Stull's Hole to Hell

Years ago, a man spoke to Art Bell live on late night radio. He identified himself as "Mel Waters". He claimed he had an 80,000 foot deep hole in his back yard. Pure Art Bell show bullshit. But various people took it quite seriously, and for some time I associated with some of them, through Seattle's Museum of the Mysteries.

Eventually I came to feel the "Mel's Hole" story was a modern updating on the old "lost mine" story. Instead of metallic riches, the hole had paranormal powers. Instead of the map to the mine becoming lost, "government agents" came in and took poor Mel's land, forcing "Mel" to flee to Australia to study wombats.

For a while I read all the postings on the Mel's Hole discussion board. At some point deep in the discussion board threads a related story appeared. It seems that at some point Art Bell played a sound file on his radio show that claimed to be the "Sounds of Hell", allegedly recorded by Russian miners at the bottom of a very deep bore hole in Siberia.

At this point in my searches I decided to google "Hole to Hell" or "Stairway to Hell", or some such. It seems that fundie Christians have grabbed those phrases to create websites that warn us of the dangers of rock music! But beyond those are the interesting websites that deal with this peculiar class of legends. One of the more famous is the "Hole to Hell" in Stull, Kansas.

Dana's sister and brother in law live near Lawrence, Kansas, and so are not far from Stull. We drove by the famous cemetery and stopped for pictures. I had heard that it was fenced off, and this was the case. Strangely, there were actually two gates, a locked automotive gate, and a pedestrian gate which was unlocked. Dana & I zipped inside for a few photographs.

As you can see in the photo above, the tiny church in the center of the cemetery has been torn down, but the rubble has not been removed. From what I've read on the Internet, the residents of Stull take trespass into the cemetery very seriously, and while we were parked there Dana's sister told us some lady from across the street was watching us. We took a few quick photos, then left. About 3 minutes after our visit, a sheriff's car passed us going in the other direction. Cemetery trespass call? I'll never know...

More on Stull's cemetary: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php3?tip_AttractionNo==503

Mel's Hole discussion board: http://www.melshole.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi