“Have you seen Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal?”
That’s not a question I’ve asked often. Honestly, I’ve probably only said those words twice since the early 2000s.
The last time I did, I called one of my best friends. I knew the plot of the movie would intrigue him, but I had no idea that conversation would unravel a secret that’s only grown bigger since. A secret no one should have ever believed.
I explained to him that in the film, a heavy metal band wants to perform a live concert aboard a Boeing 747, but instead a satanic cult hijacks the plane and tries to crash it into Stull, Kansas.
“Wait,” my friend said. “I have to see this.”
Why, Stull, you ask?
If you haven’t heard the stories, Stull is a tiny town in Douglas County with a population of around 50 that has become infamous for its cemetery. According to legend, it’s one of the seven gateways to Hell.
The myth likely began in 1974, when the University Daily Kansan published a satirical article claiming the Devil appears in Stull twice a year. The piece mentioned a staircase to Hell beneath the church ruins, a tree marking the grave of a devil child and other eerie flourishes. It ran just after Halloween—poor timing that made the fiction feel plausible.
Visitors came looking for proof. The church was old and crumbling, the graveyard eerie and there really was a headstone with the name “Wittich,” close enough to “witch” for a good ghost story.
By the 1990s, the local sheriff’s office had to patrol the cemetery on Halloween to keep thrill-seekers out. More rumors surfaced: that watches stopped ticking on the grounds, that bottles wouldn’t break when thrown against the church wall and - the big one - that Pope John Paul II once rerouted his plane to avoid flying over Stull.
That last claim, oddly enough, is the premise of Turbulence 3. The cult wants to crash the plane into the church because, naturally, that would take them straight to Hell.
Stull has been a pop culture curiosity for decades. Alt-rock band Urge Overkill recorded a song called “Stull” and featured the cemetery on an album cover. The CW show Supernatural used it as the site of the final battle between Lucifer and the archangel Michael. Even Ariana Grande reportedly visited, later saying she left feeling nauseated, smelling sulfur and unable to send a photo she took — because the file size was exactly 666 megabytes.
But Turbulence 3 was one of the earliest on-screen references, and it’s the movie that led to one of the strangest confessions I’ve ever heard.
“I made it up,” my friend explained when I saw him next.
Confused, he showed me a website he designed while at KU, studying computer engineering. My friend said he had to build a website for a class project. He chose Stull as his topic — and decided to add a few “details” of his own.
He told me he made up the story about bottles not breaking. But even more shocking - he invented the whole story about the Pope.
On his site, he wrote that Pope John Paul II told Time magazine he had his plane fly around Stull because it was “unholy ground.”
He never imagined anyone would believe it, let alone that it would become the plot of a movie.
Even back then, long before I became a prosecutor, I knew I had to verify things. A few quick internet searches confirmed what he said: every mention of the Pope or the bottle myth traced back to his site.
Until I had called him, he had forgotten about the project. He said that when he realized people were citing his webpage, he tried to take the page down, but had forgotten the password.
Unfortunately, that class project ended up doing real damage. The broken bottles scattered around the site? Criminal littering: a minimum fine of $250. The thrill-seekers and ghost hunters who trespass? Criminal charges, with fines up to $1,000 and potential jail time.
Before he passed away, after years of battling his own demons, my friend expressed regret about what he had done. He had inadvertently helped create the plot of a movie. But he’d also created something some people believed - something obviously fake.
Sadly, this hasn’t ended.
Though the website is long gone, the legend lives on. The church grounds are still littered with shards of broken bottles from people who once thought they couldn’t break. Websites still claim the Pope rerouted a flight over “unholy ground” in 1996. Yet a quick search confirms there was no truth to it, and in fact Pope John Paul II visited the U.S. in 1993 – not in 1996.
What started as a haunted graveyard hoax became an early example of how misinformation spreads - and refuses to die.
These days, it’s not just haunted cemeteries. Misinformation is peddled constantly, whether for clicks, votes or money. Heartwarming stories about Patrick Mahomes or Peyton Manning go viral, shared thousands of times before anyone stops to ask: Is this even real? And, of course, we know of even worse stories littering social media and webpages with no truth.
And it’s hard to kill these lies and legends—people still claim Stull is haunted.
But the scariest thing isn’t the myth - it’s how easily we believe the unbelievable.
Todd Thompson is the Leavenworth County Attorney. Send email to MBray@leavenworthcounty.gov.
