The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

The Grim is opening the gate to Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, Maine, during the week of Halloween. Founded in 1834, it is one of America’s oldest garden cemeteries, and it sits in the city that shaped Stephen King’s darkest fiction. On October 12, 1937, Public Enemy Al Brady and his gang walked into downtown Bangor and into an ambush by the FBI. When the gunfire on Central Street stopped, Brady lay dead in the road, and he was buried at Mount Hope in a grave no one marked for seventy years. This episode follows Mount Hope from its rural gard...

The Grim is opening the gate to Pień Cemetery, a forgotten 17th-century burial ground in northern Poland where the dead were locked into the earth. In 2022, archaeologists from Nicolaus Copernicus University uncovered Grave 75: a young woman with an iron sickle across her throat and a padlock fastened to her toe. They named her Zosia. She was buried among outcasts on unconsecrated ground, yet she wore a silk cap woven with gold and silver threads. This episode follows the excavation of what may be Poland’s largest burial ground for the rejected, the anti-vampiric burials of Slavic folklore, and the sci...

The Grim is opening the gate to Goat Island’s Pirate Graves, an unmarked burial ground on the shore of Newport Harbor in Rhode Island. In July 1723, twenty-six pirates captured from the sloop Ranger were hanged at Gravelly Point in the largest single execution of pirates the American colonies ever carried out. They were then rowed to Goat Island and buried between the high and low tide marks, denied hallowed ground even in death. This episode follows their story from capture to gallows: the Royal Navy chase that ended their careers, the Admiralty trial that decided who would hang, an...

The Grim is opening the gate to Crown Hill Cemetery, the largest cemetery in Indiana and the third-largest non-governmental cemetery in the United States. Spread across 555 acres above Indianapolis, it holds more than 225,000 graves, among them a president, three vice presidents, and Public Enemy No. 1. On this episode, we trace Crown Hill from its 1863 founding on Strawberry Hill through the Civil War dead brought to its National Cemetery and the Confederate prisoners reburied in a mass grave decades later. Then we walk among the famous and the forgotten buried there, from Benjamin Harrison and James Whitcomb Riley to the...

The Grim is opening the gate to the Hohenzollern Crypt, Germany's largest dynastic burial vault. Hidden beneath Berlin Cathedral, it holds 91 members of the family that ruled Prussia and later Germany for nearly a thousand years. On this episode, we trace the Hohenzollern dynasty from its 11th-century origins in the Swabian Alps through the rise of Prussia, the reign of Frederick the Great, and the collapse of the German Empire in 1918, then descend into the crypt itself to meet the kings, queens, and children buried there.

Along the way: a gilded statue of Death scratching names into...

Paris in Mourning, Part Two — and the gate is open again. The Grim returns to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France for the season two finale, and the dead still have stories left to tell. We walk the haunted avenues of one of the world's most famous cemeteries to meet the figures history left unfinished. We begin with Molière, whose monument may rest over bones that were never truly his. We visit Oscar Wilde, imprisoned and destroyed for loving openly, now the recipient of unending devotion from strangers who cannot stop reaching toward him. We pause at the...

The Grim is opening the gate and entering Canongate Kirkyard in Edinburgh, Scotland, one of the most storied burial grounds on the Royal Mile, where the dead have never quite stopped making noise.

A young poet dies in an asylum at twenty-four, buried without a stone, forgotten by the city that once read him, until the man who owed him everything walks through these gates and refuses to leave him nameless. The father of modern economics rests steps from the house where he spent his final years, his grave now a pilgrimage site for scholars who leave...

The Grim is opening the gate on Silver Terrace Cemeteries in Virginia City, Nevada, a sprawling collection of eleven distinct burial grounds established on a windswept hillside in 1867. Built at the height of the Comstock Lode silver boom, Silver Terrace was no frontier afterthought. It was a Victorian garden cemetery carved into the Nevada desert, complete with imported trees, marble headstones, and elaborate ironwork dividing the grounds by fraternal order, civic organization, and religious affiliation. Today the desert has reclaimed much of what was built. Four thousand people are buried here. Thirteen hundred markers remain. 

Host Kristin t...

The Grim is opening the gate and entering Norton Cemetery, tucked off the Ghost House Trail inside Big Ridge State Park in Union County, Tennessee. Small, mossy, and slowly sinking back into the earth, the cemetery rests quietly in the trees while the forest works to reclaim it. The park itself was born from displacement, rising out of the 1930s Norris Project and the communities it erased. Traces of those earlier lives still surface along the trail, including the reconstructed Norton Gristmill, which carries a dark legend no record has ever confirmed.

The cemetery is overwhelmingly a...

The Grim is opening the gate into an American holiday that isn't as old as time. Memorial Day feels timeless, as though it has always existed on the American calendar. But the holiday is younger than most realize, and its true origins are far stranger and more powerful than the version history chose to remember.

This episode opens the gate to Beaufort National Cemetery, a forty-four-acre Civil War cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina, established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, where more than 29,500 souls rest beneath moss-draped live oaks. Before walking those grounds, we follow the story backward to...

The Grim is opening the gate and entering the oldest cemetery in the Pacific Northwest. Portland was built by people who survived impossible journeys, and Lone Fir Cemetery holds nearly all of them. Established in the 1850s on land where a pioneer father was buried as a condition of sale, Lone Fir became the final resting place for more than 25,000 souls: founders and frontier figures, poets and painters, asylum patients and immigrants, and over three thousand Chinese laborers whose graves were bulldozed in the 1950s to build a county parking lot. The oldest active cemetery in the Pacific Northwest...

The Grim is opening the gate into a haunted garden hidden under the  Mediterranean sun. Perched within centuries-old bastions overlooking Marsamxetto Harbour, Msida Bastion Cemetery in Floriana, Malta is one of Europe's most hauntingly beautiful historic cemeteries — and one of its least known. Once the site of the Knights of Malta's gallows, the grounds were transformed into a Protestant burial ground after the British arrived in 1800, becoming the final resting place for over five hundred souls: soldiers, merchants, children, and wanderers drawn to Malta by empire and trade.

The cemetery's history spans centuries of conflict, neglect, and rem...

In the quiet hills of New Hampshire, two small burial grounds hide some of the most persistent and unsettling folklore in all of New England. This episode of The Grim opens the gate on Pine Hill Cemetery in Hollis, known to locals as Blood Cemetery, and Gilson Road Cemetery in Nashua, where the stories go deeper and stranger than any single legend can contain.

Pine Hill was established in 1769 on land donated by Benjamin Parker Jr., and nearly three hundred souls rest beneath its weathered stones. The cemetery's infamous nickname traces not to murder or massacre, but...

Beneath one of America's most iconic landmarks lies a crypt holding more than 1,100 souls — and stories most visitors never hear. In this episode of The Grim, we descend beneath Old North Church in Boston's North End, past the lanterns and the legend, and into the underground tombs that have held the dead since 1732.

Featured Stories

Built in 1723 as Christ Church, Old North was Boston's second Anglican congregation — an outsider faith taking root in Puritan soil. Its Georgian architecture echoed Christopher Wren's London cathedrals, its bells are the oldest change-ringing set in North America, and its stee...

Hidden behind a plain residential gate in Paris, unmarked on most maps and open only a few hours a day, Picpus Cemetery holds a silence unlike any other. Beneath its unassuming garden lie more than 1,300 victims of the Reign of Terror — and above them, nearly two centuries of unbroken prayer.

Featured Stories:

The Mass Graves of the Reign of Terror

For six terrifying weeks in the summer of 1794, the guillotine stood at the edge of Paris — and the bodies were quietly carted to a convent garden just five minutes away. Over 1,300 men and wome...

In this episode of The Grim — a podcast exploring cemetery history, dark history, and the stories the dead leave behind — we open the gates of Manzanar Cemetery, part of the Manzanar National Historic Site near Independence, California. Set against the stark backdrop of the Sierra Nevada, this windswept burial ground stands on the grounds of one of America's most sobering WWII Japanese American internment camps, where more than 10,000 people were forcibly incarcerated during World War II.

For decades before the war, anti-Asian legislation had been quietly narrowing the world of Japanese Americans — stripping land rights, denying citizenship, and bu...

Step through the iron gates of Staglieno Cemetery, one of Europe's largest and most extraordinary burial grounds, nestled on a hillside above the Ligurian port city of Genoa, Italy. Stretching across more than a square kilometer, Staglieno is no ordinary resting place — it is an open-air museum of marble, grief, and artistry, where some of Italy's most gifted sculptors transformed mourning into breathtaking stone.

In this episode of The Grim, we trace Staglieno's origins from Napoleon's 1804 Edict of Saint-Cloud through architect Giovanni Battista Resasco's grand vision, brought to life when the cemetery first opened its gates in Ja...

Grim Mourning and Welcome to The Grim. This week, Kristin opens the gate on one of the most haunted and heartbreaking places in the world — Japan's Aokigahara Forest. Known as the Sea of Trees, this dense wilderness sprawls across 13.5 square miles at the base of Mount Fuji, less than 100 miles from Tokyo. Ancient volcanic eruptions carved the land beneath it, leaving roots tangled across a maze of hardened lava and iron-rich stone that silences compasses, weakens cell signals, and swallows sound whole.

Aokigahara is a place of extraordinary beauty — and extraordinary grief.

If you or some...

Where the dead are remembered and the earth still burns. Beneath the quiet rows of Odd Fellows Cemetery in Centralia, Pennsylvania, a fire has been burning since 1962 — and it shows no sign of stopping. In this episode of The Grim, we open the gate on one of America's most unsettling burial grounds: an active cemetery inside a ghost town, maintained by a church miles away, visited by families who no longer have a home to return to.

Centralia was once a thriving coal-mining community in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Today, fewer than five residents remain — the rest displaced by a...

In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Down Cathedral Graveyard in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland — a hilltop burial ground sacred since the Bronze Age, where centuries of pilgrimage, legend, and quiet reverence converge on a single unadorned stone.

One of the oldest continuously sacred sites in Ireland, Down Cathedral Graveyard sits atop a hill that has drawn the faithful for thousands of years — long before any cathedral stood along its crest. Today it is best known as the reputed resting place of Saint Patrick, the Romano-British missionary who was enslaved in Ireland, escaped, and retu...

In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Plainfield Cemetery in Plainfield, Wisconsin—a modest Midwestern burial ground rooted in pioneer history, where the quiet rows of headstones conceal one of the most disturbing legacies in American true crime.

Home to the earliest settlers of rural Wisconsin, the cemetery is perhaps best known today as the final resting place of Ed Gein—a body snatcher who robbed the very graves he now lies among, buried unmarked between his mother and brother in the family plot.

Visitors and true crime enthusiasts continue to make...

In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Old Church Cemetery in Cobh, Ireland—a hillside burial ground stretching back to Ireland's Celtic past, where maritime catastrophe, extraordinary lives, and restless spirits converge above one of the world's great natural harbours.

Home to victims of the RMS Lusitania, a celebrated Irish boxer, a surgeon who stood beside Napoleon's deathbed, and an Antarctic explorer who carried the cold home in his hands—Old Church is one of Ireland's most cosmopolitan and quietly haunted cemeteries.

Visitors report auditory hauntings near the Lusitania mass graves: murm...

Descend into Black Hope Cemetery in Crosby, Texas, where an entire post-Civil War freedom colony was swallowed by fire, forgotten by history, and buried beneath a modern subdivision — and where the dead refused to stay silent. Host Kristin uncovers Charlie and Betty Thomas — formerly enslaved people exhumed from a family's backyard still wearing their wedding rings — the Haney family's nightmare of glowing unplugged clocks, ghostly figures hovering over the bed, and a pair of red shoes that vanished only to reappear on a grave, and the Williams family's devastating loss of their thirty-year-old daughter after digging for evidence on cursed...

Descend into African Cemetery No. 2 in Lexington, Kentucky, where the first Kentucky Derby winner rests in unmarked ground alongside Civil War heroes, Buffalo Soldiers, and the grooms and trainers who built America's thoroughbred empire. Host Kristin uncovers Oliver Lewis—who won the 1875 Derby at nineteen and died laying asphalt—journalist Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin, murdered for defending Black voters, and over 5,000 souls buried in one of the nation's oldest African American-owned cemeteries, where only 1,200 names are still known and the earth itself remembers what history tried to erase.

Featured Historical Figures:

Oliver Lewis – First Kentucky Derby...

Join host Kristin as The Grim descends into Gettysburg National Cemetery — where blood-soaked Pennsylvania earth became the birthplace of America's first national cemetery and a monument to the true cost of war.

Before national cemeteries existed, soldiers were buried where they fell. The Civil War changed everything. At the Battle of Gettysburg — the deadliest battle in American military history — over 50,000 casualties fell in just three days as outdated battlefield tactics collided with modern repeating rifles. On July 3, 1863, nearly 12,000 Confederate soldiers marched across open ground during Pickett's Charge, met by devastating Union fire, marking the high-water mark of the Co...

Join host Kristin as The Grim opens the gate on one of America's most erased and overlooked histories — African American burial grounds and enslaved persons cemeteries across the United States.

Records are heartbreakingly scarce. By 1860, nearly four million people were enslaved in America, yet their burial grounds remain largely undocumented, destroyed, or entirely lost. In a system that valued labor over human life, death was treated as an inconvenience. Burials were rushed, unrecorded, and hidden in remote corners of vast plantations — marked only by seashells, fieldstones, or personal objects that eroded over time. Even in death, dignity was...

Descend into the moss-draped grounds of St. Philip's in Charleston, South Carolina, where the nation's oldest Anglican congregation has buried its dead since 1681. Host Kristin explores a city built atop graves, uncovering the Revolutionary War heroes, Vice Presidents, and enslaved protectors whose legacies—and spirits—refuse to stay buried.

Featured Historical Figures:

John C. Calhoun – The Vice President who resigned his office to defend an ideology so divisive, his grave was hidden during the Civil War for fear of what Union soldiers might do to his remains.

Edward Rutledge – The youngest signer of the Decl...

What happens when a cemetery built to honor the dead becomes their greatest indignity? St. James Cemetery in Liverpool was designed as a modern answer to Victorian burial chaos—but instead recreated every horror it promised to solve. Now 57,000 souls lie beneath what's officially called a public park, their gravestones cleared away, their names reduced to lists on communal stones.

Host Kristin descends into this haunted quarry-turned-cemetery to uncover the stories of those buried within: Sarah Biffin, the armless artist who painted for royalty with her teeth; Arthur Richardson, a forgotten Victoria Cross hero who saved a ma...

In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Kensal Green Cemetery in London, England—the first of the city's Magnificent Seven, where innovation, artistry, and royal rebellion lie beneath seventy-two acres of leaning stones. Built in 1833 to relieve London's overcrowded graveyards, Kensal Green now faces its own crisis: caught between preservation and a city desperate for space.

Over 250,000 souls rest here, including nearly a thousand recorded in the Dictionary of National Biography. Among them: Charles Babbage, whose unfinished calculating engines predicted the computer age; Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose bridges and railways transformed Britain; writers Wi...

In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia—a place where tragedy, memory, and history converge. Best known as the final resting place of 121 Titanic victims, Fairview offers a tangible encounter with sorrow: rows of granite markers transform distant history into something immediate and haunting. From the meticulous recovery work of John Henry Barnstead to the long-unidentified Unknown Child, the cemetery preserves lives lost at sea with dignity and care.

But Fairview is more than Titanic. Just five years later, Halifax endured the Halifax Explosion, the largest ma...

Nearly 47% of podcasts never reach episode three. Only 8.5% make it to 50. The Grim just published episode 73 — and this week, host Kristin closes the gates on a year of graveyards, uncomfortable histories, and stories that asked to be told.

This isn't a typical episode. No single cemetery. No one ghost. Just an honest look back at the places that fascinated her most, the stories that lingered long after research ended, and the listeners who made survival possible in a landscape littered with abandoned feeds and forgotten voices.

The year opened at Little Bighorn — a place that sits...

Every December, millions pass through St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue — drawn by Gothic spires, Christmas lights, and the echo of Midnight Mass through marble vaults. Almost none of them know what lies directly beneath their feet.

In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin descends into the crypts below St. Patrick's high altar, where more than twenty archbishops and cardinals rest in brick-lined tombs. Men who presided over Christmas Masses while influenza swept through tenements, while telegrams arrived with news of sons lost overseas, while a city swollen with immigrants tested the limits of faith and po...

In 1900, Chicago families spent their Christmas inside a cemetery. Sleigh rides, carolers, children playing among snow-covered monuments — all of it unfolding across 350 acres on the city's north side. It sounds like a Hallmark movie. It was Rosehill Cemetery.

In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin explores Chicago's first and grandest private cemetery — a Gothic fortress of ambition, tragedy, and restless spirits receiving the city's dead since 1859. Its castellated limestone entrance gate mirrors the iconic Water Tower on Michigan Avenue, both designed by the same architect. Inside, Chicago's largest mausoleum holds Tiffany-crafted windows, including a chapel commissioned to b...

December and graveyards have always belonged together. The Victorians knew it — they laid evergreen wreaths on the graves of their loved ones on Christmas Day, symbols of eternal life enduring through the cold. And nowhere does that connection feel more alive than Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, where winter wraps 119 acres of literary history in snow and shadow.

In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin walks the frozen paths of one of America's most beloved rural cemeteries — a landscape designed not to imitate the rigid churchyards of old, but to fold death gently into nature. When...

Step through the wrought-iron gates of Trinity Churchyard and the roar of Wall Street disappears. What remains is one of the oldest and most storied burial grounds in America — a quiet half-acre in the heart of Manhattan where thousands of souls have rested since the 1660s, and where the history of a nation is etched into weathered stone.

In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin walks the grounds of Trinity Churchyard, tracing the lives buried in its shadow — from Revolutionary heroes and forgotten innovators to a woman who outlived her famous husband by fifty years, and a ma...

Before Boston was Boston, there was a pumpkin patch — and a grieving man who asked to be buried in it. That quiet wish became King's Chapel Burying Ground, the city's oldest cemetery, and one of the most haunted stops on the Freedom Trail.

In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin traces nearly four centuries of history buried in less than half an acre. We begin with Isaac Johnson, whose 1630 death seeded this plot of earth as Boston's first field of the dead, and follow the ground through its most disruptive chapters: a Royal Governor who seized sa...

Step through the iron gates of Old Gray Cemetery — Knoxville, Tennessee's most atmospheric Victorian burial ground, where Appalachian ghost lore, Civil War grudges, and marble angels have kept uneasy company since 1850.

In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin traces the full haunted history of Old Gray: how a fear of epidemic drove Knoxville to build a garden cemetery beyond its city limits, how the cholera outbreak of 1854 filled its earliest rows before the grass had even settled, and how the catastrophic 1904 New Market train disaster — one of the worst rail collisions in Tennessee history — brought dozens of vic...

Step beyond the veil with The Grim as host Kristin explores the haunting ossuaries of San Martino and Solferino in Lombardy, Italy—where thousands of bones rest in solemn tribute beneath cypress groves.

The Battle of Solferino and San Martino (1859) was a brutal clash that forged modern Italy and inspired the creation of the Red Cross. Here, in sacred charnel houses, skulls and bones are arranged in silent testimony to war's cost and Italy's fight for unity.

Discover how Jean-Henri Dunant's compassion amid the carnage gave rise to humanitarian law, and how the Tower of Sa...

In America's oldest city, beneath sighing oaks draped in Spanish moss, lies a cemetery that opens its gates to the living only three hours a month. The spirits, however, keep their own hours.

In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin walks the grounds of Tolomato Cemetery in St. Augustine, Florida — one of the oldest planned cemeteries in the United States, and one of its most restless. Long before the first headstone arrived, this soil cradled a Franciscan mission for the Guale Indians, displaced from their Georgia homeland and guided south in search of sanctuary. When British fo...

Join host Kristin as The Grim opens the gate on All Hallows' Eve, crossing into Panteón de Belén — Guadalajara's most haunted cemetery, where Gothic arches, marble crypts, and centuries of legend wait beneath the Mexican sun.

Originally built as part of the Hospital of Belén, a charitable sanctuary established by royal decree in 1751, the grounds were transformed into a burial site in 1848 when cholera swept through Guadalajara and the dead outnumbered the living. Architect Manuel Gómez Ibarra — the same visionary behind Guadalajara's cathedral — designed the cemetery in two realms: one for the wealthy, one for th...