The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

Kristin Lopes
  • 3.6 (88)
  • 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. 2d ago

    The Upiory & Strzygi Burying Ground | Poland’s “Vampire” Grave at Pień Cemetery

    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 science that gave Zosia back her face. Along the way: Professor Dariusz Poliński’s excavations, which began in 2005; 101 unmarked graves of Lutherans and possibly Mennonites; the upiory and strzygi of Slavic folklore; a grave reopened while Zosia’s body still held soft tissue; a copper stain in her mouth; the DNA, isotope and radiocarbon findings published in 2026; Oscar Nilsson’s 3D facial reconstruction; a padlocked child buried face down; Vladimir, pinned with stones; a woman with tertiary syphilis; and the war, famine, disease and Little Ice Age cold that made neighbors fear the dead. A gothic deep dive into Poland’s upiory and strzygi, its outcast burials, and the girl her village feared would rise, from 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

  2. Oct 13

    Dead Men Do Tell Tales | Goat Island, Newport, Rhode Island

    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, and the shoreline where they still lie, unmarked and unclaimed. Along the way: Charles Harris, a merchant first mate forced into piracy who was captaining his own sloop within a year; the notoriously cruel Edward Low, who slipped away into the dark near Block Island; the battle with HMS Greyhound off Long Island; nineteen-year-old Marblehead fisherman Joseph Libbey and the forced-man plea that failed to save him; Cotton Mather’s sermon on the dead as “terrible Preachers”; and the ghost lights and phantom ship said to haunt Goat Island and Gravelly Point. A gothic deep dive into Rhode Island history, colonial piracy, and the haunted pirate graves beneath Newport Harbor, from 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

  3. Oct 6

    The Empty Tomb | Crown Hill Cemetery, Indiana

    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 founders of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the children of Hearts Remembered. Along the way: a fire-scorched tomb bearing the name of Lincoln's Secretary of the Interior, whose body has never been found; the Ghostly Hitchhiker of 38th Street; a Gypsy King's nightly bottle of wine that always disappeared; phantom soldiers and a woman wandering the graves with a baby; and the grave of John Dillinger, said to be sealed beneath concrete and scrap iron, which the cemetery has refused to let anyone open. A gothic deep dive into Indiana history, haunted cemetery lore, and the mystery beneath Dillinger's grave, from 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

  4. Sep 29

    The Bloodless Royals | Hohenzollern Crypt

    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 a ledger, three electors who vanished during a 1747 coffin transfer and were never found, an unmarked coffin that may hold the lost remains of a queen, and the centuries-old legend of the White Lady, a ghostly omen said to appear before a Hohenzollern death. A gothic deep dive into German royal history, Prussian dynasty secrets, and true ghost legend, from 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

  5. Jun 23

    Paris in Mourning: The Ghosts of Père Lachaise, Part 2

    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 grave of Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest actress who ever lived, who spent decades sleeping in a coffin and returned to the stage on a prosthetic leg after amputation at seventy-one. We follow Frédéric Chopin to a tomb that holds his body but not his heart, which was smuggled back to Warsaw concealed beneath his sister's clothing. We stand beside Marcel Proust's stark black marble grave, where visitors report sudden floods of their own forgotten memories. We trace the rise and ruin of Georges Méliès, the magician who invented cinema's capacity for wonder and ended up selling candy in a train station, unrecognized in the city where he had once been famous. We visit the shared stone of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and sit with the unresolved questions of how two elderly Jewish women survived Nazi occupation in the French countryside. And we close with the restless dead: a statesman's ghost that tugs at sleeves, a tomb whose stone runs warm in cold weather, and a Russian noblewoman's inheritance that no one has ever been able to claim. 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

  6. Jun 16

    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

  7. 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

  8. 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

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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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