Paranormal Witness: "A Brooklyn Haunting" Ep. 202 Recap

“A family’s scary experiences in a Brooklyn townhouse are detailed.” 

The Mercado family, which consists of mother and wife Elaine, her husband and her two daughters (Christine and Karen) lived in a tiny, cramped apartment when they decided it was time to move into a bigger home that would allow space and also would be within their budget. The Mercados finally discover a classic Townhouse home in Brooklyn, NY and the family fell in love with it immediately. When the family was looking at the house, Elaine’s brother, Joe was with them and all the sudden, experiences  a disturbing, eerie feeling about the house. He tries to bring it up to Elaine but the girls are too ecstatic about the home and immediately purchase it and move in. When the family settled, the whole family was overjoyed that they had a much more spacious house to live in and Elaine’s daughters were thrilled to finally have their own rooms; Karen had her room in the basement while Christine had her own bedroom upstairs. 

The haunted townhouse in Brooklyn, NY

Karen’s basement bedroom also contained a washer and dryer where Elaine did the laundry. When Elaine started doing the laundry, she immediately noticed a pair of doors that were located about five feet above the floor. Immediately, she felt uncomfortable about the doors and recalls that whenever she was around those doors, she felt that something was just behind her back. Elaine knew that upon purchasing the house, there was a “dirt room” behind the basement but ignored it. She warned the girls, however, that they must not go in “the dirt room”. However, curiosity got the best of Karen (the eldest daughter) and Christine so one day, when Elaine was in the kitchen doing the dishes, Christine and Karen go downstairs to the basement to explore. Karen shows Christine the doors and dares her to open the door.  Christine, while hesitant, climbed on the cupboards nearby and opened the doors and climbed through “the dirt room’. Christine immediately was spooked and remembered distinctly the smell of the room. “It smelled earthly, musty…old and decayed…” Christine never crawled toward the back end of the room but the eerie, spooky sensation that overcame her in the room was enough to convince her that she shouldn’t be there. Christine crawls out and the girls go upstairs in the kitchen. Elaine, seeing Christine covered in dirt, is very irritated at the girls that they disobeyed her orders and demands the girls never open the mysterious doors. 

One evening, Elaine is in the house by herself and in the kitchen when all the sudden, she heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Knowing she was alone, Elaine walks to the foot of the stairway to look up and sees nothing. Elaine is confused but goes back to the kitchen when the basement door opens….and she hears what sounds like footsteps going downstairs into the basement. A nervous Elaine took at peek downstairs into the basement but didn’t proceed further. She felt something was there and didn’t want to entertain the thought of what could be down there. 

On another occasion, Elaine was in the living room when she heard “mysterious voices”; she figured maybe it was Christine calling her from upstairs. Elaine gets up and calls out Christine…..at the same time, Christine comes downstairs, thinking her mother called her name. Elaine and Christine then realized neither of them was calling Christine’s name. From the basement door, Elaine and Christine heard a maniacal, menacing laugh, along with this “voice” calling out Christine’s name. At this point, Elaine and Christine are terrified at what they are hearing but Elaine and Christine find themselves slowing moving towards the door. “It sounded evil and scary….like it sounded mocking and mean,” Christina says as she recalls the incident. “I felt fear. I felt frozen. We were both extremely frightened.” At that point, Elaine began feeling more uncomfortable in the house. 

Elaine was in bed and woke up one night and felt something push her, as if a heavy weight was on her chest and her whole weight was pushing into the bed. Elaine recalls that the pressure on her body was so intense, she felt the mattress springs from her bed and couldn’t even open up her mouth to scream for help. Once the pressure immediately  lifted, Elaine would struggle for air and assumed it was a form of a nightmare or night terror she was experiencing. These “suffering nightmares” were becoming more frequent. At the time, Elaine was an ER nurse and would sometimes go into work with absolutely no sleep at all. But she also felt that she couldn’t tell anyone at work with what she was experiencing and began questioning her emotional stability. 

Elaine and Christine wondering who...or what....was calling for Christine

On another night, Elaine was in the kitchen one night when she heard Karen scream for her. Elaine rushed to the basement in her room and Karen is sitting on her bed, terror stricken. They both saw her quilt being pulled off the bed. Christina checks downstairs to the basement to see what is going on and all the women saw the quilt perfectly placed on the floor. After that incident, Karen spent many nights sleeping on the couch. The phenomena kept building up to the point where the family couldn't ignore it anymore. They knew something was happening beyond a logical explanation and Elaine confesses she needed to open up her mind to understand that some sort of paranormal phenomena was occurring in her once-dream home. Another night passed and Elaine was awakened by a loud bang. Elaine and the girls leave their beds and check to see if something fell or dropped. Elaine describes it as a sound of "someone going from the back to the house to the front of the house, stomping, this angry stomping". The strange banging noise sounded like it was coming from upstairs. No one was there and they knew it. The girls were absolutely terrified so Elaine calls her husband to come home from work. Elaine and the girls decide to sit outside the stairs of their house to wait for Elaine’s husband. Her husband comes home, wondering what was happening and after Elaine explained what was going on, he dismissed it as "nonsense" and assumed it was probably just the plumbing in the house. He goes upstairs to check it out, the women trailing behind him. The husband says nothing is in the house and expressed his irritation at Elaine’s “nonsense”. As the husband and Elaine walk downstairs, they heard the banging noise again. The husband still dismisses it and goes back to work. After that, Elaine’s marriage began dissolving. Elaine’s husband just didn’t either want to know or didn’t know what kind of activity was going on in the house and since he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t find a logical explanation behind it all.

Elaine decided to change the house around and began redecorating it, painting over the walls and making it so the house felt more settled and peaceful. During this time, Karen was moving up to the attic so she and Christine were up there cleaning when they found a little door in the attic. They opened it and discovered items in the attic. They were exploring inside when they discovered a box sitting in the corner. They discovered inside was a beautiful white wedding dress fit for a petite woman; the dress was wrapped in newspaper that dated to 1952. Excited at their discovery, they go downstairs to show Elaine. Elaine was puzzled that that an item like a wedding dress was packed and put away the way it was. She decided then that she wanted nothing to do with it and actually threw the whole box, with the dress in it, inside the trash can. 

Was the entity a haunted bride that wasn't ready to go on the other side?

About a year later, a newly divorced Elaine was sitting in the living room with the girls when a strange phenomenon happened. They described that the house seem to “shutter” and “come alive”. There were noises and feelings of being watched. One again, the familiar menacing laughter began and this time, it was calling the girls’ names. A frantic Elaine calls her new boyfriend Matthew and asks him to come over. Matthew immediately rushes to the house. When Matthew arrives, Elaine confesses to Matthew about the activity that had been going down in the house. Even though Matthew is startled and mind-blown over what she was staying, he decided to stay in the house for the night. When Elaine and the girls went to bed, Matthew was sitting in a chair dozing off while watching TV when a phenomenon began to happen to him. He recalls having a dream that he's picturing himself trying to open the door to the same room but couldn't open it. Matthew finally opens the door and sees a flash of a picture and saw a skeletal man on the dirt floor. During this dream, Matthew also recalls feeling the same, familiar pressure and suffocating dream that Elaine had previously had. He explained that he was going in and out of sleep enough to feel the pressure but was also envisioning the dream. But the phenomenon didn’t end there with Matthew. On another night, Christine was in the bedroom when she heard something and went to the bend of the staircase to look below to see her mother sitting on the first few steps below. She calls out to her mother but then as she takes a closer look, she realizes that it wasn’t her mother. Terrified, she calls out to Elaine.

Halloween came and Elaine was throwing a Halloween party. During the party, she noticed a colleague of hers, Lisa, was getting a drink and mingling when Elaine realized that Lisa was walking towards the staircase. Elaine continued to observe Lisa, who just stood there facing the stairway where according to Elaine, she looked “ill”. Elaine goes over to her and Lisa asks Elaine about a little lady in a white dress. Elaine immediately has a flashback to the white wedding dress she threw away. Lisa then informs Elaine that her house is haunted and suggests calling up someone to cleanse the house immediately. That same night, Christine and Karen decide to share Christine’s bed. In the middle of the night, Christine wakes up, looks at her sister, and she sees a shadowy, long figure, a "dark cloud" hover over Karen. Christine describes that it felt like a "figure". Christine rolls over wanting to ignore it and try to get back to sleep. In the meantime, Elaine once again felt a presence in her room. Elaine feels her head and shoulders pushed down. It got so intense, that she felt it was a female presence/energy pushing down on her and growing heavier. She felt it was an angry woman pushing in on her. After the sensation stopped, Elaine looked for places to sleep and she was just crying, holding her pillow and searching for a room to sleep in. She couldn’t go back in the bedroom, she couldn’t sleep downstairs and she couldn’t sleep on the couch.  At this point, Elaine feels like she was slowly going out of her mind. The next day, Elaine calls her brother Joe and confesses that she wants to consider selling the house because she couldn’t take the life she was living in the house anymore. 

A picture example showing a "shadow ghost", probably like the one Christine saw hover over Karen. These "shadow ghosts" frequent homes and other historic locations. Some say they are negative energies and possibly demonic but other circumstances disagree with that theory. There are many theories as to what can produce such phenomena.

During the day when Elaine goes out to take the trash, Elaine spots a neighbor and decides to talk to him. She asks him if there’s anything strange that’s ever gone on in the house. The neighbor proceeds to tell her that he used to babysit the kids of the couple who sold Elaine the house. He remembers that the couple had a son and that the son married his bride. The son and the bride were both young so they decided to live up in the attic. Because the house was so large, the couple decided if they needed help, they would bang on the heater so it could be heard throughout the house. One day, the bride slipped and fell, hitting her head and she died immediately. The neighbor goes on to describe the bride as a “beautiful, tiny woman” and recalls her looking extremely beautiful in the white dress. Elaine begins piecing the puzzle together in her mind. It was February 1995 when Elaine decides to call up a medium. Upon arrival, the medium goes straight to the basement, opens up the mysterious doors and peeks her head in. She then begins saying “You are dead, you don’t belong here anymore, go onto the light”. The medium repeats this quite a few times.

The whole ordeal had left the family emotionally drained; however, the morning after the medium came in to “cleanse” the house, Elaine and the rest of the family noticed a different atmosphere in the house; it was more peaceful and relaxing. Joe describes it as opening the window and letting sunshine and fresh air inside the house. The family had never experienced any phenomenon in the house after that. However, Elaine concludes that whatever it was that was haunting her house, it wasn’t of this world and was open-minded to the possibilities of an existence of “unworldly phenomenon” that we have yet to fully understand. 

JANE'S NOTES: Yet another thrilling episode and in Brooklyn, of all places! I browsed around the internet to look for more information on the house and what came of the haunting. It turns out Elaine Mercado wrote a book about her experiences called “The Grave’s End”. According to Amazon.com, the book has an overall 4/5 star rating. Further information on the book description reveals that the Mercados bought their home in 1982 and this phenomenon had haunted them for 13 years.

Elaine Mercado posing with her book for the NY Daily

But unlike last week’s episode, this one had me raise eyebrows a few times and I felt important pieces of the story were missing. First off, why did Elaine feel the need to throw away a wedding dress that was obviously an antique discovery? Why didn’t she go to the neighbors to see if they knew anything about it and could possibly relay it to a living family member? Personally, if I discovered something as beautiful as that dress wrapped in paper from the 50s, I sure as hell wouldn’t throw it away in the trash. The medium...who or what was she talking to? Was it the bride or the "skeletal man" Matthew saw in his dream? Also, what about that “dirt room” that spooked Christine....what was THAT about and did anyone ever crawl back in the dirt room to see if remains were there? Upon further search, I’ve seen a couple news articles that talked about the haunted townhouse, the first result being from the New York Daily where you can find it by clicking here. There’s another article by The New York Post where you can find it by clicking here. The article from the NY Daily not only shows the house but also shows Elaine Mercado posing with her book. Both articles are very vague in their content, unlike last week’s episode where the LA Times went into great detail about what happened to Jackie Hernandez in her San Pedro Bungalow Home. While I do believe that the hauntings of the home were genuine, I also feel the lack of history and conclusion presented in the show makes me think that Elaine Mercado didn’t necessarily use “Paranormal Witness” just to share her story but to discretely market her own book. I can’t lie, as a paranormal enthusiast, it’s pretty disappointing when someone tells a story but won’t go into further detail unless there’s a profit out of it. These are just my own opinions. Your thoughts? 

Picture Credit: Syfy.com, The NY Daily, GhostStudy.com

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