2025 | A Grim Review

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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