The Land Where the Devil Walks
The devil incarnate is a figure often portrayed in fiction, but very rarely does the figure reportedly come up in person at a predesignated location. But in the small town of Stull Kansas, there is a legend that the devil himself appears one night every year when the veils are thinnest. And if the legend of the devil suddenly climbing up from the ground in a lonely graveyard in Kansas isn’t enough to haunt your nightmares, the harrowing tales from frightened witnesses might be.
The legend has it that there are two locations on Earth where the devil comes out. One of the locations varies in this telling, but the other is a small town that only a few decades ago had a population of less than twenty. As it goes, somewhere near or within the cemetery lies buried the body of a man who was in his life possessed by a demonic entity. During a particularly intense exorcism, he died but not before declaring that he would return every year to claim the lives of anyone foolish enough to near his grave. And every year on that night his very body takes on a horrifying transformation, becoming itself somehow a macabre portal constructed of his remains that springs up from the Earth. No one knows where the portal leads officially, as no one has ever stepped through it and returned. But if the sounds emanating from it are any indicator, then it surely must be some sort of nightmare world. The closest place our mythology would have to compare it to would be Hell. And if the portal is to Hell, then the creature that steps from it -as the legend goes- must be the devil.
As the story goes the creature quickly claims the bodies and souls of any who are nearby and drags them into this nightmarish landscape behind him after wandering the graveyard in search of further victims. Different tellings of the story suggest different fates to those who visit, with some even suggesting there may be any number of ways to escape.
But on that night nearby residents have reported nothing of the sort, suggesting instead that they are stories made up by teenagers to bring them to the graveyard for drinking. There is guaranteed at least one visitor to the graveyard at midnight every Halloween, however, in the form of the Police, who try to break up the trespassers and vandals who go there.
Is there anything more to this story than just an urban legend? As with any good urban legend, this one has its share of backup. There are unverified claims that The Pope even had his plane rerouted when he realized the flight path would be passing over Stull, Kansas saying he would not fly over the only place in the world where he knew the Devil had walked. Whether this actually happened is left to the same sources that say the devil was in Kansas at all.
