Elaine Mercado

The story is that of the author and her family's experiences with a Victorian house they had purchased and restored. Considering her occupation as an emergency room R.N., she is used to dealing with death. Yet when she and her family continue to have dreams of suffocation, see balls of light streaking around the ceiling and dusky shadows flowing along the baseboards of their Victorian house that they had restored with so much love, neither her nurse’s training nor her experiences with death, could provide any answers. From the book:“Denial plows very deeply into our souls,” she states. “We would rather have a flimsy, semi-rational explanation, however irrational in reality, than have to deal with the unknown.” In spite of that, it is the "unknown" that stalks her and her family in this ghost story and I have no reason to believe that it is not true...or at least that it is absolutely true as far as she's concerned. The family is tossed into a nightmare that consist of skeletal brides huddling near the stairway, drinking glasses that hover by in the air by themselves, and finally and worst of all...sexual assault by "things" unseen. The author and her family struggles with these manifestations and desperately searches for a rational explanation. When all the lights inexplicably turn on and the doors all unlock by themselves, they try to rationalize it away with "perhaps the fuse box had shorted out"...or "maybe the doors were not really locked". She has two young daughters in the house who are alternately frightened and saddened, wanting to help whatever is haunting the house. I thought long before this, that they should be looking for help from someone that perhaps deals with these things and NOT offering to "help" whatever this is. It didn't seem to be very friendly or even wanting to be friends, to me. Soon the manifestations escalate. I thought is this even possible? How much worse can it get??? Finally, the author and her daughters leave the house from sunset to sunrise. I thought that they might as well sell it or burn the thing down. As the story go on, neighbors and a search of historical records bring clues to the haunting. Why they didn't do this the very first time they saw or experienced anything was beyond my understanding. They got psychic investigator Hans Holzer involved and hoped he could get to the bottom of it. If I or any other reader believes or disbelieves makes no difference...the author and her daughters believed it and either was or thought, they were experiencing it. Rather you believe it or not, it's still a story that will give you goosebumps if not nightmares.… (altro)

Grave’s End by Elaine Mercado is her account of the years she and her family lived in a haunted house.
Sightings, visitations, strange sounds, noxious smells are just some of the things that this family experienced while the unknown stalked them. While some things such as all the lights coming on, the doors unlocking by themselves were easier to rationalize, other things frightened and saddened them. From visions of a skeletal bride to drinking glasses hovering in the air, feelings of suffocation and intimate touches were experienced by Elaine and her daughters over the years. My biggest question throughout the book was why the family stayed in this house.

Yes, this was their first, hard saved for house. A large Victorian that they renovated and restored, but even after Elaine and her husband divorced, she and her girls stayed in the house. If I was experiencing even some of the things that they described, I would have been out of that house. She wrote of how the girls didn’t want to move away from their school or their friends but surely she could have found somewhere close by for them to live.

I am a skeptic and this book didn’t help make a believer out of me, my thoughts were more about how much the author was financially benefiting from this story. Unfortunately, the writing was weak and uninspired which made the supposedly scary events come off more as a campfire tale than a true story. If you are looking for a good haunted house story, I would suggest you pass on Grave’s End.… (altro)