A psychic told Mike to look in his basement. What he found solved a 57-year-old family mystery.

Mike Carroll was eight months old when his father, George, disappeared from his family’s Long Island home. It was 1961, and the Korean War veteran simply went out one day and never returned. No missing persons’ report was filed, and any questions Mike and his three older siblings posed to their mother, Dorothy, were met with the same response: “Don’t ask.”

And for decades, they didn’t.

But three years ago, acting on intuition and the suspicions he and his siblings had floated over the years, Mike went looking for answers once again. He turned his attention to his childhood home, which he had bought off Dorothy before she died in 1998.

The basement of the house was at the centre of the darkest rumour about George Carroll’s whereabouts. According to Newsday, relatives had suggested maybe he’d been killed and buried there.

A few years earlier, a psychic had pointed to that same basement: “I was told by the psychic it was blunt force trauma,” he told The New York Post. “She actually said to me that it was a pipe, that he got hit in the head by a pipe and he was buried alive.”

The in June, a team of paranormal investigators said the same: “There was a guy who came to my basement, and he went to the right spot and said, ‘The energy is here.'”

And so Mike dug, tearing up the thick concrete, guided by an expert with ground-penetrating radar.

On October 30, roughly 6-8 beneath the surface, they found answers.

Bones. Human bones. This week confirmed via DNA testing to be those of George Carroll.

“I’m happy to learn that that is my dad,” Mike told Newsday. “This is a deep and very emotional thing and everybody is dealing with this in different ways. This has broken up my family.”

His father's death is now being investigated as a homicide.

Authorities told media they would have liked to talk to Dorothy's second husband, Richard Darress, who moved into the home shortly after George disappeared. However, he died in June, aged 77. Dorothy had divorced him in 1983, according to The New York Post.

But Mike said he is trying to "avoid pointing the finger at this point". Instead, he is focused on a proper military funeral for his father.

"I feel great that my dad is free from that crappy hole," he told ABC7 News. "I want him to be a soldier... I want him to get what he needs."