The Stull Cemetery Legend: How a College Prank Became Horror Folklore

A tiny Kansas town with barely 50 residents has become an unlikely focal point of supernatural folklore, spawning movie plots, inspiring musicians, and drawing thrill-seekers for decades—all based on misinformation that began as college humor.

Stull, Kansas, a speck on the map in Douglas County, harbors what legend claims is one of seven gateways to Hell. The town’s cemetery has developed such notoriety that it became the central plot device in the 2001 direct-to-video film “Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal,” where a satanic cult hijacks a plane to crash it into the allegedly unholy ground.

The origins of the Stull legend can be traced to 1974, when the University Daily Kansan published a satirical Halloween-season article claiming the Devil appears in Stull twice yearly. The piece fabricated details about a staircase to Hell beneath church ruins and a tree marking a devil child’s grave. The timing and presentation of the article blurred the line between fiction and reality for many readers.

What followed demonstrates the remarkable staying power of compelling folklore. Curious visitors began arriving at the cemetery, looking for evidence of the supernatural. The crumbling old church and weathered tombstones—including one bearing the name “Wittich” (close enough to “witch” for ghost story enthusiasts)—provided the atmospheric backdrop that made the tales seem plausible.

By the 1990s, the legend had grown so pervasive that the local sheriff’s office had to patrol the cemetery on Halloween to prevent trespassing by paranormal enthusiasts. New embellishments to the myth continued to emerge: watches supposedly stopped working on cemetery grounds, bottles allegedly wouldn’t break when thrown against the church wall, and perhaps most notably, Pope John Paul II purportedly diverted his plane to avoid flying over Stull’s “unholy ground.”

The Stull legend eventually permeated popular culture. Alt-rock band Urge Overkill recorded a song titled “Stull” and featured the cemetery on an album cover. The CW television series “Supernatural” chose Stull as the apocalyptic battleground between Lucifer and the archangel Michael. More recently, pop star Ariana Grande claimed to have experienced supernatural phenomena during a visit, including sulfurous odors and a photo file that measured exactly 666 megabytes.

However, the truth behind at least some of these embellishments is far more mundane. According to Todd Thompson, the Leavenworth County Attorney, a college friend confessed years ago that he had fabricated some of the most persistent elements of the Stull mythology for a class website project while studying computer engineering at the University of Kansas.

This student invented both the unbreakable bottle myth and the widely circulated story about Pope John Paul II diverting his flight path. He claimed to have written on his website that the Pope told Time magazine he had his plane fly around Stull because it was “unholy ground”—a quote and interview that never existed.

“He never imagined anyone would believe it, let alone that it would become the plot of a movie,” Thompson explains. When the student realized people were citing his webpage as a legitimate source, he attempted to take it down but couldn’t remember the password. By then, the fabrications had already begun their journey through popular consciousness.

The consequences of this college prank have been real and lasting. The cemetery grounds continue to be littered with broken glass from those testing the bottle myth. Trespassers face criminal charges with potential fines up to $1,000 and jail time. The local community has endured decades of unwanted attention and property damage.

Though the original website has long vanished, the legend persists. Websites still report as fact that Pope John Paul II rerouted a flight over Stull in 1996, despite easily verifiable evidence that the Pope visited the U.S. in 1993, not 1996.

The Stull Cemetery saga represents an early example of how misinformation spreads in the digital age—a phenomenon that has only accelerated with social media. What began as a satirical article, then expanded through a student’s website project, eventually became accepted lore repeated across multiple platforms and media formats.

“The scariest thing isn’t the myth,” Thompson concludes. “It’s how easily we believe the unbelievable.”