‘Grave’s End: A True Ghost Story’ by Elaine Mercado

Writing about Grave’s End: A True Ghost Story by Elaine Mercado is the most challenging assignment I’ve had so far in this blog. It’s not just because we’ve been instructed to take the author at her word that the events really happened, or at least that she truly believes they happened. (After The Amityville Horror, one can hardly blame us for being suspicious.)

The biggest problem for me is that, not only is it presented as nonfiction, but it was written by someone who never even aspired to be a professional writer. Elaine Mercado is a registered nurse by profession. It doesn’t seem fair, then, to criticize technical issues that may have interfered with my experience of the story when her goal was not to write expertly crafted fiction or nonfiction but simply to tell her story.

The other issue is that Mercado is a real person. If I have issues with a protagonist in a fictional work, I think that’s a legitimate critical issue — as writers we tend to try to make our protagonists sympathetic and engaging, or if not, it’s interesting to talk about the reasons they are not. However, it’s different when you’re talking about a real person, especially somebody’s mom.

That said, I’m going to tiptoe into the shallow end of both of these topics and see how it goes.

Grave’s End: A True Story is a first-person account of Mercado’s experiences after her family moves into a house she eventually comes to accept as haunted. It’s what The Amityville Horror might have been if written by the Lutzes, without exaggeration, fabrication, or exclamation points. It’s unfair to expect Mercado to have been aware of, or care about, showing rather than telling or using descriptive language rather than “really.” Unfortunately, though, these things matter to me as a reader. Grave’s End felt to me like reading a long e-mail from somebody’s mother.

The other reason I didn’t particularly enjoy the story was because I found it nearly impossible to empathize with the main character. This isn’t to say I think she’s a bad person; it’s just that she couldn’t be more different from me, so I found her decisions alien and confusing.

People close to me describe me as very direct. I don’t worry too much about what other people think about me — I assume they’re not spending a lot of time on it. Maybe because of early losses, I’m intensely aware that life is short, and I’m not one for sitting around wringing my hands instead of making decisions and acting on them, even if they’re not the greatest decisions. Lastly, my parents raised me to take care of myself. In contrast, Mercado, at least at the time of this story, might be the most passive person to ever walk this planet. She stays in an unhappy marriage for more than 20 years. She lives in a house for years knowing her child is being harassed by spirits there. I have all-caps notes of frustration during the section after her co-worker, Lorraine, tells her to get her house cleaned and she helplessly asks her brother to do the research and dilly-dallies around with a half-hearted effort to read about it on her own. When Lorraine told her to get the house cleaned, why didn’t she just ask right then, “What do you mean, clean the house? How do you do that?”

Allowing for differences in age and upbringing, I still found it odd that in 1982, when the story began and throughout the story, Mercado remains so emotionally dependent on men. I applauded her for pursuing her nursing career, and writing a book is a major accomplishment, but even for that, she credits her brother’s “pushing, poking, and prodding.”

So for those reasons, Grave’s End was a bit of a frustrating read to me. But what about the ghost story? While I didn’t find it a thrilling read, I didn’t see much in it that I haven’t seen in other accounts of hauntings (and after Amityville, you can bet I went looking for debunkers). Okay, maybe the cat making a picture was a new one — and how frustrating was that when Elaine ran over and stopped it before it finished? What would it have made? A satanic symbol? A bag of Cat Chow? We’ll never know. The hovering gerbil cage seemed a little extreme, too. Still, I confess that, after a quick snopes.com check, I didn’t go digging too deep for hoax accusations. I just had a gut feeling; maybe it’s a mom thing. I don’t know what her brother’s motives might have been for her writing the book, but with Mercado being a devoted mother and a nurse, I can buy into her wanting to share her story in case it helped someone.

As far as whether the house was really haunted, I am cautiously optimistic. I’m not one of those people who categorically declares there is no such thing as ghosts. I don’t automatically believe all unexplainable occurrences are paranormal, either. Mercado states at the end of the book that she came to think of the haunting as evidence, to her, that there is life after death. For her, what was terrifying and unknown became a comfort. Me, I just love the mystery of it all.