The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

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

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

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

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