“He fashioned hell for the inquisitive.” (Augustine)

Just south of the skyscrapers and traffic of Columbus lies the Ohio most people envision: endless farmland. Interstate 71 cuts through the mostly flat, ridiculously pastoral landscape. Driving south toward Cincinnati, you’re lulled into a trance-like state from the bucolic scene. Oh, look, another huge crop of something. And yes, another herd of cows.

Then, just outside of tiny Mount Sterling, you see it rising from the vast farmland. A black sign that almost looks homemade. The all-cap letters suggest something big is going to be told. As you speed closer, the message is revealed:

HELL IS REAL

And just like that, it’s gone. The sign may be out of view, but the message lingers in your head. Depending on your beliefs, you may chuckle or get a chill up your spine. Either way, you are unlikely to be forgetting the sign anytime soon.

In America’s heartland, it is not unusual to see faith-based billboards encouraging passersby to read a particular Bible passage or respect life. The “Hell Is Real” sign is different. At 14-feet tall and 48-feet wide, it’s huge, but it stands on four wooden posts, not on thick metal columns high above the interstate. While the message is bold, the presentation is intentionally simple. All of the letters are painted white, except for the infernal red “H,” which calls to mind the indisputable fact that hell is hot and devils are red. The sign offers no call to action. It only makes a statement that you can take or leave.

He Saw the Signs

“Hell Is Real” is one of more than thirty signs erected over the last forty-plus years by semi-retired real estate developer Jimmy Harston. It began, he says, when God told him to create messages. “We were in a revival at church and it came on me,” says Harston, a Missionary Baptist who lives in rural Kentucky. God didn’t tell him exactly what the signs should say, though. “I put up whatever I felt I should,” he says.

He built the first sign on his own farmland, “near a secondary road, where my cattle graze.” One side reads, “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?” The other says, “You don’t accept Christ, Christ accepts you.” Then, Harston began to splash signs across Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. Other roadside messages include “Jesus Saves” and an entire run-through of the Ten Commandments.

As you might expect, Harston’s signs have not always been met with warmth and excitement. He has been sued, including in his home state. But through ads in smalltown newspapers, Harston has found the “country people” who share his Christian beliefs and agree to put his religious signs on their property.

In the early 2000s, Bob Hall answered Harston’s ad in a London, Ohio paper. “Please, come up here and talk to me,” Harston recalls Hall saying over the phone in a quivering voice. Hall was in the hospital facing very serious heart issues. He told Harston that the Lord had told him to put up biblical messages on his property seven years earlier, but he hadn’t done it. “You’ve answered my prayers,” Hall told Harston. “You put up religious signs on my property wherever you want.”

Harston chose to write “Hell Is Real” on one side of a sign and “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?” on the other. (Although most people pay attention to the “Hell Is Real” side only.) He also decided to create signs with the Ten Commandments. “I built them, rolled them up, and put them on the back of my truck. And I had lumber delivered locally from Mount Sterling,” Harston recalls. In 2004, the signs officially became part of the bucolic landscape.

Bob Hall and his wife, Nancy, were thrilled, but a lot of other people in the area weren’t. “They hated them,” Harston says about the signs. Unfazed, he contacted a local lawyer and reached out to someone in the Ohio Department of Transportation, and, long story short, the signs have been up ever since.

Do With It What You Will

These days, only cranky Redditors tend to condemn the “Hell Is Real” sign. (“Hell is real, and it’s full of people who claimed to be Christians.” “The people who put that sign up eat paste.” “Would be a ‘shame’ if it caught fire.”) The majority of Ohioans, though, have decided to embrace its presence, even if it’s for purely secular reasons.

The sign serves as a reference point for cars traveling north-to-south in the state.

“How far are you from Cincinnati?” someone might ask.

“I just passed the ‘Hell Is Real’ sign.”

“Okay, see you in about an hour and 20 minutes.”

In 2017, the Major League Soccer rivalry between FC Cincinnati and Columbus Crew officially became known as the “Hell Is Real derby.” Even this tongue-in-cheek reference serves a purpose, according to Harston. “It made the sign more popular so that people won’t press me to take it down,” he says. “They’ll have to go through the soccer teams, and that’ll be hard.”

The sign has its own GPS coordinates— 39.7375° N, -83.347778°—and has been reviewed on Google Maps, generating 4.3 out of 5 stars. Reviewers declare the sign an “Ohio landmark” that’s “accurate and ominous/threatening” because “you are in the epicenter, the final tier of Dante's inferno, in this desolate, forsaken no man's land between Cincinnati and Columbus.” Among the few one-star reviews was this one: “Of course hell is real, we all know about Indiana. This sign is making it too hard to find the Grandpa’s Cheesebarn exit.”

The sign has been vandalized over the years, but it always comes back stronger. In 2023, an artist known as LISP drew a crude illustration of a demon beside the words “Hell Is Real.” Unfazed, Harston decided it was time to update the sign anyway, so he had a new one made. The material is fresh, but the message remains the same.

He only hopes it gets people thinking of the Almighty. Beyond that it is not within his power. As he puts it, “The Lord has used those signs in ways you and I will never know.”