The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

Kristin Lopes
  • 3.7 (82)
  • Places & Travel
  • Updated Weekly

Welcome to The Grim, where host Kristin Lopes guides you through the world's most haunted cemeteries and forgotten burial grounds. Each week, we explore ghost stories, historical mysteries, and the art carved into centuries-old stones—from New England witch trials to European ossuaries, Victorian mourning customs to modern hauntings. Through vivid storytelling and deep research, we uncover the lives, legends, and restless spirits that refuse to stay buried. Perfect for lovers of: Haunted cemeteries & graveyard folkloreParanormal encounters & ghost storiesDark history, true crime & forgotten talesCemetery tourism & historical exploration Whether you're planning a graveyard visit or simply drawn to the shadows, The Grim blends atmosphere with meticulous research—bringing you stories that linger long after the episode ends. So pour yourself a warm cup of coffee, cozy up with the whispers of the past, and step beyond the veil. "Step carefully—it's time to descend into the hauntings of history." With over 267,000 listens, The Grim has become a beloved companion for cemetery enthusiasts and paranormal lovers worldwide. 🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe and join us where the past refuses to rest.

  1. 1d ago

    Mortsafes & a Mean Man | Canongate Kirkyard, Edinburgh, Scotland

    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 coins on the stone with no prescribed ritual. Two centuries of soldiers lie beneath open grass, their names never carved, a single granite column standing for all of them at once. And then there is the question of Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, a meal man, a corn merchant, possibly a great-nephew of Adam Smith, and possibly the man whose gravestone gave Charles Dickens one of the most recognizable names in English literature. Possibly. The gravestone is gone. The burial records say nothing. The story, however, refuses to die. Beneath it all runs a darker current: the resurrection men who worked Edinburgh's kirkyards by night, the iron mortsafes still rusting in the ground, and a story from a house just up the Royal Mile that has never been fully explained. Canongate Kirkyard does not give up its dead easily. But it does give up their stories. Support the show Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind! https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes Find All of The Grim's Social Links At: https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia

    22 min

  2. Jun 9

    Silver Souls | Silver Terraces Cemeteries, Virginia City, Nevada

    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 traces the history of Virginia City itself, from the 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode through the population explosion that transformed a bare Nevada mountainside into a city of twenty-five thousand souls. She examines how the social hierarchies of the living followed residents into death, and explores one of the cemetery's most striking omissions — a story of exclusion that reflects the harder truths of what the Comstock was built on.  Featured Stories  The episode moves through the cemetery's distinct sections, uncovering the stories of those who built Virginia City and paid for it with their lives. Among the miners, two men who crossed an ocean together and died in the same mine six months apart. Among the civilian dead, a family plot that holds parents and infant sons, separated in life by twenty years of grief and reunited in Silver Terrace by a collision in San Francisco Bay. A woman buried in the Oddfellows section whose story is recorded only in the coldest terms a cemetery record allows.  The firemen's section carries its own weight, including a grave restored a century after burial when a distant city answered the call to take care of one of its own, and the story of a woman the firemen fought to bury in their ground and were refused. Her grave has since been lost.  Among the veterans, soldiers who carried their wars west and lived out their days among sagebrush and silver dust. And a Virginia City native, barely nineteen years old, remembered by the local paper as one of the most beloved young men in the city.  The episode closes with a woman who spent nine years trying to reach the dead from the other side of the veil. She is buried at Silver Terrace now. Perhaps she found what she was looking for.  Silver Terrace Cemeteries are open year round from sunrise to sunset, free of charge. The Comstock Cemetery Foundation manages the grounds and offers a self-guided audio tour with twenty-nine stops. Each fall, Funtime Theater performs Voices of the Past, a living history walking tour through the cemetery. Cemetery Gin, the official spirit of Virginia City, donates one dollar from every bottle sold to preservation efforts at Silver Terrace.  Support the show Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind! https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes Find All of The Grim's Social Links At: https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia

    23 min

  3. Jun 2

    The Trail Ghost | Norton Cemetery, Union County, Tennessee

    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 family burial ground, spanning generations of the same name in these hills. Among the stones are graves marked only by a single word or a single name. Ibby. Son. No dates, no explanation, nothing but the inscription and the silence around it. One of the most often-told spirits here has no stone at all. The men buried in this clearing lived through the Civil War fighting for the Union while surrounded by a Confederate state, and two of them may have ridden in the same regiment without the trail plaques ever mentioning it. Whether the wandering figure people report seeing at dusk is a grieving father, a returning soldier, or simply a trick of the light, Norton Cemetery has never stopped collecting stories. Some places hold onto their dead long after the markers are gone. Support the show Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind! https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes Find All of The Grim's Social Links At: https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia

    14 min

  4. May 26

    The First Decoration Day | Beaufort National Cemetery, Beaufort, South Carolina

    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 a Charleston racetrack in May of 1865, where nearly 10,000 people gathered for what may have been the earliest large-scale Memorial Day ceremony in American history. Most were formerly enslaved Black citizens. The story was nearly erased and wasn't rediscovered until historian David Blight found a handwritten account at Harvard in 1996. Inside Beaufort, we meet the men whose lives give this cemetery its weight. Donald Conroy, decorated Marine pilot and the real-life inspiration for Pat Conroy's novel The Great Santini, rests beneath the same oaks where his character's fictional funeral was filmed. Joseph Simmons was born in 1899 on nearby St. Helena Island, fought at Belleau Wood, served with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II, and spent thirty-four years in uniform, only to receive meaningful recognition from France weeks before his hundredth birthday. Ralph Henry Johnson was twenty years old when he threw himself onto a grenade in Vietnam on March 5, 1968, saving the men beside him and earning the Medal of Honor he would never hold. Beaufort holds more than the dead. It holds the memories a nation tried to forget. Descending once more into the hauntings of history on The Grim. Support the show Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind! https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes Find All of The Grim's Social Links At: https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia

    19 min

  5. May 19

    Tombstones Under The Trees | Lone Fir Cemetery, Portland, Oregon

    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 is also Portland's second-largest arboretum, with more than seven hundred trees growing where memorial plantings once marked individual lives. But beneath the canopy, not everyone rests easy. Featured Stories The Origins of Lone Fir: From a frontier farm burial to Portland's central necropolis, the story of a city that outgrew its dead and consolidated them in a single place. Block 14: The erasure of more than three thousand Chinese immigrant graves, the parking lot built over their remains, and the 2026 apology issued nearly a century after the desecration. The Macleay Mausoleum: A $13,500 Gothic Revival monument in red sandstone, built by Scottish merchant Donald Macleay to honor his wife Martha, who died on New Year's Day 1876, the day after giving birth. The Founders: Beneath the Trees Asa Lovejoy, who lost the coin toss that named Portland; Oregon's first Poet Laureate Samuel L. Simpson; painter Eliza Barchus; and Julius Caesar, the formerly enslaved man whose headstone reads "Play ball." Emma Merlotin: A French courtesan brutally murdered on December 22, 1885, whose killer was never found, and whose shadow many believe still moves between the trees. The Old Man in the Dark: A first-person account of an encounter at Lone Fir that left two visitors running and one unsettling question unanswered. Support the show Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind! https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes Find All of The Grim's Social Links At: https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia

    21 min

  6. May 12

    A Garden in the Gallows | Msida Bastion Cemetery

    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 remarkable restoration. Bombed during World War II and left in ruin for decades, it was rescued in 1988 when volunteers painstakingly reassembled more than twenty thousand fragments of shattered stone. Today, ancient cypress trees, wildflowers, and migratory birds share the grounds with Neo-Classical monuments carved with urns, angels, broken columns, and Masonic symbols — all suspended above the still blue waters of the harbor. Among the graves rests John Hookham Frere, British diplomat, poet, and friend of Lord Byron, who spent his final years on the island. Scattered throughout are the forgotten dead of British Malta: officers felled by disease rather than battle, merchants who never returned home, and families who built lives beneath foreign skies. Two Catholic burials and one Russian Orthodox burial quietly break the cemetery's Protestant boundaries — small fractures in the rigid lines of empire and faith. The cemetery carries its own folklore. Visitors report wailing voices drifting from the bastions after dark. Night tours led by the warden each summer recount stories of duels, suicides, and mysterious deaths. A child buried on Christmas Day in 1871 — the last known burial — and a shadowy figure reportedly seen near the wall decades later. And somewhere within the restored paths lies Mikiel Anton Vassalli, the father of the Maltese language, denied Catholic burial by the Church he defied, resting anonymously among strangers in the very cemetery his rediscovery helped save. Support the show Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind! https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes Find All of The Grim's Social Links At: https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia

    20 min

  7. May 5

    Live Free, Die Haunted | New Hampshire

    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 to a single grave: Abel Blood, a Christian philanthropist whose surname proved too unsettling for local imagination to ignore. For decades, visitors have reported a phantom child along the roadside, malfunctioning cameras and electronics within the gates, sudden temperature drops, and a pointing hand carved in stone that some claim shifts direction after dark. Then there is Gilson Road, less than an acre, easy to overlook, and according to paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, the most active cemetery in the state. Here, the graves of infant children draw quiet offerings from strangers, a headstone bears an unexplained hole drilled cleanly through its center, and a legend tied to a Colonial-era woman named Betsey Gilson has haunted the roadside for generations. A banished medicine man. A glowing headstone. A dark rider, some call the Watcher. At Gilson Road, no single story dominates, only an accumulation of dread that visitors carry home long after the gate is behind them. Featured Stories Pine Hill Cemetery (Blood Cemetery), Hollis, NH — The origin of the "Blood Cemetery" nickname, the legend of Abel Blood's shifting grave marker, reports of a phantom child along the roadside, and decades of paranormal encounters documented by researcher Fiona Broome. Gilson Road Cemetery, Nashua, NH — The mysterious drilled headstone of five-year-old Walter Gilson, the legend of Betsey Gilson and the ritual visitors still attempt after dark, and why investigators call this the most haunted cemetery in New Hampshire. Descending once more into the hauntings of history, on The Grim. Support the show Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind! https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes Find All of The Grim's Social Links At: https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia

    17 min

  8. Apr 28

    Light Above, Silence Below | The Old North Church Crypt, Boston, MA

    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 steeple carried the signal that set Paul Revere riding. But the building's deeper history lives underground. The crypt beneath the church holds thirty-seven tombs, coffins stacked upon coffins in chambers carved from necessity. Among the interred: Timothy Cutler, the church's founding rector who abandoned Congregationalism for Anglicanism and guided his congregation through the colonial era's most uncertain decades. Major John Pitcairn, the British Marine officer present at Lexington and Concord, reportedly brought here after falling at Bunker Hill — though whose remains truly rest in this tomb remains unresolved. And Samuel Nicholson, first captain of the USS Constitution, who helped forge a new nation's naval identity before returning, in death, to lie among those he had outlived. Then there is the brick. In the spring of 2025, an anonymous package arrived at Old North — a single crypt brick returned by a stranger whose husband had taken it, followed, the note said, by a string of bad luck. The brick now rests on a pillar in the crypt, sealed beneath glass alongside its two-sentence confession. Two weeks after it was reinstalled, the lights went out. No explanation was found. Old North's staff insist this is a sacred space, not a haunted house. The brick is lighthearted, they say. It's what you make of it. Over a thousand people rest beneath a city that has spent three centuries walking over them. Maybe the lights just flickered. Maybe the brick is just a brick. Or maybe the crypt has feelings about what belongs to it. Descending once more into the hauntings of history — on The Grim. Support the show Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind! https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes Find All of The Grim's Social Links At: https://www.the-grim.com/socialmedia

    15 min
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About

Welcome to The Grim, where host Kristin Lopes guides you through the world's most haunted cemeteries and forgotten burial grounds. Each week, we explore ghost stories, historical mysteries, and the art carved into centuries-old stones—from New England witch trials to European ossuaries, Victorian mourning customs to modern hauntings. Through vivid storytelling and deep research, we uncover the lives, legends, and restless spirits that refuse to stay buried. Perfect for lovers of: Haunted cemeteries & graveyard folkloreParanormal encounters & ghost storiesDark history, true crime & forgotten talesCemetery tourism & historical exploration Whether you're planning a graveyard visit or simply drawn to the shadows, The Grim blends atmosphere with meticulous research—bringing you stories that linger long after the episode ends. So pour yourself a warm cup of coffee, cozy up with the whispers of the past, and step beyond the veil. "Step carefully—it's time to descend into the hauntings of history." With over 267,000 listens, The Grim has become a beloved companion for cemetery enthusiasts and paranormal lovers worldwide. 🎧 New episodes weekly. Subscribe and join us where the past refuses to rest.

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