The Monday Morning TERROR Digest

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Hello, dear friends. Welcome to another edition of the Monday Morning TERROR Digest. The spirits are stirring as All Hallow’s Eve approaches, the spirit realm beckons and dark powers summon their minions to wreak havoc on the world of man. I have just described the plot to the Mortal Kombat movie.

I really gotta work on this spooky monologue stuff.

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Now, let’s continue.

Spooky Fact of the Week

There is a low-frequency radio broadcast in Russia called UVB-76, AKA “The Buzzer.” It is a steady stream of intermittent buzzing noises and a voiceover broadcasting messages to what codebreakers believe are callsigns. No one has ever been able to break the code or find out where the radio signal originates from. It began broadcasting in 1976 and no one has been able to figure out what it is for nearly 50 years.

Scary Story of the Week

Stull, Kansas is an unincorporated town in Douglas County, not too far away from the campus of the University of Kansas. The town has been mostly abandoned for over 100 years. The town, like most places in Kansas, is completely unremarkable and unimpressive. It is a derelict dump. It’s never held any major significance in any industry or held much culture.

Unless we’re talking about the infamous Stull Cemetery.

Stull, Kansas is allegedly home to one of the seven gates to hell around the world. I have never been to Stull, Kansas, but one of my older cousins used to tell the story about when he and a few friends road tripped to Stull to dance with the devil.

The following is a secondhand account of my cousin’s trip to the Stull Cemetery in 1993:

Me and some friends decided to grab a case of beer and road trip to Stull after a high school football game on Halloween night. It was easily the most popular urban legend in Kansas. We’d heard about some seniors traveling to Stull a couple of years before and decided that we’d make the same trip to commemorate our senior year. They said it wasn’t anything too scary, just a creepy chapel in the middle of an abandoned cemetery.

We left the game at halftime and hit K7 to Douglas County. Once we got to Stull, we were shocked at how dead the town was. There was a cloud of darkness over the town, even though the waxing half moon was out. There was a dark sense of foreboding, the town was extremely creepy. Since the town is unincorporated, cops are rarely an issue. We were completely alone.

We parked the car just outside of the cemetery, grabbed our flashlights and a couple of beers a piece and headed into the cemetery. As we walked deeper into the property, it kept getting foggier.

My buddy Mike said he kept hearing whispers, but I didn’t hear anything. He was also hammered.

Then, we saw it. A crumbling husk of a 19th Century chapel at the top of a short hill about 100 yards from the fenceline. The fog parted and the moon brightened, revealing the silhouette of the old church. I hadn’t been nervous yet, but once I saw the decaying structure, a lump grew in my throat.

We climbed the short hill and closed in on the remains of the building. It was dead silent. Bugs stopped chirping, the wind completely died, leaves no longer rustled.

I could have sworn I saw a dull, orange light coming from behind the building, but it disappeared before I was certain.

As I crossed the threshold into the chapel, the temperature dropped immediately. A chilling wind whipped through the windows and I began to hear dogs barking in the distance as the crescendo of familiar autumn sounds returned.

The legend says that the gate to hell was located in a hidden stairwell behind the altar. We headed towards the altar and sure enough, we were staring down a collapsed stairwell. Holy shit, we found it.

My friend pulled out his Polaroid camera and started snapping pictures. Mike took a step into the stairwell and posed for a photo. The atmosphere immediately shifted. It felt like the non-existent ceiling was collapsing in on us. The temperature kept dropping. Our breath became visible in the beams from our flashlights. Oppressing silence fell over us again and we all froze. The world stood still.

Then, without warning, I heard a deep, horrifying growl growing from the depths of the old stairwell and the temperature became absolutely frigid, like we were suddenly plunged into freezing cold water.

Fuck it. We were gone.

We all tore off out of the church and made a bee line to the car. We sped off into the night. I looked back at the church and again I saw the faint orange light behind the church, illuminating its shadow on the horizon atop the low hill. After a silent ride home, we spent the night in my parents’ basement.

For the next month, I was woken up by a loud bang almost every single night at 3:13 a.m. I shared my story with my friends who were there that night. Mike said he was also being woken up at the same time by a loud bang. My other buddy Tim said he’d see a dark shadow outside of his window in the middle of the night from time to time. Our other friend Shelly said she would wake up from sleepwalking staring out of her window, looking westward towards Stull.

Some nights, I’ll still be woken up at 3:13 in the morning by a loud bang. I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of whatever followed me home that night. The church was mysteriously demolished without permission from the owner of the property in 2002. The rubble is still there.

That’s my cousin’s story. I choose to believe that yes, the seat of evil in this world resides in and emanates from the state of Kansas.

Author’s note: It is also believed that Bill Self routinely travels to Stull to sacrifice small animals to appease the spirit of James Naismith. That’s just a rumor I’ve heard. Don’t quote me on that.

“Abandoned Mines? Absolutely Not” Video of the Week

I am pretty sure this is the creepiest video on the internet. “Frank” had an insignificant YouTube channel in which he would explore abandoned mines. He had over 200 videos, some of them with less than 10 views, before posting this insane video in 2013. By the miracle of the wonderfully random YouTube algorithm of the mid-2010s, this video went crazy viral a few years after he posted it and it is believed to be one of the most compelling pieces of paranormal evidence ever posted on the internet. I love this video.

That’ll do it for this week. Look lively.

-B