Peace Church Cemetery

Serial killer Billy Cook was buried by flashlight in an unmarked grave outside the fence of this 1841 Joplin cemetery, which also holds the remains of 18 Union soldiers massacred at the Rader Farm in 1863. Visitors report dark shapes between the trees, phantom screams and gunshots, and being physically shoved by invisible hands.

Billy Cook had "HARD LUCK" tattooed across his knuckles and a right eyelid that wouldn't close. In January 1951, the 21-year-old Joplin native kidnapped the Mosser family at gunpoint, drove them for three days, then killed Carl, Thelma, and their three children, ages three to seven, along with the family dog. He dumped the bodies down the Nortonia Mine shaft, a hundred-foot drop into the same abandoned mining tunnels where his own father had left him and his siblings as a child. Cook was captured in Mexico and executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin in 1952. His body came back to Joplin, and nobody wanted it. Peace Church Cemetery finally agreed to take him, but only outside the fence, in an unmarked plot, buried at night in secret. The graveside service lasted less than ten minutes, done by flashlight.

Peace Church Cemetery sits on the outskirts of Joplin and dates to 1841, making it the second oldest graveyard in Jasper County. The church it was named for disappeared board by board over the years. As many as 2,000 people are buried here, including veterans from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, and Korea. The first burial was a Black child who worked on a salt freighter. The first recorded burial, in 1846, was Sarah Tingle, who died during childbirth.

The Civil War graves carry the heaviest history. On May 18, 1863, at the nearby Rader Farm, Confederate troops from Jasper County ambushed and massacred 18 unarmed Union soldiers, 15 of them African American volunteers from the 1st Kansas Infantry. The bodies were mutilated. A local neighbor named John Bishop was executed in retaliation and thrown in with them. All the remains were piled in a barn and set on fire. Whatever was left of those soldiers likely ended up in Peace Church Cemetery, in an unmarked mass grave with nothing but small piles of rocks on top.

The paranormal claims are aggressive for a cemetery. Visitors describe dark shapes darting between trees along the cemetery drive, especially at night. People hear screams and gunshots echoing from the woods with no visible source. One visitor described feeling two large hands press into her mid-back and shove her forward, with no one behind her. Others have come home with scratches and bruises they can't explain. Some say objects get thrown at them.

Lisa Martin, an attorney who leads the Paranormal Research Lab out of Carthage, Missouri, has investigated the cemetery personally and confirms the pattern of experiences visitors describe. Bluish-white floating lights, similar to the nearby Hornet Spooklight, have been seen drifting through the grounds. Footsteps and laughter come from empty parts of the cemetery.

The cemetery was abandoned for over three decades before the Peace Church Cemetery Association, originally founded in 1956 by a local woman named Lillian Geer, was revived in 2015. During those empty years, road construction paved over some forgotten graves, leaving headstones partially buried under asphalt. Stone slabs across the grounds are cracked, fallen, weathered past reading. A concrete entrance arch marks the front, but most of the cemetery feels like it's returning to the woods.

Between the Rader Farm soldiers, the serial killer buried by flashlight, and the two thousand others who went into this ground over nearly two centuries, the cemetery has collected more than most places can hold. The shadows keep darting between the trees. People keep feeling the hands.