When archaeologist David Stronach visited the cemetery in 1979 and 1980, he documented over 600 standing stones spread across multiple locations. About half of them cluster on a ridge he called the High Plateau. South and southeast of the main concentration, smaller groups dot several ridges and hillocks. At some distance, another group of perhaps 150 stones is distributed over a wide area on the mountain's south side. The stones are not uniform. Stronach classified them into distinct types: cylindrical shafts with thickened caps and rounded forms of a different shape entirely. Their age and original purpose remain subjects of scholarly debate, with interpretations ranging from simple grave markers to expressions of religious belief systems that predated Islam in this region.

For the Yomut Turkomans, the cemetery is a sacred landscape. Khaled Nabi, identified with the figure of Khaled bin Sinan in Islamic tradition, is venerated as a prophet who lived before Muhammad. His mausoleum draws pilgrims who come to pray and seek blessings. Women visit the site to pray for their welfare, following a tradition of tying ribbons to nearby trees as physical tokens of their petitions. The trees around the mausoleum flutter with fabric in the mountain wind, each strip representing a hope or a prayer offered to a prophet whose historical existence remains a matter of faith rather than documentation. The pilgrimage tradition has continued unbroken despite the cemetery's isolation in the hills near the Turkmenistan frontier.

The standing stones have achieved a different kind of fame in popular media. Visitors from distant parts of Iran noticed that the cylindrical Type 1 stones, with their thickened tops, resemble phallic forms. The rounded Type 2 stones were subsequently interpreted as female counterparts. These observations sparked popular speculation about pre-Islamic fertility cults, theories that have more to do with the stones' visual impact than with archaeological evidence. The fertility-cult narrative has nonetheless driven tourism, turning an isolated mountain cemetery into one of Golestan Province's more visited attractions. The site is now protected as a national heritage site by the Iranian government, a status that acknowledges both its archaeological significance and its vulnerability to the foot traffic that increasing fame brings.

The cemetery occupies a borderland in every sense. Geographically, it sits near the frontier between Iran and Turkmenistan, in the Turkmen Sahra region where Iranian and Turkic cultures have overlapped for centuries. Religiously, it preserves the memory of a pre-Islamic prophet within a predominantly Islamic landscape, a reminder that the arrival of new faiths does not erase the old ones but absorbs them. Architecturally, the stones belong to no easily classified tradition. They are not quite like anything found at other sites in the region. The Khalid Nabi Cemetery exists in the spaces between categories, which may be precisely why it continues to fascinate. The stones offer no inscriptions, no dates, no explanations. They simply stand, as they have for centuries, waiting for someone to read them correctly.