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.
