The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

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.
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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.
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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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Step through the iron gates of Staglieno Cemetery, one of Europe's largest and most extraordinary burial grounds, nestled on a hillside above the Ligurian port city of Genoa, Italy. Stretching across more than a square kilometer, Staglieno is no ordinary resting place — it is an open-air museum of marble, grief, and artistry, where some of Italy's most gifted sculptors transformed mourning into breathtaking stone.
In this episode of The Grim, we trace Staglieno's origins from Napoleon's 1804 Edict of Saint-Cloud through architect Giovanni Battista Resasco's grand vision, brought to life when the cemetery first opened its gates in January 1851. We explore the towering statue of Faith, the domed Pantheon modeled on Rome's, and the sweeping galleries that house both neoclassical masterpieces and Art Nouveau monuments.
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The Sculptors of Staglieno — Meet the masters who gave grief a form: Leonardo Bistolfi, Giulio Monteverde, Augusto Rivalta, and others whose weeping angels and contemplative prophets have earned the cemetery's figures the haunting nickname the talking statues.
Joy Division's Closer — Discover how photographer Bernard Pierre Wolff's 1978 visit to Staglieno carried its melancholy far beyond Genoa's walls, and how the Appiani family tomb became one of rock music's most iconic images.
The Revolutionaries — Walk among the tombs of Nino Bixio, who helped forge modern Italy at Garibaldi's side, and Giuseppe Mazzini, the exiled nationalist who dreamed of a republic and drew 100,000 mourners to Genoa's streets in death — the city that had once condemned him.
Constance Lloyd, Fabrizio De André, and Fernanda Pivano — A quiet corner of the grounds holds the wife of Oscar Wilde, the beloved Genoese singer-songwriter who gave voice to the forgotten, and the translator who brought Hemingway, Ginsberg, and Kerouac to Italian readers.
The British Cemetery — On the hillside's outskirts, 352 Commonwealth servicemen from both World Wars rest in orderly rows — a reminder that Genoa was, and always has been, a crossroads of the world.
Edoardo Sanguineti's Last Word — The poet, provocateur, and founder of Gruppo 63 who dismantled language and rebuilt it — and who once said of poetry: it is not dead, but it lives a secret life.
Descending once more into the hauntings of history — on The Grim.
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Grim Mourning and Welcome to The Grim. This week, Kristin opens the gate on one of the most haunted and heartbreaking places in the world — Japan's Aokigahara Forest. Known as the Sea of Trees, this dense wilderness sprawls across 13.5 square miles at the base of Mount Fuji, less than 100 miles from Tokyo. Ancient volcanic eruptions carved the land beneath it, leaving roots tangled across a maze of hardened lava and iron-rich stone that silences compasses, weakens cell signals, and swallows sound whole.
Aokigahara is a place of extraordinary beauty — and extraordinary grief.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. In the US, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7 at 988lifeline.org. If you're outside the US, please reach out to a local crisis line or a trusted person in your life. You don't have to carry this alone.
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The Forest That Absorbs Sound — Inside Aokigahara, the wind disappears. Wildlife falls silent. Sunlight breaks into fragments through a canopy so thick it dims the world below. Visitors describe a stillness unlike anything else — a quiet that feels less like peace and more like the forest itself is listening.
A History Rooted in Loss — The forest's association with death stretches back centuries. Linked in folklore to the ancient practice of ubasute and the restless yūrei of Japanese legend, Aokigahara became cemented as a place of final decisions through Seichō Matsumoto's 1960 novel Kuroi Jukai and later, Wataru Tsurumi's 1993 work. By 2003, authorities stopped releasing annual death figures to discourage further tragedies.
The Weight of Silence — We explore the cultural and social forces that have drawn people to this forest — from Japan's historically complex relationship with suicide to the economic pressures that drive many there at the close of the fiscal year. Researchers, psychiatrists, and survivors speak to the isolation, the financial collapse, and the strange pull of wanting to disappear without being found.
The Yūrei Among the Trees — In Japanese folklore, spirits of the dead who pass without resolution do not leave. Dressed in white burial kimonos, with long black hair and hands that hang limp, they linger in places like Aokigahara — anchored by grief and unfinished lives. The Hour of the Ox, between 1:00 and 3:00 AM, is said to thin the veil between worlds.
What the Forest Is Teaching Us — From thermal-imaging drones to volunteer patrols and crisis signage, Japan continues to fight for lives at the edge of this forest. We sit with what it means to speak honestly about a place like this — not to mythologize it, but to understand the very human weight it carries.
Descending once more into the hauntings of history — on The Grim.
If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. In the US, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7 at 988lifeline.org. If you're outside the US, please reach out to a local crisis line or a trusted person in your life. You don't have to carry this alone.
Support the show
Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind!
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