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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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.

Featured Stories

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.

Featured Stories

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.

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Where the dead are remembered and the earth still burns. Beneath the quiet rows of Odd Fellows Cemetery in Centralia, Pennsylvania, a fire has been burning since 1962 — and it shows no sign of stopping. In this episode of The Grim, we open the gate on one of America's most unsettling burial grounds: an active cemetery inside a ghost town, maintained by a church miles away, visited by families who no longer have a home to return to.

Centralia was once a thriving coal-mining community in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. Today, fewer than five residents remain — the rest displaced by a government-mandated evacuation driven by an underground mine fire that has burned for over sixty years, reaching temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The town's eerie fate inspired the 2006 horror film Silent Hill, and its abandoned streets and smoke-venting earth continue to draw visitors from across the country.

Yet through it all, the cemeteries remain. Tended. Loved. Active.

Featured Stories:

• The Independent Order of Odd Fellows — Founded in Baltimore in 1819 by Thomas Wildey, the Odd Fellows carried a quietly progressive legacy in a rigidly classed era, becoming the first national fraternal order to formally admit both men and women in 1851. Their lodges spread across Pennsylvania's coal region, and their promise — that no member would ever be abandoned — echoes still in Centralia.
• Odd Fellows Cemetery — First burial recorded in 1858 (Sarah Buchanan), with the most recent in 2013. The grounds feel irregular, almost unplanned, as if order was never the intention. Now maintained by the First United Methodist Church in Mount Carmel, PA.
• The Centralia Mine Fire — Burning since at least May 27, 1962, its true origin remains disputed: a trash burn gone wrong near Odd Fellows Cemetery, old ash reigniting a coal seam, or perhaps a forgotten 1932 fire that never fully died. Once it reached the underground coal veins, nothing could stop it.
• Todd Domboski — On Valentine's Day, 1981, twelve-year-old Todd fell into a steaming, smoke-filled sinkhole caused by mine-fire subsidence. He survived only by grasping an exposed tree root until his cousin pulled him free — the moment that made Centralia's danger impossible to ignore.
• The Curse of Centralia — Local legend ties the fire to the Molly Maguires, a 19th-century Irish secret society active in Pennsylvania's coal region. After twenty suspected members were convicted and hanged in the 1870s, a priest allegedly cursed the town: that it would one day burn — except for the church itself. One church still stands in Centralia today.

If you’re drawn to haunted history, Pennsylvania coal region lore, environmental disasters, or the ethics of leaving and staying, this story sticks. Subscribe for more, share this with a friend who loves eerie true history, and leave a review with your take: would you visit Centralia or avoid it?

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In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Down Cathedral Graveyard in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland — a hilltop burial ground sacred since the Bronze Age, where centuries of pilgrimage, legend, and quiet reverence converge on a single unadorned stone.

One of the oldest continuously sacred sites in Ireland, Down Cathedral Graveyard sits atop a hill that has drawn the faithful for thousands of years — long before any cathedral stood along its crest. Today it is best known as the reputed resting place of Saint Patrick, the Romano-British missionary who was enslaved in Ireland, escaped, and returned to transform the island's spiritual identity forever. According to centuries of tradition, he does not rest here alone: the same granite stone is said to mark the shared grave of all three patron saints of Ireland — Patrick, Brigid, and Columba.

Unlike most cemeteries featured on The Grim, this one carries almost no ghost stories. No famous apparitions, no shadowy figures between the headstones, no centuries-old accounts of restless dead. Pilgrims still climb this hill every Saint Patrick's Day — not in search of hauntings, but something harder to define. What draws thousands of people to stand before a stone placed here in 1900, marking a grave that history cannot confirm? Kristin walks these grounds to find out.

Saint Patrick: Born in Roman Britain and enslaved in Ireland at sixteen, Patrick spent six years as a shepherd before escaping and returning as a bishop — transforming a land of druidic tradition into the most fervently Christian island in Europe. After his death in the late fifth century, rival kingdoms erupted into open conflict over possession of his remains, a clash so significant it was recorded in Irish annals as the Battle for the Body of Patrick. Tradition holds his body was brought to this hill in Downpatrick, where a granite marker — placed in 1900 — draws pilgrims to this day.

Saint Brigid of Kildare: Born around 451 to a chieftain and an enslaved Christian woman, Brigid founded the Abbey of Kildare around 480 — a double monastery for men and women, governed jointly, that became one of Ireland's most important centers of learning and faith. She tended an eternal flame that burned at Kildare for centuries, extinguished during the Reformation and relit in 1993. Historians have long noted the striking parallels between this Christian saint and the Celtic goddess of the same name — both associated with fire, fertility, and the forge — leading some to believe Brigid represents not a break from Ireland's pagan past, but its transformation.

Saint Columba (Colmcille): Born in 521 into one of Ireland's most powerful Gaelic dynasties, Columba abandoned a path of political power for the monastery — founding communities at Derry, Durrow, and Kells. When a secret copy he made of a mentor's psalter sparked a legal dispute that spiraled into the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne in 561 — killing thousands — Columba left Ireland, vowing never to look upon her shores again. He sailed to the remote island of Iona off the coast of Scotland, where he founded a monastery that became one of the most significant spiritual centers of the early medieval world. Along the way, he had a documented encounter with a violent creature in the River Ness that would take on a very different reputation in the centuries to come.

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In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Plainfield Cemetery in Plainfield, Wisconsin—a modest Midwestern burial ground rooted in pioneer history, where the quiet rows of headstones conceal one of the most disturbing legacies in American true crime.

Home to the earliest settlers of rural Wisconsin, the cemetery is perhaps best known today as the final resting place of Ed Gein—a body snatcher who robbed the very graves he now lies among, buried unmarked between his mother and brother in the family plot.

Visitors and true crime enthusiasts continue to make pilgrimages to the site, drawn by morbid curiosity and renewed interest following Netflix's dramatized portrayal of Gein's life. Locals, however, have long struggled with the unwanted notoriety—vandalism, desecration, and a steady stream of strangers searching for a killer's grave in a cemetery that was never meant to be famous.

Featured Stories:

Ed Gein: Confessed to robbing nine graves and making up to forty nocturnal cemetery visits between 1947 and 1952. The 1957 discovery at his farmhouse revealed murders, grave robbing, and the construction of grotesque objects from human remains—a crime scene that shocked the nation and defined a genre.

Bernice Worden: The 58-year-old hardware store owner whose disappearance on November 16, 1957 led investigators to Gein's farm and unraveled the full horror of his crimes.

Augusta Gein: Ed's domineering, deeply religious mother—the defining psychological force behind his life, preserved in shrine-like rooms after her 1945 death.

The Plainfield Pioneers: The earliest settlers buried here since 1837, their quiet legacy now forever overshadowed by the man interred among them.

Descending once more into the hauntings of history—on The Grim.

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In this episode of The Grim, Kristin opens the gates to Old Church Cemetery in Cobh, Ireland—a hillside burial ground stretching back to Ireland's Celtic past, where maritime catastrophe, extraordinary lives, and restless spirits converge above one of the world's great natural harbours.

Home to victims of the RMS Lusitania, a celebrated Irish boxer, a surgeon who stood beside Napoleon's deathbed, and an Antarctic explorer who carried the cold home in his hands—Old Church is one of Ireland's most cosmopolitan and quietly haunted cemeteries.

Visitors report auditory hauntings near the Lusitania mass graves: murmuring voices, footsteps on empty gravel paths, and the sensation of a funeral procession that never ends. The "White Witch of Cobh" claimed to witness the dead still arriving long after the rescue boats fell silent.

Featured Stories: The Lusitania – May 7, 1915: 1,199 of 1,960 people perished when a German torpedo sank the ship in eighteen minutes off the Irish coast. Between 169 and 200 victims are buried at Old Church—many unidentified, many in mass graves.

Jack Doyle – The Gorgeous Gael: Cobh's own boxing prodigy won 28 bouts before drink, Hollywood, and violence unravelled everything. A piper led him home. His grave is still visited.

James Roche Verling: The army surgeon assigned to watch Napoleon in exile on Saint Helena—and sign his death certificate.

Robert Forde: Scott's Antarctic sledge-master, sent home with frostbite before the fatal polar push. A mountain in Victoria Land still bears his name.

Descending once more into the hauntings of history—on The Grim.

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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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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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