Season 3 Episode 6
The Grim is opening the gate to the Museo Panteón de San Fernando in Mexico City for a special Día de Muertos episode. Once the most exclusive cemetery in Mexico, this nineteenth-century burial ground holds presidents, generals who fought one another to the death, and the forgotten dead of the city's cholera epidemics, all within the same walls. Its gates closed to burials in 1871, then opened one final time for Benito Juárez, the very man who had ordered them shut. From the traditions of the Day of the Dead to the ghost stories its keepers still tell, this is the history of one of Mexico City's oldest cemeteries and the people who rest there.
Along the way: the origins of Día de Muertos, the ofrenda, cempasúchil marigolds, and the nights the dead return home, including October 27 for beloved pets; how José Guadalupe Posada's Calavera Garbancera became Diego Rivera's La Catrina; the James Bond film that conjured Mexico City's Day of the Dead parade into being; why colonial Mexico buried its dead inside its churches; the 1833 cholera epidemic that threw San Fernando's gates open; Benito Juárez's death at the National Palace and his marble tomb, where the Patria cradles his body; conservative general Miguel Miramón's empty tomb and the heart his widow carried away in a jar; General Tomás Mejía and his widow Agustina Castro, who gave nearly everything she had to bury him; journalist Francisco Zarco, whose coffin held only stones; José María Lafragua and Dolores Escalante, the bride who died before reaching the altar; Isadora Duncan's mysterious name on a niche; seventeen burials discovered beneath the sidewalk in 2021; and the legends of a statue that moves, a lady in white, a woman in black, and the lamenting Don Juan.
A Día de Muertos journey through famous graves, forgotten souls, and the marigolds that light their way home, from The Grim.
