The  Cherryvale  Bender  Museum

You leave this spooky environment through the back door with your life and all your possessions. Outside and to your left as you leave is the double-leaf door, with the always present pad lock, leading into the stone-lined passage to the killing pit or cellar. Those who visited this museum with you, and others before you, will leave with a feeling that the notorious Benders, unlike their many ill-fated forgotten travelers, live again. 

More than 130 years after the news first spread about “The Kansas Bloody Benders", their story is still told by Kansans around campfires and noted by road markers from the Kansas State Historical Society. Generations have gossiped about Kate Bender and newspapers, magazines, and the movies have portrayed her. Today, as an infamous character of the prairie, she ranks with Jessie James, the Daltons, and Belle Starr, and still the story of Kate lives on.  On the Internet Google site, more than 2,600 daily hits are made, a grim reminder of a dark page out of the past.  Photo by Mike Gullett of the Parsons “Sun”, used by permission