It’s the middle of the night. You’re lying in bed, almost asleep. But a banging wakes you. Your eyes fly open and your heart freezes. What is it? You can’t imagine what it could be. Is it a ghost—or your radiator?
When faced with inexplicable happenings in your home, a place you want to consider a safe haven, it may take time to discern the source. At first you may have no explanation for the events and phenomena. If you can find no natural cause, you may fear what’s happening. Assigning possible meaning requires you to question, research, test, and evaluate.
If you diligently rule out natural causes and consider that such happenings as seeing balls of light, glimpsing shadowy figures, and being touched by unseen presences in the night are supernatural in origin, where does it leave you?
You might decide to do nothing. If so, can you learn to live with spirit housemates? You would need to overcome fear of spirits manifesting in your personal space. For example, if you heard a disembodied voice say, “I love you” in your dark cellar, how would you feel? Warm and fuzzy? Or scared shitless? Would you ever get used to it? You could try, but you may never become perfectly comfortable with such contact.
You may face loneliness, wondering why these strange things are happening to you and your family. Could you confide in anyone else about them? Who?
If you admit to a confidant that you believe what’s happening in your home is supernatural, would they believe you? Will they accept and help you, or mock and reject you? Receiving criticism might make anyone hesitate to share their paranormal experiences with others.
In Grave’s End: A True Ghost Story, an allegedly true account of a haunted home, Elaine Mercado’s husband personifies dogged unwillingness to attribute events to supernatural causes. He provides for Elaine and their daughters plenty of doubt, disbelief, disagreement, sarcasm, and harassment. After Mercado deals with unpleasant phenomena, such opposition simply piles on more grief.
At another point in the narrative, her husband suggests a different approach. He says, “…I couldn’t figure out what was happening to me. I think if we just keep our heads, whatever it is will just go away” (71).
But what if you do keep your head, and it doesn’t go away?
You could move. Yet, what if, like Elaine Mercado, you have nowhere else to go? You may be unable to escape elsewhere on your own. Elaine found herself in this situation before she became a nurse; she couldn’t afford to take the girls and move out.
Mercado is obviously an anxious person, overprotective, prone to worry. Even if you aren’t, many reasons could prevent you from leaving a problem house. If you could afford to vacate, like most people you may be reluctant to make such a drastic change. (Some folks don’t flee abusive relationships for the same reasons.) It makes it even harder to go if the entities aren’t seriously hurting you.
With my study of Spiritualism and mediumship, the experiences in Mercado’s book rang true. Because of her doubts, her husband’s opposition, and all that she dealt with that I’ve outlined above, it took her a long time to acknowledge the source of the activity in her home. However, it boggles me that, suffering as she and her daughters did, she did nothing about it for over a decade!
Mercado disliked the thought of a medium coming (109). As a result, she and her girls suffered a while longer. She and Karin weren’t sure they liked psychic Marisa Anderson “cleaning” the house. Finally, though, Mercado acknowledged that the trapped spirits were suffering and needed to be sent on their way toward the light.
Mercado concludes, “[Experiences with spirits] proved to me, without a doubt, that we survive our physical death” (174). Although not everyone will agree with her conviction, it came to her hard-earned.
I found Grave’s End a fascinating story about why spirits may linger on earthly properties and what one family did about a haunting. Such accounts provide rich fodder for conjuring fictional tales of the supernatural.
I’ve read a ton of books about the afterlife and a few specifically on rescuing spirits trapped in the physical realm. One such book I edited and published on this topic is by Doris and Hilary Severn called The Next Room [Kindle].)
If you’re currently dealing with supernatural activity or know someone who is, I recommend my book, How to Tell If Your House Is Haunted: And What to Do If It Is. I wrote it to explain how to determine whether phenomena is spiritual in origin, what to do about it, and how.
May you and your home find peace as Elaine Mercado did.
Source:
Mercado, Elaine. Grave’s End: A True Ghost Story. Llewellyn Publications, 2001.
4 replies on “Grave’s End by Elaine Mercado”
I’m glad you found Elaine Mercado’s tale to ring true. I found “Grave’s End” to be relatable. The home my family lived in when I was in middle school was haunted, but it was just part of our lives. We went to school and my parents went to work and we all lived there until we could afford to live somewhere else. Ignore those heavy footsteps and study for your social studies test.
One of the things I loved about this book was how down to Earth Mercado is. 13 years seems like an eternity, yet haven’t we all endured something unpleasant for far too long? I love to explore people’s reactions to books after I read them to see how they compare to my own. I came across a blog post about this book that Elaine Mercado actually commented on and she states that what most people don’t glean from her book is that they had months at a time without any paranormal activity. Those islands of respites must have made living there more bearable.
Above everything else one thing that really struck me about this book was how it changed her beliefs about an after life. I found that really enlightening.
Lee-
With your expertise, I’m happy to know that it past the ghost test for you. As you mentioned in your post, with her marriage in crisis I think Elaine had a difficult time making sense of what was going on or even accepting it. It must have been overwhelming.
I enjoyed the book tremendously. It actually inspired me to write about my own experiences in Ghosts and Me. I really could relate to what she experienced.