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Live Free, Die Haunted | New Hampshire · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Pine Hill Cemetery and Gilson Road Cemetery, located in New Hampshire.
0:26
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:29
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:31
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:32
Kristin: It's kind of descend into the hauntings of history.
0:36
Kristin: As much as I love the vast cemetery steeped in endless history, it's always the smaller burial grounds that stay with me the longest.
0:44
Kristin: The quiet ones, the forgotten ones hidden beneath trees or sitting off old roads.
0:49
Kristin: So familiar to locals that most people pass them every day without truly noticing them.
0:54
Kristin: Places like Pine Hill and Gilson Road.
0:57
Kristin: Pine Hill Cemetery rests quietly along Pine Hill Road in Hollis.
1:01
Kristin: Modest and easy to miss if you aren't looking for it.
1:04
Kristin: At first glance, there's nothing particularly unusual about the cemetery.
1:08
Kristin: No towering mausoleums, no ornate iron gates, no grand monuments meant to draw visitors from far away, just weathered stones sinking slowly into the earth, soft grass moving in the wind, and a silence that seems to settle over the entire hill.
1:25
Kristin: And maybe that's the part of what makes places like this feel so unsettling, because Pine Hill looks ordinary.
1:31
Kristin: It looks like the kind of cemetery you would drive past without a second thought.
1:35
Kristin: Yet for decades stories have clung to it, stories whispered between teenagers on late-night drives, stories passed from neighbor to neighbor and lowered voices.
1:45
Kristin: Stories that eventually turned this small cemetery into one of the most feared and talked-about burial grounds in all of New Hampshire.
1:52
Kristin: But to many locals, it has never simply been Pine Hill Cemetery.
1:56
Kristin: They know it by another name, Blood Cemetery.
1:59
Kristin: Established in 1769 on land donated by Benjamin Parker Jr.
2:04
Kristin: after he sold his farm, Pine Hill was created to serve the town's growing need for local burial grounds.
2:10
Kristin: Nearly 300 people are buried here, though time has not preserved every name.
2:16
Kristin: Many stones have eroded beyond recognition, while others have disappeared entirely, leaving some graves anonymous and forgotten beneath the soil.
2:25
Kristin: For podcasts like The Grim, places like this can be difficult to tell stories about.
2:30
Kristin: Small cemeteries rarely carry the dramatic histories people expect.
2:34
Kristin: There are no infamous massacres here, no notorious serial killers, no catastrophic tragedy etched forever into the land.
2:42
Kristin: And yet Pine Hill possesses something many historic cemeteries don't.
2:47
Kristin: A reputation.
2:48
Kristin: Stories of ghostly apparitions, strange sounds drifting through the trees, and unexplained encounters have circulated for generations.
2:57
Kristin: Over time, the cemetery became less known for those buried within it, and more for what belief never left.
3:03
Kristin: Some of the most persistent stories don't even take place within the cemetery itself, but along the lonely road beside it, and like many rumors, they shifted over the decades, layering on top of another until they become nearly inseparable.
3:16
Kristin: In the 1970s and 80s, teenagers driving past reported something stranger still.
3:22
Kristin: They claimed that if you sped toward the cemetery gates and slammed on the brakes, a woman would appear in the review mirror, pale faced and silent beneath the wash of headlights.
3:31
Kristin: They called her Mary Blood, though no woman by that name was ever buried within Pine Hill Cemetery.
3:37
Kristin: And as the story passed from one generation to the next, the legend changed shape.
3:42
Kristin: The woman vanished, and her place became something smaller.
3:46
Kristin: A child standing among the graves, a child's laughter drifting through the trees after dark, and sometimes, according to those who saw it, a brief outline of a little figure reflected in the back seat where no one had been sitting at all.
3:59
Kristin: Drivers passing Pine Hill late at night began claiming to see what appeared to be a young boy standing near the roadside, or emerging suddenly from the darkness near the graves.
4:09
Kristin: Some described him as frightened, as though trying desperately to stop passing cars.
4:15
Kristin: But whenever someone slowed or looked back, the child was gone.
4:19
Kristin: Others claimed the figure wandered silently among the headstones before disappearing into the woods near the rear of the cemetery.
4:26
Kristin: The road itself seemed to carry its own strangeness.
4:29
Kristin: Paranormal researcher Fiona Broom, one of the most prominent investigators to document Pine Hill, collected reports of car radio switching on their own to play dirje music as drivers passed the grounds.
4:40
Kristin: Gas gauges were said to behave erratically near the gate.
4:44
Kristin: Cameras refused to function within the cemetery walls.
4:47
Kristin: Broom herself once found she couldn't take a single photograph there, pressing the shutter again and again to no result.
4:54
Kristin: Other visitors described sudden drops in temperature, an overwhelming sense of being watched from somewhere within the trees, and whispers carried through the woods despite finding themselves completely alone.
5:06
Kristin: One former visitor recalled exploring Pine Hill late at night with friends, when heavy impacts began striking the earth around them from multiple directions, as though something was thrown into the darkness from all sides at once.
5:19
Kristin: Nothing, though, was ever seen, no footsteps, no voices, only the sounds closing in before they finally fled.
5:27
Kristin: What makes it even stranger is that no one has ever been able to say who the boy along the road is supposed to be.
5:33
Kristin: There are no clear records, no documented tragedy tied to Pine Hill involving a child.
5:39
Kristin: And yet the reports persisted, passed from one generation to the next, gathering detail as they went, until the story became something larger than its origin, something no one can fully explain.
5:51
Kristin: And perhaps that uncertainty is what makes the story linger, not because anyone knows who the child was, because no one does.
5:59
Kristin: At the center of much of Pine Hill's folklore, though, rests a single grave, Abel Blood.
6:05
Kristin: It's likely that the cemetery's infamous nickname originated not from violence or murder, but simply from the surname carved into a stone.
6:13
Kristin: Abel Blood was, by all historical accounts, a deeply Christian man, philanthropic and well regarded in the community.
6:20
Kristin: Nothing in the records suggests any connection to the occult or to violence, and yet in isolated places, names can become legends.
6:29
Kristin: And Blood Cemetery was a name far too unsettling for the local imagination to ignore.
6:34
Kristin: In another cemetery, Abel Blood may have faded quietly into history.
6:39
Kristin: Here his name survived longer than his story, and eventually the cemetery inherited it.
6:45
Kristin: One legend surrounding his grain became especially well known.
6:48
Kristin: Carved upon the headstone is a pointed hand, a common funeral symbol meant to guide the soul heavenward.
6:55
Kristin: The original meaning was simple enough.
6:57
Kristin: Abel Blood, his wife Betsy, and their son George, who died in childhood, would be reunited together in the afterlife.
7:04
Kristin: But according to local legend, the meaning of that carving changes after dark.
7:09
Kristin: During the day, the finger points upward toward the sky.
7:12
Kristin: At night, some claim it turns downward toward the earth.
7:15
Kristin: Fiona Broom documented at least one investigator she trusted, who saw that they had seen the hand in two different positions across separate visits.
7:24
Kristin: Another account from the 1990s claimed the carving did more than shift.
7:29
Kristin: The visitor described something dark appearing to seep from the engraved hand itself, as though the stone were weeping.
7:35
Kristin: The same person later claimed that they were shoved violently from behind by something they never saw.
7:41
Kristin: Perhaps it was nothing more than a shadow twisting across some old stone beneath the moonlight.
7:46
Kristin: Perhaps imagination filling the gaps.
7:49
Kristin: But stories like these have endured because they leave just enough room for doubt.
7:53
Kristin: Like many haunted places, Pine Hills slowly became layered with tales no one could fully trace back to their origin.
8:00
Kristin: Some whispered of murders tied to the blood family, that the number of family members buried together pointed to some common violent end.
8:08
Kristin: Historians have since noted that the death dates on the Bloodstone span multiple generations of individual deaths years apart, quietly dismantling that theory.
8:18
Kristin: But folklore rarely waits for facts to catch up.
8:21
Kristin: Paranormal stories spread across generations until truth and legend became impossible to separate.
8:27
Kristin: And perhaps the cruelest part of that legend is what it eventually did to the cemetery itself.
8:32
Kristin: Thrill seekers and vandals came searching for ghosts instead of history.
8:36
Kristin: The grave of Able Blood, the very stone that gave birth to so much folklore, was reportedly damaged repeatedly over the years.
8:43
Kristin: In 2007, it was knocked down entirely, and in an act of particularly strangeness, switched with the stone from Gilson Road Cemetery in Nashua.
8:52
Kristin: The original marker was eventually taken down by the town for safekeeping, and the replacement bears none of the famous pointing hand.
9:00
Kristin: The cemetery now regularly is patrolled by police, especially around Halloween.
9:05
Kristin: Many who visit Pine Hill describe it not as terrifying but as peaceful, still, heavy with age, but not hostile.
9:13
Kristin: Most who wander the grounds during daylight hours experience no apparitions, no voices, and nothing overtly unnatural.
9:20
Kristin: The places don't earn reputations like this without leaving impressions behind.
9:25
Kristin: Standing among the faded names and fractured stones, it becomes easy to understand how stories survive in places where history itself has already begun to disappear.
9:36
Kristin: Pine Hill doesn't feel haunted in the theatrical way movies portray.
9:41
Kristin: It feels older than that, quieter, the kind of place where folklore grows naturally from silence.
9:47
Kristin: And perhaps that's what truly lingers here, not ghosts, but the strange and uneasy feeling that something forgotten still waits among the dead.
9:56
Kristin: Not far from Hollis in the neighboring town Nashua lies another cemetery, quieter, smaller, and far less famous.
10:04
Kristin: Yet among the paranormal investigators who spent years documenting New Hampshire's haunted places, it's Gilson Road Cemetery, not Blood Cemetery, that tends to stop the conversation cold.
10:15
Kristin: Fiona Broom, the same researcher who helped bring Pine Hill to national attention, was ambiguous about it.
10:22
Kristin: Hands down, she said, There are more reports of activity here than any other cemetery in New Hampshire.
10:28
Kristin: And these come from people I respect.
10:31
Kristin: They're not the type to jump at shadows.
10:33
Kristin: Gilson wrote, in her words, is the one that scares the daylights out of people.
10:38
Kristin: The cemetery sits quiet on a road in Nashua directly from a residential development.
10:43
Kristin: It's easy to miss, unremarkable at first pass.
10:47
Kristin: Less than an acre, an old stone boundary wall, with scattered headstones and uneven ground where earlier graves have long since left their markers resides.
10:56
Kristin: Nothing about its appearance prepares you for what people have described here.
11:01
Kristin: Families buried here are early New England names: Gibson's, Fiske's, Searless, Lawrence's, Newton's.
11:08
Kristin: Among the oldest preserved markers is that of Anna Robbins, who died in 1796 at just 20 years old.
11:15
Kristin: Nearby are John and Betsy Gilson, buried a few years apart with three small headstones placed between them, memorial stones for unnamed infants who never survived long enough to be named.
11:27
Kristin: Visitors have left small toys and offerings at these graves for years, quietly, persistently, as though something compels them to keep returning.
11:36
Kristin: The Gilson's name itself carries historical weight.
11:40
Kristin: An 18th-century account describes an expedition taken by Nemhiah Lovell and John Gilson through the wilderness of New Hampshire in the fall of 1747.
11:49
Kristin: Two men from Dunstable sending out to traverse the Merrimack Valley with little more than a musket and a camp lake in each, documenting some of the earliest recorded movement through the region's interior before settlement had fully taken hold, helping map the future of the land itself.
12:06
Kristin: What he could never have imagined was what the place would one day become.
12:09
Kristin: The strangest stone in the cemetery belongs to a child, Walter Gilson, who died on August 28, 1811, at just five years old, eight months and twenty five days.
12:20
Kristin: His stone bears a hole, roughly an inch in diameter, drilled cleanly through its center, not the result of a gunshot, not a crack from weathering, a deliberate precise hole whose origins has never been fully explained, and which predates any of the paranormal stories attached to this place.
12:38
Kristin: Investigators and historians alike have examined it and come away without answers.
12:43
Kristin: The folklore layered over Gilson Run, though, runs deeper and stranger than Blood Cemeteries, drawing from multiple sources across centuries.
12:51
Kristin: One persistent legend predates the cemetery entirely, a story tied not to the graves but to the land itself.
12:58
Kristin: A medicine man, the account goes, was banished here by his own people for practicing dark arts.
13:04
Kristin: Rather than living quietly in exile, he continued his work, luring young warriors into the woods with the promise of strength and power through magic.
13:14
Kristin: Instead, he sacrificed them, drawing on their lives to extend his own, and when he finally died, the story says he didn't leave.
13:22
Kristin: Visitors at the back corner of the cemetery have described something difficult to articulate, a heaviness, a resistance, as though the air itself is pushing back.
13:32
Kristin: Some have described a sensation of wading through water or deep mud, despite standing on dry ground.
13:38
Kristin: A dog, once brought into the cemetery by its owners, a former military working animal, highly trained and normally unshakable, reportedly refused to go near the back wall.
13:49
Kristin: Instead, it planted itself between its owner and that corner of the cemetery, barking relentlessly into the darkness beyond the stones.
13:57
Kristin: And according to investigators, the Gilson's family grief may have left its own imprint on the land.
14:03
Kristin: Betsy Gilson's spirit has long been associated with the cemetery and the road outside it, wandering endlessly in search of her children.
14:11
Kristin: Her husband Joseph's headstone has also been reported to glow faintly green after dark.
14:17
Kristin: One of the most enduring legends attached to Gilson's road centers on a ritual visitors have repeated for years.
14:24
Kristin: Though much like folklore, the detail shifts slightly with each retelling.
14:28
Kristin: The grave marker itself reads Betsy, but the legends call her Betty.
14:33
Kristin: The story goes like this: Leave the cemetery after dark and call out into the night.
14:38
Kristin: Betty Gilson, I have your baby.
14:40
Kristin: And somewhere nearby, a woman in colonial era clothing will appear, sometimes standing in the road, sometimes motionless behind the tree line, watching silently from the woods.
14:52
Kristin: Most investigators strongly advised against trying it though.
14:56
Kristin: But Betsy is far from the only figure said to haunt this place.
15:00
Kristin: Visitors have described seeing a man in 19th-century clothing seated along the stone wall, staring silently toward the road before vanishing moments later.
15:09
Kristin: Others are part of a woman in white drifting along the cemetery's edge.
15:13
Kristin: A childlike figure is also seen near the roadside that disappears whenever anyone approaches.
15:19
Kristin: Strange lights flickering near the back wall are also seen, zigzagging mists appearing in photographs where nothing can be seen with a naked eye.
15:28
Kristin: And then there is also the figure that some investigators simply call the watcher.
15:33
Kristin: A dark writer is said to pass the cemetery with unsettling regularity, whose appearance is often described as a warning that something else is about to follow.
15:42
Kristin: What makes Gilson Road Cemetery so unsettling is that it's not defined by any single legend the way Blood Cemetery is.
15:50
Kristin: There's no one famous haunting, no single story everyone agrees upon.
15:55
Kristin: What exists here instead is an accumulation, decades of overlapping experiences from people who arrived skeptical and left deeply unnerved.
16:04
Kristin: The feeling that something unresolved lingers beneath the surface of this place, difficult to explain and even harder to forget.
16:12
Kristin: And that is usually the question people carry home with them after visiting Gilson Road.
16:17
Kristin: They arrive asking whether the cemetery is haunted, and they leave wondering what exactly is still there, and whether it has always been waiting in the dark.
16:26
Kristin: For now, the stories of Pine Hill and Gilson Road slip back into the stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
16:33
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into Pine Hill Cemetery and Gilson Road Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
16:42
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grin.