The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

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

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

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

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

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