Worth a Listen: 10 Podcast Episodes About Cemeteries and the Stories Written in Stone
By Joshua Smith
Old New England cemeteries can be easy to drive past without giving them much thought. But walk through the gate and start reading the stones, and suddenly you have a history book spread out across the hillside. Names repeat through generations, veterans rest beside farmers and merchants, unusual carvings appear on weathered stones, and sometimes an epitaph tells a story all its own.
With October well underway, this week we are listening to specific podcast episodes about cemeteries, gravestones, burial traditions, and the lives remembered in old New England burying grounds.
1. “A Cemetery Is a History Book Written in Stone” — Our American Stories
This recent episode visits the old public cemeteries of Antrim, New Hampshire. Bill Bryk reads the stones of Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War veterans and reflects on how cemeteries preserve the stories of a town.
2. “Episode 3: Relief” — The Secret Life of Death Podcast
Historian and archaeologist Gail Golec heads to Halifax, Vermont, to investigate the unusual gravestone of Relief Clews Wilcox Towne. One stone becomes a doorway into names, families, community, and early New England life.
3. “Episode 6: Awe, Part 1” — The Secret Life of Death Podcast
What do winged skulls, cherubs, plants, and other carvings on old gravestones actually mean? This episode explores gravestone art and stone carvers in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire.
4. “A Tombstone Tirade in New Hampshire” — New England Legends
In Milford, New Hampshire, Caroline Cutter’s 1842 headstone contains roughly 150 words aimed squarely at members of the local Baptist church. Small-town disagreements apparently did not always end at the grave.
5. “Captain Jones’s Grave Has a Leg Up” — New England Legends
Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger visit a cemetery in Washington, New Hampshire, in search of the unusual grave of Captain Samuel Jones, who died in 1804.
6. “The Oldest Gravestone” — A Cape Cod Notebook
A tiny weathered stone in Sandwich, Massachusetts, may be the oldest surviving gravestone on Cape Cod. The mystery is made even more interesting because someone deliberately chiseled away its inscription centuries ago.
7. “The Original Crypto: 18th Century Burial Practices at Old North Church” — HUB History
This Boston history episode visits the nearly 300-year-old crypt beneath Old North Church and explores why some colonial New Englanders were buried inside church walls rather than in outdoor burying grounds.
8. “The ‘Hampton Indian’ and the Search for a Mystery Gravestone Carver” — Western Mass History
This episode follows the clues left by a mysterious 18th-century stone carver whose distinctive gravestones appeared in Connecticut and later western Massachusetts.
9. “The Ghoul of Chebacco Parish” — New England Legends
In 1817, eight bodies disappeared from the Old Burying Ground in Essex, Massachusetts. This episode explores the investigation into one of New England’s stranger cemetery crimes.
10. “Live Free, Die Haunted: New Hampshire” — The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales
For a little October atmosphere, this episode visits Pine Hill Cemetery in Hollis and Gilson Road Cemetery in Nashua, separating some of the real cemetery history from the folklore that has grown up around these places.
Cemeteries are not simply places associated with death. They can tell us how people lived, what communities valued, how art and language changed, and which stories a town chose to preserve. The next time you pass an old burying ground, it may be worth slowing down and taking another look — respectfully, of course.
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Don’t forget: The St. Johnsbury Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram Outdoor Edge, hosted by Gary Moore, often digs into the outdoor history of northern Vermont and New Hampshire along with hunting, fishing, wildlife, conservation, and the stories of the people and places around us. Find Outdoor Edge wherever you get podcasts and on the WYKR app.