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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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