Stull: The Ghost Town That Keeps Its Secrets

German and Pennsylvania Dutch settlers platted this community in eighteen fifty-seven as Deer Creek. It grew quietly into a farming village, got a post office in eighteen ninety-nine named after first postmaster Sylvester Stull, and then slowly emptied out as the twentieth century rolled on. By the nineteen seventies, only a cemetery and a crumbling stone church remained.

Then a University of Kansas student newspaper ran a story declaring the cemetery haunted, and Stull became famous for reasons its founders could never have imagined. Vandals, trespassers, and thrill-seekers made Halloween here a nightmare for Douglas County authorities for decades. The old Emmanuel Church was demolished in two thousand two to stop the crowds.

The cemetery remains. The town itself is essentially gone, a speck on the map that somehow became one of Kansas's most Googled locations.