The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

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 Ca...

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 immigr...

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 a...

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.,...

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 — ...

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 Par...

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 tha...

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 ...

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 ...

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 retur...

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 befo...

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...

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 expl...

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 clock...

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 5,00...

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 i...

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...

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 ...

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-...