The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

The Grim is opening the gate on Silver Terrace Cemeteries in Virginia City, Nevada, a sprawling collection of eleven distinct burial grounds established on a windswept hillside in 1867. Built at the height of the Comstock Lode silver boom, Silver Terrace was no frontier afterthought. It was a Victorian garden cemetery carved into the Nevada desert, complete with imported trees, marble headstones, and elaborate ironwork dividing the grounds by fraternal order, civic organization, and religious affiliation. Today the desert has reclaimed much of what was built. Four thousand people are buried here. Thirteen hundred markers remain. 
Host Kristin traces the history of Virginia City itself, from the 1859 discovery of the Comstock Lode through the population explosion that transformed a bare Nevada mountainside into a city of twenty-five thousand souls. She examines how the social hierarchies of the living followed residents into death, and explores one of the cemetery's most striking omissions — a story of exclusion that reflects the harder truths of what the Comstock was built on. 
Featured Stories 
The episode moves through the cemetery's distinct sections, uncovering the stories of those who built Virginia City and paid for it with their lives. Among the miners, two men who crossed an ocean together and died in the same mine six months apart. Among the civilian dead, a family plot that holds parents and infant sons, separated in life by twenty years of grief and reunited in Silver Terrace by a collision in San Francisco Bay. A woman buried in the Oddfellows section whose story is recorded only in the coldest terms a cemetery record allows. 
The firemen's section carries its own weight, including a grave restored a century after burial when a distant city answered the call to take care of one of its own, and the story of a woman the firemen fought to bury in their ground and were refused. Her grave has since been lost. 
Among the veterans, soldiers who carried their wars west and lived out their days among sagebrush and silver dust. And a Virginia City native, barely nineteen years old, remembered by the local paper as one of the most beloved young men in the city. 
The episode closes with a woman who spent nine years trying to reach the dead from the other side of the veil. She is buried at Silver Terrace now. Perhaps she found what she was looking for. 
Silver Terrace Cemeteries are open year round from sunrise to sunset, free of charge. The Comstock Cemetery Foundation manages the grounds and offers a self-guided audio tour with twenty-nine stops. Each fall, Funtime Theater performs Voices of the Past, a living history walking tour through the cemetery. Cemetery Gin, the official spirit of Virginia City, donates one dollar from every bottle sold to preservation efforts at Silver Terrace. 
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The Grim is opening the gate and entering Norton Cemetery, tucked off the Ghost House Trail inside Big Ridge State Park in Union County, Tennessee. Small, mossy, and slowly sinking back into the earth, the cemetery rests quietly in the trees while the forest works to reclaim it. The park itself was born from displacement, rising out of the 1930s Norris Project and the communities it erased. Traces of those earlier lives still surface along the trail, including the reconstructed Norton Gristmill, which carries a dark legend no record has ever confirmed.
The cemetery is overwhelmingly a family burial ground, spanning generations of the same name in these hills. Among the stones are graves marked only by a single word or a single name. Ibby. Son. No dates, no explanation, nothing but the inscription and the silence around it. One of the most often-told spirits here has no stone at all.
The men buried in this clearing lived through the Civil War fighting for the Union while surrounded by a Confederate state, and two of them may have ridden in the same regiment without the trail plaques ever mentioning it. Whether the wandering figure people report seeing at dusk is a grieving father, a returning soldier, or simply a trick of the light, Norton Cemetery has never stopped collecting stories. Some places hold onto their dead long after the markers are gone.
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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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