left to decay.

The devil arrived in November 1974, in an issue of The University Daily Kansan, the University of Kansas student newspaper, which claimed he appeared in Stull twice a year, at Halloween and the spring equinox. The story grew. The cemetery became one of the seven gates to hell, the ruined church was possessed, a staircase in its basement led down to hell itself, and Pope John Paul II supposedly rerouted his plane on a 1990s trip to Colorado to avoid flying over it. There is no evidence for any of it, and most academics, historians and local residents agree the legend was created and spread by students. Nor did Stull have a mayor to be killed in the 1850s, since it was never organised as a town.

What the legend did bring was visitors, high school and college students from Lawrence and Topeka coming on Halloween or the equinox to see the Devil, and vandals with them. In late March 2002 the stone church came down. The Lawrence Journal-World found that demolition equipment had pushed the walls into the middle, about two weeks after a windstorm caved in the west wall. One of the landowners said he had not authorised it, the cemetery caretaker said vandals had knocked over four headstones in the past week alone, and a former owner called it a blessing, since the county had been sending deputies to sit there every Halloween.

The cemetery is locked at night and patrolled, and trespassing can bring up to six months in jail or a fine of up to $1,000. The legend thrives in popular culture instead. Urge Overkill put the church on the cover of its 1992 record Stull, and Supernatural staged the last confrontation between Lucifer and Michael here in its fifth-season finale; its creator made the Winchester brothers Lawrence boys because the town is close to Stull.