The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

The Grim is opening the gate to the Museo Panteón de San Fernando in Mexico City for a special Día de Muertos episode. Once the most exclusive cemetery in Mexico, this nineteenth-century burial ground holds presidents, generals who fought one another to the death, and the forgotten dead of the city's cholera epidemics, all within the same walls. Its gates closed to burials in 1871, then opened one final time for Benito Juárez, the very man who had ordered them shut. From the traditions of the Day of the Dead to the ghost stories its keepers still tell, this is the history of one of Mexico City's oldest cemeteries and the people who rest there.

Along the way: the origins of Día de Muertos, the ofrenda, cempasúchil marigolds, and the nights the dead return home, including October 27 for beloved pets; how José Guadalupe Posada's Calavera Garbancera became Diego Rivera's La Catrina; the James Bond film that conjured Mexico City's Day of the Dead parade into being; why colonial Mexico buried its dead inside its churches; the 1833 cholera epidemic that threw San Fernando's gates open; Benito Juárez's death at the National Palace and his marble tomb, where the Patria cradles his body; conservative general Miguel Miramón's empty tomb and the heart his widow carried away in a jar; General Tomás Mejía and his widow Agustina Castro, who gave nearly everything she had to bury him; journalist Francisco Zarco, whose coffin held only stones; José María Lafragua and Dolores Escalante, the bride who died before reaching the altar; Isadora Duncan's mysterious name on a niche; seventeen burials discovered beneath the sidewalk in 2021; and the legends of a statue that moves, a lady in white, a woman in black, and the lamenting Don Juan.

A Día de Muertos journey through famous graves, forgotten souls, and the marigolds that light their way home, from The Grim.
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The Grim is opening the gate to Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, Maine, during the week of Halloween. Founded in 1834, it is one of America’s oldest garden cemeteries, and it sits in the city that shaped Stephen King’s darkest fiction. On October 12, 1937, Public Enemy Al Brady and his gang walked into downtown Bangor and into an ambush by the FBI. When the gunfire on Central Street stopped, Brady lay dead in the road, and he was buried at Mount Hope in a grave no one marked for seventy years. This episode follows Mount Hope from its rural garden beginnings to the gangster’s grave, and from there into the fiction of the man who turned Bangor into Derry.
Along the way: the garden cemetery movement that shaped Mount Hope’s hills and ponds; Civil War soldiers beneath one of the oldest Civil War monuments in the nation; the lumber barons who built Bangor; the Brady Gang’s trail of robbery and murder across the Midwest; the ambush at Dakin’s Sporting Goods; the unmarked grave and the headstone that finally came in 2007; the shootout’s echo in Stephen King’s It; the filming of Pet Sematary among Mount Hope’s graves, with King himself playing the minister; and the hauntings and legends whispered about the cemetery after dark.
A gothic Halloween journey through Mount Hope’s graves, its gangster’s unmarked rest, and the cemetery that helped haunt Stephen King’s Maine, from The Grim.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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