The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

Latest Episodes:

The Black Hope Curse | Black Hope Cemetery Feb 24, 2026

Show notes

Descend into Black Hope Cemetery in Crosby, Texas, where an entire post-Civil War freedom colony was swallowed by fire, forgotten by history, and buried beneath a modern subdivision — and where the dead refused to stay silent. Host Kristin uncovers Charlie and Betty Thomas — formerly enslaved people exhumed from a family's backyard still wearing their wedding rings — the Haney family's nightmare of glowing unplugged clocks, ghostly figures hovering over the bed, and a pair of red shoes that vanished only to reappear on a grave, and the Williams family's devastating loss of their thirty-year-old daughter after digging for evidence on cursed ground. Over sixty souls rest in one of Texas's most forgotten African American burial grounds, where a corporation built a neighborhood over the dead, a jury verdict was overturned, and families were ordered to prove the cemetery ever existed — despite the bones already pulled from the earth.

Featured Historical Figures & Families: Charlie & Betty Thomas – Enslaved people freed after the Civil War, buried in Black Hope in the 1930s, Sam & Judith Haney – Discovered remains beneath their backyard, sued Purcell Corporation, and were ordered to pay court costs after the verdict was overturned, Ben & Jean Williams – Neighbors who uncovered coffin-shaped sinkholes, Tina — The Williams' daughter who died at thirty after digging for evidence, Jasper Norton – Longtime Crosby resident who identified the Thomases, and the unnamed members of the freedom colony whose settlement, church, school, and burial ground were erased from the historical record.

Perfect for: True haunting enthusiasts, Black history scholars, Civil War and Reconstruction researchers, fans of Poltergeist and its real-world parallels, and anyone drawn to the stories America paved over — and the ground that refuses to forget.

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Phantoms of the Track | African Cemetery No. 2 Feb 17, 2026

Show notes

Descend into African Cemetery No. 2 in Lexington, Kentucky, where the first Kentucky Derby winner rests in unmarked ground alongside Civil War heroes, Buffalo Soldiers, and the grooms and trainers who built America's thoroughbred empire. Host Kristin uncovers Oliver Lewis—who won the 1875 Derby at nineteen and died laying asphalt—journalist Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin, murdered for defending Black voters, and over 5,000 souls buried in one of the nation's oldest African American-owned cemeteries, where only 1,200 names are still known and the earth itself remembers what history tried to erase.
Featured Historical Figures:

Oliver Lewis – First Kentucky Derby winner (1875), USCT soldier Dennis Simpson – Buried unmarked with his family, Nathan Caulder – Buffalo Soldier who died in France, Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin – Journalist assassinated for defending voting rights, James "Soup" Perkins – Youngest Derby-winning jockey, Abraham Perry – Pioneering Black trainer, 180+ horse industry workers, 112+ Civil War veterans, and the Harlem Hellfighters.
Perfect for: Kentucky Derby enthusiasts, Civil War history buffs, African American history scholars, and anyone drawn to the stories America buried—and the ground that refuses to forget.

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Pickett's Souls | Gettysburg National Cemetery Feb 10, 2026

Show notes

Join host Kristin as The Grim descends into Gettysburg National Cemetery — where blood-soaked Pennsylvania earth became the birthplace of America's first national cemetery and a monument to the true cost of war.

Before national cemeteries existed, soldiers were buried where they fell. The Civil War changed everything. At the Battle of Gettysburg — the deadliest battle in American military history — over 50,000 casualties fell in just three days as outdated battlefield tactics collided with modern repeating rifles. On July 3, 1863, nearly 12,000 Confederate soldiers marched across open ground during Pickett's Charge, met by devastating Union fire, marking the high-water mark of the Confederacy and the turning point of the war.

In the aftermath, Elizabeth Thorn — six months pregnant and left alone with her elderly father — buried nearly 100 soldiers in the summer heat before a national cemetery even existed. Landscape architect William Saunders designed the Soldiers' National Cemetery with quiet dignity, where officers and enlisted men were buried side by side. Four months after the battle, Abraham Lincoln stood before 15,000 people and delivered the Gettysburg Address — 271 words that consecrated the ground and redefined the meaning of the war.

Today, more than 3,500 Union soldiers rest here, among them 979 unknowns. Confederate dead were largely exhumed and reburied in Southern cemeteries, though some are believed to remain in rocky, inaccessible corners of the battlefield.

But Gettysburg's dead may not all be resting. The surrounding battlefield and cemetery are considered among the most haunted locations in America. Visitors report phantom cannon fire, the scent of gunpowder in the dark, and shadowed figures moving between headstones. A spectral Union soldier is said to linger among the rocks at Devil's Den, while the ghosts of hanged soldiers reportedly haunt Sachs Covered Bridge. And Jennie Wade — the only civilian killed during the battle — is said to remain forever bound to the home where her life ended.

At Gettysburg, the past does not vanish. It waits.

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The Erasure of Death | African American Burial Grounds Feb 03, 2026

Show notes

Join host Kristin as The Grim opens the gate on one of America's most erased and overlooked histories — African American burial grounds and enslaved persons cemeteries across the United States.

Records are heartbreakingly scarce. By 1860, nearly four million people were enslaved in America, yet their burial grounds remain largely undocumented, destroyed, or entirely lost. In a system that valued labor over human life, death was treated as an inconvenience. Burials were rushed, unrecorded, and hidden in remote corners of vast plantations — marked only by seashells, fieldstones, or personal objects that eroded over time. Even in death, dignity was denied.

The end of slavery did not end the erasure. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation into cemeteries, and as towns expanded, undocumented Black burial grounds were paved over, declared abandoned, and legally cleared for redevelopment. This pattern was not confined to the South. In Lower Manhattan, the New York African Burial Ground — holding an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 enslaved and free African Americans — was uncovered by accident during federal construction in 1991, its dead disturbed by bulldozers before community outrage forced the project to a halt. At Arlington National Cemetery, Black refugees and United States Colored Troops soldiers were among the earliest buried, with many choosing freedom names — Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson — carved into headstones as declarations of identity long denied in life.

In the years following the Civil War, African American benevolent societies built their own burial grounds — quiet acts of resistance funded not by the state, but by the community itself. From African Cemetery No. 2 in Lexington, Kentucky to Mount Pleasant Plains Cemetery in Washington D.C., these sacred spaces preserved names, identities, and legacies that official records refused to keep. Yet many remain neglected, underfunded, and under threat from gentrification and urban development to this day.

The African-American Burial Grounds Preservation Act, despite its promise, carries no dedicated funding — leaving families to fight yet again for the right to protect their dead. Meanwhile, grassroots efforts like the Anson Street African Burial Ground project in Charleston offer a different model — one built on descendant collaboration, Gullah Geechee spiritual traditions, and a naming ceremony that returned humanity to ancestors stolen by silence.

These grounds are still here. Beneath parking lots, behind churches, under cities that move too fast to notice who was left behind. The dead are not lost. They were buried — and then buried again by silence.

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Blood on the Irons | St. Philip's Graveyard & Cemetery Jan 27, 2026

Show notes

Descend into the moss-draped grounds of St. Philip's in Charleston, South Carolina, where the nation's oldest Anglican congregation has buried its dead since 1681. Host Kristin explores a city built atop graves, uncovering the Revolutionary War heroes, Vice Presidents, and enslaved protectors whose legacies—and spirits—refuse to stay buried.

Featured Historical Figures:

John C. Calhoun – The Vice President who resigned his office to defend an ideology so divisive, his grave was hidden during the Civil War for fear of what Union soldiers might do to his remains.

Edward Rutledge – The youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence, captured during war, elevated to governor—yet whose legacy reveals the contradictions at the heart of America's founding.

Rawlins Lowndes – A revolutionary leader who fought tyranny abroad while perpetuating it at home, then opposed the Constitution itself to protect what he believed South Carolina could not survive without.

DuBose Heyward – Descendant of a Declaration signer whose novel became one of America's most celebrated—and controversial—operas, a work of beauty inseparable from the questions it raises.

Also Featured:

Constitutional framers, Supreme Court Justices, Revolutionary War generals, and the West Cemetery—ground once reserved for strangers and outsiders, now holding some of the nation's most powerful architects of early America.

The Hauntings:

One of America's most famous ghost photographs, captured here in 1987. A grieving mother who died six days after losing her child. An enslaved man who saved the church from fire and earned his freedom, now said to watch over the grounds. And a young girl whose nighttime dare ended in tragedy, her cane still trapped where she fell.

Perfect for: Colonial and Revolutionary War history enthusiasts, Southern Gothic lovers, Charleston ghost hunters, cemetery tourists, and anyone fascinated by the uncomfortable spaces where founding ideals and human contradiction collide—and where the dead refuse to let the past stay quiet.

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A Garden Built on Bones | St. James Cemetery, Liverpool Jan 20, 2026

Show notes

What happens when a cemetery built to honor the dead becomes their greatest indignity? St. James Cemetery in Liverpool was designed as a modern answer to Victorian burial chaos—but instead recreated every horror it promised to solve. Now 57,000 souls lie beneath what's officially called a public park, their gravestones cleared away, their names reduced to lists on communal stones.

Host Kristin descends into this haunted quarry-turned-cemetery to uncover the stories of those buried within: Sarah Biffin, the armless artist who painted for royalty with her teeth; Arthur Richardson, a forgotten Victoria Cross hero who saved a man's life under gunfire; William Huskisson, the politician killed by the world's first railway; and Lucy Walker, who became the first woman to summit the Matterhorn in a white dress.

But the dead of St. James may not rest quietly. From Huskisson's limping ghost to the mysterious Christmas Vampire, paranormal reports have haunted these grounds for decades. When a cemetery strips away the names of the poor while preserving monuments for the wealthy, do the forgotten ever truly find peace?

A story of progress, exploitation, erasure, and the souls left behind.

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The Rebel Royal | Kensal Green Cemetery, London Jan 13, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Kensal Green Cemetery in London, England—the first of the city's Magnificent Seven, where innovation, artistry, and royal rebellion lie beneath seventy-two acres of leaning stones. Built in 1833 to relieve London's overcrowded graveyards, Kensal Green now faces its own crisis: caught between preservation and a city desperate for space.

Over 250,000 souls rest here, including nearly a thousand recorded in the Dictionary of National Biography. Among them: Charles Babbage, whose unfinished calculating engines predicted the computer age; Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose bridges and railways transformed Britain; writers William Makepeace Thackeray and Wilkie Collins, who dissected Victorian hypocrisy with unflinching precision; and royal rebels Prince Augustus Frederick and Princess Sophia, siblings who defied and endured the monarchy in equal measure.

From overgrown corners to Gothic mausoleums, Kensal Green wears its age openly. Stones lean. Time presses heavily. Stories like The Living Dead Girl refuse to stay buried, and visitors sometimes sense something lingering in the shadows—reminding them this place holds more than bodies. It holds unfinished brilliance, scandalous secrets, and the question: do Victorian cemeteries still have a place in our modern world?

Featured Stories:

The Titanic Tragedy – April 15, 1912: RMS Titanic sank claiming approximately 1,514 lives. Of 2,224 passengers and crew, only 710 survived. The ship carried 16 standard lifeboats and 4 collapsible ones—legally compliant by 1912 standards yet insufficient to save everyone aboard.

The Recovery Operation – Halifax ships carried embalming fluid and undertakers, not rescue equipment. When the CS Mackay-Bennett ran out of supplies, Captain Frederick Larnder prioritized first-class passengers for preservation while many third-class passengers and crew were buried at sea. Of 338 bodies recovered, 150 came to Halifax—121 buried at Fairview in individual graves rather than mass burial.

The Unknown Child – Mackay-Bennett sailors pooled money for his headstone when no family claimed him. DNA testing eventually revealed Sidney Leslie Goodwin, a 19-month-old British child whose entire family perished. His preserved shoes at the Maritime Museum helped confirm his identity nearly a century later.

Joseph Dawson (J. Dawson) – An Irish coal trimmer mistaken for James Cameron's fictional Jack Dawson. After the 1997 film, visitors flooded Fairview leaving trinkets at his grave where fiction and history blur.

William Denton Cox – A steward who guided third-class passengers toward lifeboats. His grave remained unidentified until 1991—79 years after his death—when the Titanic International Society helped restore his name.

John Henry Barnstead – Halifax's Registrar created an unprecedented identification system: numbered sealed bags, catalogued belongings, photographs when no ID existed. His son Arthur Stanley Barnstead later applied these methods during the Halifax Explosion.

The Halifax Explosion – December 6, 1917: SS Mont-Blanc, laden with explosives, collided with SS Imo and detonated at 9:04 a.m., killing at least 1,782 people. Railway dispatcher Patrick Vincent Coleman stayed at his telegraph warning an incoming train, saving hundreds but losing his life.

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2025 | A Grim Review Dec 30, 2025

Show notes

Nearly 47% of podcasts never reach episode three. Only 8.5% make it to 50. The Grim just published episode 73 — and this week, host Kristin closes the gates on a year of graveyards, uncomfortable histories, and stories that asked to be told.

This isn't a typical episode. No single cemetery. No one ghost. Just an honest look back at the places that fascinated her most, the stories that lingered long after research ended, and the listeners who made survival possible in a landscape littered with abandoned feeds and forgotten voices.

The year opened at Little Bighorn — a place that sits heavier now, asking visitors to think not just about what happened there, but about who was allowed to tell the story. It moved through Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, a Victorian masterpiece that felt familiar and foreign and deeply haunted. Into Peru, where Presbítero Matías Maestro Cemetery embraces its haunted side with night tours that honor both the dead and the curious. Through Paris, where Montmartre hides a mass grave from the French Revolution that most textbooks never mention. Into the bone chapels of Portugal and Italy, where the why behind the beauty makes the history come alive.

Two episodes explored asylum cemeteries — places where patients were buried without names, some not mentally ill at all, just inconvenient enough to disappear. One episode wrestled with Friedhof Ohlsdorf in Germany, where Nazi-era figures rest alongside war victims, and where the question of who deserves to be remembered refused an easy answer. Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin brought one of the year's favorite stories — a historian who spent his life educating visitors and planned, knowing he would one day rest on those same grounds, accordingly. And Bennington Centre Cemetery in Vermont delivered one of the year's best names: the Redcoat Skeleton, a British soldier whose bones spent years in an attic before finally returning to the earth.

True crime touched the grounds twice. The asylum episodes asked whose stories get erased. St. Paul's Cathedral crypt offered a latte beside Britain's legends. And the Tophet of Carthage raised questions about the past that even now, we don't fully understand.

A year of graveyards that didn't stay quiet. A year of stories that deserved to be told. And a little niche podcast that, somehow, kept going.

Here's to 2026.

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A Gothic Yuletide | St. Patrick's Cathedral Crypt Dec 23, 2025

Show notes

Every December, millions pass through St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue — drawn by Gothic spires, Christmas lights, and the echo of Midnight Mass through marble vaults. Almost none of them know what lies directly beneath their feet.

In this episode of The Grim, host Kristin descends into the crypts below St. Patrick's high altar, where more than twenty archbishops and cardinals rest in brick-lined tombs. Men who presided over Christmas Masses while influenza swept through tenements, while telegrams arrived with news of sons lost overseas, while a city swollen with immigrants tested the limits of faith and power.

The cathedral itself was born in defiance. Archbishop John Joseph Hughes — "Dagger John" — drove its construction through financial ruin, a stonecutters' strike, Civil War interruption, and open anti-Catholic hostility. He died in January 1864 with the walls still unfinished, buried beneath a promise made in faith rather than stone. It fell to John McCloskey — a boy who once rowed across the frozen East River just to attend Mass — to see it through. He became the first American cardinal, quietly transforming decades of struggle into completion.

The crypt holds the full weight of that legacy. Francis Spellman, the GI's Cardinal, was confidant to presidents and one of the most powerful Catholic figures in twentieth-century America — faith and political authority so entwined they were nearly indistinguishable. Terence Cooke, his opposite in temperament, governed with compassion and humility, his cause for sainthood now formally open. John O'Connor confronted clergy abuse publicly before the full crisis broke. Edward Egan's tenure was defined by the reckoning that followed.

And then there is Fulton Sheen — the golden-voiced broadcaster whose Christmas programs reached millions of living rooms and won Emmy Awards, yet who clashed so bitterly with Cardinal Spellman that he was removed from television and reassigned. Originally interred here, his remains were later transferred to Peoria after a years-long legal dispute. A man who spoke to a nation during silent nights, and knew the solitude of conscience.

But the most extraordinary presence in the crypt holds no title at all.

Pierre Toussaint is the only layperson ever buried beneath St. Patrick's high altar. Born into slavery in Haiti in 1766, he arrived in New York as an enslaved man and became the city's most sought-after hairdresser. He sheltered orphans, fed yellow fever victims when others fled, and purchased his sister's freedom with his earnings. He helped fund Catholic institutions that would not admit children of his own race — and gave anyway, because the need was real. When he died in 1853, the poor and the powerful stood together at his funeral. More than a century later, his body was reinterred beneath the altar — the only layperson ever granted that honor. In 1997 he was declared Venerable, one step from sainthood.

In a crypt filled with men who wielded authority, Pierre Toussaint represents something rarer: holiness without office, faith without recognition, charity practiced inside an unjust world without pretending it was fair.

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