The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

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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Hidden behind a plain residential gate in Paris, unmarked on most maps and open only a few hours a day, Picpus Cemetery holds a silence unlike any other. Beneath its unassuming garden lie more than 1,300 victims of the Reign of Terror — and above them, nearly two centuries of unbroken prayer.
Featured Stories:
The Mass Graves of the Reign of Terror
For six terrifying weeks in the summer of 1794, the guillotine stood at the edge of Paris — and the bodies were quietly carted to a convent garden just five minutes away. Over 1,300 men and women were buried here without ceremony: nobles beside laborers, nuns beside soldiers, strangers in life bound together in death.
The Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne
Sixteen Carmelite nuns, ranging in age from twenty-nine to seventy-eight, are counted among the dead. It is said they sang hymns as they were led to the scaffold — an act of quiet defiance that would later be immortalized in Francis Poulenc's opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites.
The Search for the Lost Dead
After the Terror ended, surviving families returned to a city that had buried its dead quickly — and quietly. It was not a noble who guided them to the burial site. It was a young commoner who had followed the cart carrying her father and brother, and remembered where it went. Because of her, Picpus was found again.
The Marquis de Lafayette
Born into French nobility and orphaned by fifteen, Lafayette sailed to America at nineteen to fight in a revolution that was not his own — funding troops from his personal fortune, enduring Valley Forge, and helping deliver the decisive victory at Yorktown. He returned to France to champion liberty, survived imprisonment during the Terror, and was laid to rest at Picpus beside his wife — with soil from Bunker Hill buried with him. An American flag still flies over his grave today, renewed each Fourth of July.
Picpus During the Nazi Occupation
Through the German occupation of Paris, an American flag continued to fly over Lafayette's tomb — and remarkably, the cemetery was never entered by German forces. Nearby, staff at the Rothschild Hospital risked everything to save Jewish patients: falsifying records, creating false death certificates, and quietly sheltering those in danger within the convent grounds of Picpus itself.
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In this episode of The Grim — a podcast exploring cemetery history, dark history, and the stories the dead leave behind — we open the gates of Manzanar Cemetery, part of the Manzanar National Historic Site near Independence, California. Set against the stark backdrop of the Sierra Nevada, this windswept burial ground stands on the grounds of one of America's most sobering WWII Japanese American internment camps, where more than 10,000 people were forcibly incarcerated during World War II.
For decades before the war, anti-Asian legislation had been quietly narrowing the world of Japanese Americans — stripping land rights, denying citizenship, and building a climate of suspicion that needed only a single spark. Pearl Harbor provided it. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, setting into motion the forced removal of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, nearly 70,000 of them U.S. citizens, from their homes on the West Coast into internment camps surrounded by barbed wire and guarded towers — with no charges, no trials, and no crimes beyond ancestry.
Hidden within Manzanar's boundaries was a place most history books overlook — the Children's Village, a wartime orphanage where even children with living parents were sometimes separated from their families by policy. Some arrived not fully understanding where they were going. Others, like seven-year-old Francis Honda, would later describe it simply: it was lonely, it was sad, it felt like the end of the world. And yet, older residents like John Sohei Hohri gathered the children at night to tell stories — keeping imagination alive behind the wire.
The cemetery itself was never part of the original plan. It emerged out of necessity, carved from what had once been a peach orchard just beyond the barbed wire fence, shaped by death in a place that had not prepared for it. Today only six graves remain — but at the center stands the Soul Consoling Tower, a white obelisk built in 1943 by the incarcerees themselves, funded through fifteen-cent contributions from each family. On its face: Soul Consoling Tower. On its reverse: Erected by the Manzanar Japanese, August 1943.
In 1988, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 brought a formal government apology and reparations of $20,000 to surviving incarcerees. It was an acknowledgment — but for many descendants and survivors of Japanese American incarceration, Manzanar National Historic Site endures not only as a place of grief but as a space of continuing reflection on what justice truly means and what remains unresolved.
Descending once more into the hauntings of history — on The Grim.
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