Located along 47-mile Flint Hills National Scenic Byway in Council Grove, nestled among grandeur found in Kansas’s rolling hills and tallgrass prairie, Hays House 1857 Restaurant and Tavern serves the best bread pudding in Kansas.
Hayes House 1857 was founded by Seth Hayes. Seth Hayes, a rancher who was born in Connecticut, is Council Grove’s forefather.
Hays House 1857 was once run by A.G. Boone, son of Jesse Boone. Jesse Boone was Daniel Morgan Boone’s brother.
Seth Hays’s mother, Susannah Boone, was Daniel Boone’s eldest daughter. Seth Hayes’s father was Captain William “Bully” Hays.
Seth Hayes was Daniel Boone’s great grandson.
Hayes House 1847 and two of Daniel Boone’s great grandsons, A.G. and Seth.
Seth Hayes…founder of Council Grove, cousin of A.G., founder of Hayes House, great grandson of “The Great Pathfinder,” Daniel.
Early homes built by Pilgrims were simple dwellings, one or two room cottages, complete
with 400 to 500 square foot layouts. A 20 ft-by-20 foot floorpan was common.
The framing of homes would have been shaped through timber harvesting. Raising the frame to a home involved reliance upon close-by oak tress, pine tress or walnut tress. Cut down, for the build.
Framing of oak logs, or pine logs or walnut logs done by hand.
Structures were anchored with heavy posts and beams, linked by mortise-and-tenon joints. Then secured by treenails, or pins.
The underpinning for a moise-and-tenon joint was an insertion of tongue-like projections – tenons – at the end of one board into matching rectangular holes in the next board. Those matching rectangular holes, moises.
Taking harshness of winters into account, clapboards were split from logs, then nailed over a home’s exterior.
A clapboard is an angled, beveled wood board, typically measuring 1 1/4 inches.
Clapboards overlap. Their contour, a preventative design which proved to be effective in shielding a home’s framing from gusts of cold winter winds.
Chimneys were added to a floor plan, then built out of timber and clay.
Chimneys were complimentary to fireplaces, to wood-burning stoves or to hearths. One of which serving as the origin for a home’s warmth.
Unfortunately, a good deal of heat generated would have escaped through the chimney, causing much of the dwelling – just about all areas not near the fireplace, or the hearth, or wood-burning stove – to hold at near-freezing temperatures on arctic nights.
Winter evenings were relegated to warmest sections of the main living area. Those sections, nearest the fireplace.
Walls were filled with woven branches, then plastered, using clay and mud. To capture heat, homes were built with thick wooden walls.
Bundled marsh or grasses were the ingredients of a roof. It would have been thatched roofs, early on.
As for a home’s floors, those fortunate enough to be well-off may have considered laying wood planks as floorboards. For the majority of Pilgrims, dirt floors. Basic hard–packed earth.
Windows were added to blueprints…windows without glass. Wooden shutters were used as window coverings.
Just about 60 miles northwest of Kansas City, on the western bank of the Missouri River you’ll find Atchison, Kansas, a cute riverside town. Hometown of Amelia Earhart.
Atchison is known for its majestic collection of Victorian homes and for being home to one of Kansas’s famous ghosts.
Dr. Charles Finney lived in Atchison. The town’s doctor lived in an Atchison home built in 1867. A prominent physician in his day, our practioner unintentionally extended an invitation to his house to a forsaken, tormented visitor.
For nearly two-hundred years, the Finney house has been haunted, this haunting, the aftermath of a tragedy. A calamity befallen a young girl.
The hapless girl’s name was Sallie. The foredoomed dwelling, this haunted lair, did it become.
This ghost of Sallie delegates a twisted facade, a facade which gives rise to a basket of events. A collection, far more demonic than the presence of one prancing little soul.
Sallie was brought to the Finney house for a medical procedure. Dr. Finney practiced medicine in his house. There was no hospital in Atchison.
Young Sallie’s procedure encountered complications. Sallie screamed in agony, she passed away amidst her afflicted procedure. Taking her last breath in that hexed house.
This young girl’s death depicted a context far more demonic than one prancing ghost.
In the 90s, there was a young family who moved into the Sallie House, intending to make this Atchison dwelling the family lair. Yet there was a quandary which arose…the house’s orderly uninvited soul.
Household kinfolk atoll to having been scratched and clawed at night. Abraded skin, those wounds drew blood. Marrings of an unseen assailant. It was as if those attacks were engineered…by a little girl.
Appliances turned on by themselves. Household objects, took to flight.
As rumor has it, that tragic death of an unfortunate young girl named Sallie served not as a precursor to Sallie’s recurrence. But rather, as an invitation to a fiend.
The life estate affixed to this Atchison home is party to a demonic infernal. A dark being. Offspring, no doubt, of the devil himself.
This incubus who calls upon the old doctor’s home takes pleasure in mimicking behavior espoused by a young girl. One whose biography is marked by its torturous epilogue.
Five nights from tonight, if you are in Kansas near Route 40 or County Road 442 in Douglas County and not too far from an unincorporated community known as Stull, be forewarned. You location is not far from one of the 7 “Gateways to Hell” on one of two nights the Old Serpent himself will pay a visit.
In 1867, German settlers had the misfortune of constructing one limestone abbey on the Kansas prairie some fifteen miles outside of Lawrence. This farming community’s tabernacle for many, many years no longer served local Kansans as a holy meetinghouse, having long since fallen into disrepair. This Kansas minister was mysteriously set ablaze one day.
There is a cemetery which sits next to this old shell-of-a-chapel. The shrine and burial ground…together have long represented one poltergeist site.
Storytellers narrate how, with gaping holes in the chapel roof, no raindrop could ever enter the old countryside kirk. No drop of rain ever did touch this parish’s dated, wooden floor.
The fate of these accursed grounds – on which our stone sanctuary was erected long, long ago – traces its doom to a yesteryear stabbing of one prominent Stull citizen. One of Stull’s own was killed by a stable hand. A stable hand who once labored in an old stone barn built aside quiet gravesites in this desolate Stull cemetery.
Years later, that old stone barn – the scene of this tragic, fateful occurrence – became the town church. And what a mistaken unholy conversion that was.
Kansas folklore has it that an old staircase – built too, out of stone – can be uncovered beneath a well which is located in the old ruined church basement. This, a staircase leading to the underworld.
This gateway – that old stone staircase, found beneath a basement well – can be reached but two times every year…and (thankfully) only two. Once, on Halloween night. And the other, on the Spring Equinox.
It is, after all, on Halloween that the unseen wall separating the dead from the living reaches its thinnest layer. Which is to say, on Halloween night one can tepidly tiptoe down that stairwell…to breach one of 7 “Gateways to Hell.”
In 1974, The Daily Kansan wrote of the Devil paying one his two semi-annual visits to Stull on Halloween night. Beelzebub’s other foray to Stull occurs in the Spring, at the Equinox.
The Evil One comes to Stull on Halloween night – less than a week from today – eagerly accompanying any cursed man or woman who wishes to venture down a regretful stone staircase flight. One of the seven “Gateways to Hell.”
Tales of infernal happenings grip this cemetery, laid beside that old stone church. Tales, told, then retold again and again for over 150 years.
One urban legend involved two brave souls who paid a visit to our spectral milieu one harrowing night. When out of nowhere, a fearsome wind arose. Tearing back to their car, overtaken by fear, what did they find? Their car was moved to the opposite side of the road.
Others impart those same recurring, chilling cemetery winds…rolling into Stull with no forewarning.
There is a story about how one man was knocked out by such a gust. A haunting plains breeze, having held this unfortunate cemetery guest in place for a time before he was finally able to break free, scampering from the graveyard’s haunted confines. Never to return again.
Lest us not forget how others have told of an old wooden crucifix which once hung on the church’s inner wall. As legend has it, the old crucifix would capsize at midnight, should a passerby ever dare to enter this unholy, haunted place.
One other legend involves Pope John Paul II, a private plane and the plain’s pilate.
As that plane carrying the Pope reached skies above eastern Kansas on a flight to Colorado, the Pope directed the pilate to intentionally bypass Stull. The Pope, refusing to fly over the possessed Stull cemetery, not wanting to cross paths with this very, unholy ground.
Others will tell of the visit a ghostly woman pays to this cemetery on Halloween night. The woman – always wearing her white dress – has been known to direct drivers to their untimely demise along the highway’s edge.
Its face resembles a horse’s face. The head found atop a long, thin, fur-covered torso could be mistaken for the head of a collie. Those wings? Wings of a bat, and leathery too, measuring two-and-a-half to three feet, from wing tip to shoulder. Its thick snake-like tail? This is a tail, fitting a demon. It’s horns…the devil’s horns, no doubt, resting above piercing red-orange eyes.
Standing nearly six feet tall and weighing close to 200 pounds, the Jersey Devil prowls the dense pine forest, cedar swamps and sandy back roads we find in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens…searching for its favorite delicacies, bellowing out a high-pitched scream, if by some chance, encountered.
Although tracked by fugitives, deserting soldiers, Hessian mercenaries from Revolutionary War times and escaped slaves – each group possessing finely-tuned hunting-and-gathering skills – no soul has ever caught the Jersey Devil. The swiftness and agility of this demon has allowed it to evade trackers for centuries.
On the menu for the Jersey Devil is poultry and livestock. If it’s very, very lucky, this malevolent spirit loves to feast on pigs.
Born in the early part of the 18th Century in Estellville, the Jersey Devil is the 13th child of a witch, Deborah Leeds. Its father, the devil himself.
Mother Leeds cursed her 13th child in frustration, already tired and worn, having raised her twelve other children. Deborah Leeds cried out, “Let it be the devil.” And it was…
This curse a mother cast upon her child came to fruition. Leading to a legendary and, unfortunately, a ghoulish transformation.
This damned boy grew cloven hooves, clawed hands and wings. The doomed little boy was no longer a boy. This ill-fated boy became New Jersey’s afflicted demon.
The Jersey Devil is nocturnal. This Tempter resides in forsaken towns found among the southernmost points of the Garden State.
Desolate Pine Barrens swamps and wetlands once facilitated low-grade ore needed to manufacture Revolutionary War munitions. “Bog-iron” towns took hold.
These “bog-iron” towns are long since abandoned, left untouched within one million harrowing Pine Barrens acres.
Decrepit buildings, outmoded blast furnaces, disused and crumbling 18th Century homes – all sitting quietly and uninterrupted for decades – became perfect neighborhoods for our Jersey Devil.
In 1909, several household pets were mysteriously killed. Hundreds of locals reported Jersey Devil sightings. Tracks matching no known animal were discovered in the snow. Schools and mills wisely closed, as cautionary measures. The Jersey Devil was nearby.
With over 1,700 square Pine Barrens miles to trek through, the Jersey Devil remains free to roam his forlorn terrain.
Few rile enough courage to venture through lonesome swamplands and forests blanketing in excess of 20% of New Jersey’s land area in pursuit of this furtive, skittish gargoyle.
Daniel Boone was not a Kansas guy. Daniel Boone lived in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky and Missouri. But his son was a Kansas guy.
Daniel Boone’s son – Daniel Morgan Boone – settled in Kansas City, in the Westport neighborhood.
From Kansas City, Daniel Morgan Boone headed to Kansas – then, the Kansas Territory. Daniel Morgan Boone was one of the first settlers in the Kansas Territory.
Seth Hayes grew up in the same Kansas City neighborhood of Westport that Daniel Morgan Boone was from. Seth Hayes was a rancher. A tavern owner. And a publisher.
A frontiersman at heart, like Daniel Morgan Boone, Seth Hayes ventured out from Paris of the Plains to settle in the new Kansas Territory, building a log cabin for himself along the Neosho River.
Seth Hayes’s new home was in a section of the Kansas Territory known as the Grove. With the Grove sitting on the Santa Fe Trail, Seth Hayes’s log cabin became a trading post.
Seth Hayes, a bachelor, lived in his log cabin – now a trading post on the Santa Fe Trail – with his adopted daughter, a freed slave.
Hayes’s log cabin evolved from a trading post into a trading post and a restaurant – Hayes House.
Hayes House was run by a man named A.G. Boone.
A.G. Boone was the son of Daniel Morgan Boone’s brother, Jesse Boone. A.G. Boone was Daniel Boone’s grandson.
Seth Hays’s mother, Susannah Boone, was Daniel Boone’s eldest daughter. Seth Hayes’s father was William Hays. Making Seth Hayes Daniel Boone’s grandson.
Hayes House and Daniel Boone’s grandsons, A.G. and Seth.
Blairstown, New Jersey is eponymous for two famous sons. One famous son was a good son, and one famous son was a (very) bad son. These two famous sons are John and Jason.
The good son…
John Insley Blair was a 19th Century industrialist. John Insley Blair was a philanthropist.
John Insley Blair was among the wealthiest men in America in his day. John Insley Blair built railroads across New Jersey and the Midwest. John Insley Blair contributed to the funding for Blair Academy, a prep school in town.
Blairstown, New Jersey was named after John Insley Blair. This town takes its name – Blairstown – from the town’s good son.
While the town name of Blairstown emanates from the doings of this town’s good son, it was Blairstown’s (very) bad son who made Blairstown a well-known, must-visit destination among horror movie buffs throughout the world.
The (very) bad son…
Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th is also from Blairstown. Jason Voorhees is Blairstown’s (very) bad son.
In the original Friday the 13th, Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco – a Boy Scout camp located near Blairstown – provided the setting for fictional “Camp Crystal Lake” (where Jason resides).
There is also a scene in Friday the 13th featuring the Blairstown Diner. Today, you can stand next to a life-size replica of Blairstown’s (very) bad son, Jason Voorhees, in Blairstown Diner.
John and Jason from Blairstown. A good son and a very, very bad son.
As our tale has been told by many an uninvited guest who has harkened a drive after dark out to old Rocky Ford Bridge…testaments of sightings. Of unexplained encounters. Of a visitor.
This bridge is now home to a hauntingly tortured apparition.
This phantom, this shade, this ghost…a woman wearing white. One restless spirit, slowly approaching our paranormal investigator atop the skeletal rails of a haunted 19th Century Kansas aqueduct.
Brave souls have told of this ghost. Of this melancholy, ghastly spirit.
Our Rocky Ford Bridge apparition, aimlessly wandering along muddy riverbanks of the Cottonwood River which meanders – with no hurry at all – below the plank-laid wood which invites you to cross (if you dare) our fateful, haunted overpass.
On Rocky Ford Bridge, look to your wrist as each watch hand of your timepiece touches 12…just as your car reaches midpoint, on this eery iron passage.
Your car will stall. Your car doors will lock, then unlock, on their own.
As our tale has been told by many an uninvited guest who has harkened a drive after dark out to old Rocky Ford Bridge…testaments of sightings. Of unexplained encounters. Of a visitor.
This bridge is now home to a hauntingly tortured apparition.
This phantom, this shade, this ghost…a woman wearing white. One restless spirit, slowly approaching our paranormal investigator atop the skeletal rails of a haunted 19th Century Kansas aqueduct.
Brave souls have told of this ghost. Of this melancholy, ghastly spirit.
Our Rocky Ford Bridge apparition, aimlessly wandering along muddy riverbanks of the Cottonwood River which meanders – with no hurry at all – below the plank-laid wood which invites you to cross (if you dare) our fateful, haunted overpass.
On Rocky Ford Bridge, look to your wrist as each watch hand of your timepiece touches 12…just as your car reaches midpoint, along this eery iron passage.
Your car will stall. Your car doors will lock, then unlock, on their own.
When Victor Miller wrote A Long Night At Camp Blood, Jason Voorhees is a victim, not a killer.
By following the original storyline for Friday the 13th there was a drowning of the boy, Jason.
The ending – where Jason emerges from Crystal Lake – wasn’t in Victor Miller’s original script. This scene was was an addition to the story made by Sean Cunningham and Tom Savini. Sean Cunningham was the producer and the director of Friday the 13th. Tom Savini handled special effects.
Inspired by the ending to Carrie, Cunningham and Savini wanted a final shock scene…one which would lead to sequels. Jason emerging from Crystal Lake as the killer accomplished their goal.
The hockey mask…
Jason sporting his goalie mask was simply an off-script suggestion made by Martin Becker, the makeup artist in Friday the 13th Part III.
Following the original script, Jason was not a killer. And the non-killer certainly didn’t own a hockey mask.
