One Afternoon in Stull Cemetary, Kansas

Stull Cemetery

I’m unsure exactly when Stull Cemetery entered national consciousness. Before or after it appeared on TV’s Supernatural? Series creator Eric Kripke wrote the show’s protagonists, Sam and Dean Winchester, as originally being from Lawrence, Kansas, to incorporate the urban legends surrounding Stull into the series. Kripke originally wrote a five-season story arc, culminating in an apocalyptic confrontation between Satan and the Archangel Michael in Stull.

What I found in Stull Cemetery was far from horrific. Stull itself, never a particularly large town, has been reduced to a wide spot in the Kansas 1600 Road, very little remaining besides the cemetery and a United Methodist Church. The cemetery is surrounded by a chain-link fence, and is open only during limited hours. Sheriff’s patrols visit intermittently throughout the day, to discourage vandals and souvenir hunters.

For a reputed ghost town, though, Stull’s cemetery continues attracting numerous new graves. Though I didn’t perform a thorough survey, I saw over ten gravestones with dates in the last decade; one was dated January 2021. Stull, a community founded by Pennsylvania Dutch, continues to inter its honored dead in the same earth where their ancestors have buried their friends and neighbors since White settlers seized this land in the 1870s.

Urban legend holds that Stull Cemetery is one of the eight Gates of Hell, places where the living world and the afterlife of perdition sit perilously close together. This legend has made the cemetery a destination of Goth-culture pilgrimages, especially around Halloween. Gawkers come hoping to witness supposed in-person visitations of Satan’s minions, who supposedly manifest among the remains of the old, stone-walled Evangelical United Brethren church.

The grave of Essie P. Buck; note the broken
stone, patched with concrete

This legend, however, only dates to 1974, when it ran in the University Daily Kansan, the student newspaper at the University of Kansas, in nearby Lawrence. In 1974, fewer students had cars, so Stull, sixteen miles from Lawrence around Carter Lake, could’ve been on the far side of the moon. Maybe students got a frisson of transgression by thinking a manifestation of Hell existed so close, yet so far. They probably never dreamed the story would grow legs.

Stripped of paranormal woo-woo, Sarah and I found a place characterized not by terror, but by celestial calm. Many stones are freshly decorated with silk flowers. In late spring, fading daffodils and hyacinths surround several graves. Stones dated from the late 19th Century lie adjacent to stones from the last five years. Family graves, children’s graves from the Spanish Influenza, and veterans’ headstones from two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam mingle freely.

Kansas 1600 Road runs alongside the cemetery, and up a slope, one course of large, rough-hewn bricks marks the former EUB church building. Though it sits beside a heavily trafficked road, Stull Cemetery feels like a place removed, a bastion of peace. A gentle breeze, scented by the trees surrounding Carter Lake, urged Sarah and I to sit in front of a grave marked as Essie P. Buck, who died in 1878.

We wanted to simply be present.

Yet around us, evidence testified that others didn’t enter these grounds with open hearts. Several 19th-Century monuments had much newer pediments under them, several with visible smears of patching plaster. Sure signs that these stones had once been overturned, and been reset, probably with anchor bolts to prevent them being moved again. Some might’ve been overturned by subsidence and erosion. But the likelier culprit was vandalism.

Essie P. Buck’s five-foot obelisk has a large diagonal crack, filled with cement. The stone probably broke when somebody, presumably a student, pushed it over. These physical markers of bad-faith presence remind us of the conflicting forces driving places like this. Loved ones chose this place, its peaceful air and soothing nature, to memorialize their lives forever. And paranoid children, fearful of eternity, defaced that memorial.

The Houk family monument, victim
of subsidence and possible vandalism

“Look at the bird,” Sarah said, pointing. “What is it?”

Above us, a broad-winged hawk with a fringe of dark feathers around its cream-tinted wings, glided in a sweeping arc. Another matching hawk followed shortly after. Watching their massive wings and graceful spiral, I couldn’t help remembering the large wings that Renaissance artists painted on angels. Spirits that, unlike us mere mortals, weren’t confined to earth.

The salacious legends had attracted us to visit. Eric Kripke painted Stull as a frightening, apocalyptic necropolis. But we found a refuge, a place unsullied by our world’s violence and poverty. Media hucksters tell us our world is teeming with terrors and mortality. But this place reminds me that peace and beauty exist.