Graves End: A True Ghost Story by Elaine Mercado

When I think of haunted houses, I frequently think of this Eddie Murphy skit. He’s just so sensible. White people do stick around too long in these stories. As viewers we're all silently shouting at the screens--just get out! 
 
But as writers we know that if we have our characters “just get out” there will be no story at all. It’s fine for a comedy skit, but not the blockbuster novel we’re dreaming of writing.

Q. Why would a person stay in a haunted house? 
​
A. It’s complicated. ​

As I read Elaine Mercado’s Graves End: A True Ghost Story, I kept thinking about the similarities of her experience in that home to an abusive relationship. Sometimes it’s just not a simple matter to extricate ourselves from the situations we humans find ourselves in. 
 
Here are the ways that I felt Elaine Mercado’s experience mirrored an abusive relationship:

Whether an abusive relationship takes the form of physical or emotional abuse, the victim of the abuse suffers from low self-esteem. They have been repeatedly made to feel worthless and like there’s no better option.   
​

• Throughout Grave’s End, Elaine explains why she had no other option than to stay. At first, her husband says they won’t survive financially if they try to sell and move. Then he belittles her for believing these things were happening. Even when they happen to him, he minimizes the impact. Then once they get a divorce and she’s a single mother, the financial risk becomes even more critical. Elaine also describes how the visits from the home's spirits disrupted her sleep and wore her down physically and mentally so that she didn’t have the energy to even consider moving.

The abusive cycle. Instances of abusive behavior are often followed by sincere apologies and promises that it will never happen again. Then there is usually a honeymoon period of extreme solicitousness.

• In Elaine’s situation there were no apologies or promises or extra-nice behavior, but there were long periods of ghostly inactivity which may have given her a false sense that everything would be okay. Until it started up again.

 
Societal pressure. There is less of this these days than in the past, but there can be a lot of pressure--especially from family--to stay together for the kids, or to stick it out through a bad patch, because it will get better.  
​

• Elaine feared telling people about the issue with her house because she felt sure they wouldn’t believe her. She never told her own parents because she said she knew her father wouldn’t believe it and her mother would just be upset. While our current society is disinclined to put much faith in science, it is equally skeptical of anything of a paranormal nature. Speaking of such things is not someone can do casually without potentially harming their own reputation.

Gaslighting. Abusers are often adept at making their victims feel as though all of their problems as a couple are the fault of the victim.
​

• Elaine wasn’t gaslit by the spirits coexisting with her in her house, but she definitely took on the responsibility for “disturbing them” more than once. She spends a lot of time discussing the crawl space under one part of the house and how she thought that her teenaged daughter and her friends exploring that area may have caused the problems to escalate. This exploration took place after Elaine had already had a few unsettling experiences—so clearly it wasn’t the cause. But people like to find reasons for why things happen and it’s all too easy to blame oneself for things that are beyond our control.

 
Maybe they’ll change. A lot of people in these situations live on the hope that their partner will change.  
​

• Up until the point that the home became completely unbearable, Elaine seemed to hope that the problem would just resolve itself.

Dependency. Often people can’t just leave an abusive relationship because they have children with their abuser or they may be inextricably tied financially to them with shared accounts and properties.
​

• This was certainly the case for Elaine. She felt that she was financially stuck with that house and her children didn’t want to leave it despite their experiences.

 
We’ve all read stories with thin premises. As writers it’s important to consider real-world reasons for our character’s motivations so that they make sense to the reader and are believable. While this story is a memoir of a real individual’s experience, I think that we can learn a lot by examining the nature of her reasoning and thought processes and how they may parallel other situations that we may be more familiar with—and bring those ideas with us into the writer’s room.

---