Despite having had a few well-defined and quite amazing so-called "paranormal" experiences in my life, there is still a large part of me that remains sceptical. I recently, on thinking of all those past experiences, asked myself the question......"what more proof do you need?".......but the logical part of my brain still persists in arguing with what some may call the less rational part, and my feelings on the topic of the existence of all things paranormal continues to oscillate between the extremes of total disbelief and wholehearted acceptance.
I would like to share with you the most powerful experiences of the paranormal I have encountered to date, and hope it makes for interesting reading.
1. When I was a very small child, my mother had a part-time job as a cleaner for a rich family. Sometimes, when I was pre-school age and later during school holidays, my mother had to take me to work with her as on some days, there was nobody else available to look after me. On the first day that she took me with her, we boarded the bus and travelled the 20 or so minute journey to the posh side of town. Mum said that she usually took a short cut to the house where she worked through a park and, holding my hand, she strolled me through the gates and we made our way to the south side of the park. At the end of this park was a small stream, with monkey puzzle trees growing all along its edge. As we approached the stream, I began to feel very uneasy, then I caught sight of the gnarled and twisted roots of the trees criss-crossed over the surface of the stream. For some reason, the sight of these twisted and knotted tree roots filled me with a fear and a horror beyond all rational comprehension, and I began to scream hysterically. My mother (who could sometimes be a rather impatient lady) demanded to know what on earth was making me behave in this way, and with the limited vocabulary of a small child, I tried to explain the blind terror I was experiencing at the sight of the tree roots. As she was in a hurry to get to work, she picked me up and covered my eyes as we walked across a little bridge over the stream, and left the park through the huge iron gates. Once outside of the park, I began to calm down, though could not offer an explanation as to what had been going on inside of my mind. My mother I think took it as a childish "glitch", and assured me it was only harmless water and trees. She hoped that by the next morning I'd have recovered and forgotten all about the incident. But, the very same thing happened the next day.....this time much worse, and my mother then reluctantly decided that we'd have to take a different route to her place of work on the occasions that I was with her.
The years passed by and I grew up, rarely thinking about the above-mentioned incident in the park. I would just give it a fleeting thought occasionally, and conclude that my mother was probably right in thinking it was one of those inexplicable aspects of childhood behavior which we all grow out of eventually.
During the early 1990s, I began to develop an interest in the history of my home town, and I took myself off to the library to read up as much as I could. A book on the shelf in the library caught my eye, and purely out of curiosity, I took the book to a table and began to leaf through it. The book was all about ghostly happenings in and around my home town, and I was reading it with what I can only describe as mildly amused fascination - when, something leaped out of the page at me. It was an article describing how, back in about the 14th century, the very park I mention above was part of a manor house estate. It was recorded that the Lord of the Manor had been a very cruel and vicious man, and one by one his wives had gone missing without trace. One morning, a peasant gardener who was employed by the Lord was strolling through the grounds by the stream, and he saw something that made his blood run cold.....the Lord, oblivious to his spectator, was holding wife no.5's head underwater whilst strangling her with a leather strap. The peasant ran into the house and raised the alarm to the other staff members, and to cut the rest of the story short, the Lord was pronounced guilty of murdering his 5th wife, and hanged............though I never "saw" anything other than what was there in reality at the time when I'd be taken past the murder spot by my mother, could I have in some way been picking up at some level on the residual "energies" from what had happened six centuries earlier? Or was it something more, albeit unseen, "ghostly" at work?
2. During the long, hot, scorching UK summer of 1966 when I was aged 12, my father and stepmother decided they wanted to move out of their lodgings, and buy a house. They viewed quite a few different houses, most of which were out of their price range, then the estate agent recommended that they view a small terraced house in the center of town which was affordable. My father and stepmother viewed the house two or three times and decided that though it needed some refurbishment, it was exactly what they were looking for. They asked me if I'd like to go and see it with them, and one very hot Sunday afternoon in July, the three of us went to view the house together. We walked up the path to the front door, and strolled inside. Though warm, the inside of the house provided a pleasant relief from the searing sunshine outside. My dad showed me all of the rooms in the house while my stepmother went into the garden to speak to who, if they bought the house, would be their next-door neighbor.
At the top of the landing upstairs, was a large room which my dad and I entered. The air in the room, uniquely to the rest of the house, was freezing cold. That struck both of us as strange, bearing in mind how hot the weather was outside. We ignored it though and put it down to the fact that the day's sunshine hadn't yet penetrated the room, and that it would warm up later as the afternoon progressed. Although we were still feeling cold, my dad and I had a lot of fun in the room. There was still a little furniture in the room left by the previous occupant, and we had fun opening the drawers of a bureau and examining the contents. The drawers contained various items such as boxes of matches, odd pieces of cutlery, pieces of string and other meaningless trivia. My dad pushed his hand into the back of the drawer and pulled out a metal box. He opened the lid, and inside, there was a huge old-fashioned syringe and two vials of clear liquid.....the vials were labeled "insulin".....he closed the box and put it back in the drawer.
At that point, my stepmother called us from the garden, and we went downstairs to join her. The lady next door had been telling my stepmother about the previous occupant of the house, and stated that he was an old man living alone, who had died of complications arising from diabetes...that obviously explained what my dad and I had just a few minutes before, found in the metal box in the strange, cold room upstairs. Suddenly, whilst we were all talking over the garden fence, a small black dog hurtled from the would-be neighbor's kitchen, and dashed to the end of the garden. The dog stopped and turned towards the fence separating his garden from ours, and was barking ferociously. At first my dad, stepmother and myself thought he was barking at us, then my stepmother noticed he wasn't even looking at us but was barking and growling at a certain spot at the bottom of the separating fence. The lady next door told us that the dog had done this ever since the man who'd owned "our" house died.....and eerily explained that the man had actually collapsed and died in his garden, right by the spot where the dog was barking. She went on to explain that this wasn't a case of the dog remembering having seen the old man collapse and die, as when it happened, her husband had taken the dog for a walk on the beach - the dog wasn't even there when it happened.
Fascinated that the dog had been picking up on something that he hadn't even seen, my dad, stepmother and I said goodbye to the neighbor and made our way back into the house. We had opened all the doors and windows to try and air the place a bit, hoping the musty smell would gradually disappear. My dad wanted to show my stepmother what he and I had found in the "cold" room, so the three of us made our way up the stairs......as we were halfway up, there was an almighty series of crashing noises. We three jumped as if we'd been shot, and noticed that all the doors we'd opened had suddenly slammed shut. My dad, now becoming nervous, stated that it couldn't have been the wind which blew them shut as there wasn't even the tiniest hint of a breeze outside. We decided to carry on up the stairs though, and walked into the "cold" room once more. We didn't hang around for long though, because my stepmother let out a huge gasp, and pointed to the floor. On the floor was the metal box which my father had discovered earlier and had put back in the drawer after inspecting the contents.....the box was opened, one of the syringes lay on the floor, and there were spots of fresh, wet blood on the lino leading away from it.
Gritting his teeth and being very brave, my dad decided to search the house to see if there was a person (maybe a tramp) hiding out, and he led the way....my stepmother and I following close behind. We scoured the house from top to bottom...looking in all the corners and cupboards, and found nothing, no evidence at all of anyone else being in the house, or having recently been. We then decided it would be better to leave, and for my dad and stepmother to go back to the drawing board and hunt for another, less creepy house to buy. On our way out, my dad stopped dead in his tracks......by the front door, a piece of wallpaper was peeling from the wall slowly and deliberately.....at the top edge, there was a finger-shaped indentation, yet no visible person performing the act. We just stood and watched, open-mouthed, then ran for it!
In the early 1970s, I had a boyfriend called Nick. One evening he wanted to take me home to meet his mother, so I went along. I was gobsmacked when he took me to the very same house where all the above had happened. He told me that they'd moved into the house January of 1967, and since they'd been living there, strange things had happened like doors slamming, wallpaper sliding off walls.....and when I met her, his mother confirmed what he'd told me. It is interesting to note that Nick told me these things with no knowledge whatsoever that my dad and stepmother had once been on the verge of buying the house, or that I'd been there and witnessed these things myself.
3. In the early to mid 1980s, I shared an office at work with a girl called Christine. We had a lot in common, were the same age, and soon became firm friends. We had to have separate lunch-breaks from one another to make sure there was phone cover in the office, so we never had the opportunity to go out to lunch together. When we had been working together for a few weeks, we discovered that our minds seemed to work almost identically in that we'd go out separately to the shops in our lunch breaks, and on each of us's return, discover that we'd.....completely independently of one another.....bought exactly the same things. That was a very frequent occurrence, and we put it down largely to either coincidence, or the fact that as we were so similar as people, we would most likely make similar or the same choices in buying things. In 1987 I left the company, but Christine and I kept in regular contact and would meet up now and again for a meal and a drink.
In 1991, Christine (at that time newly divorced) invited me to spend a weekend at her house in South London. I was looking forward to spending the weekend with her as we hadn't spoken for some time, and it would be good to catch up on all our news. We decided to get a takeaway meal, a couple of bottles of wine, and have a "girlie" evening indoors. During the evening, I looked at a clock which Christine had on her mantelpiece (I'd never been to her home before) and admired it. She told me that it had been her great grandmother's clock, handed down to her, and that it hadn't worked for over 50 years. She then jokingly said "If we concentrate hard enough, maybe we can re-start the clock" and......not even a split second after she finished speaking, there was a loud but soothing, steady ticking sound...the clock at that instant had sprang into action! We were stunned, to say the least and considered that it could have been a total coincidence, but how on earth did a clock which had been out of action for more than 50 years choose that particular instant to start working again?
As the years went by, whenever Christine and I met or spoke to one another (I never did go back to her house, as it was a long way from where I live), I always asked after the health of the clock, and she each time assured me it was still working and had never stopped again.
4. Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I used to do some voluntary work. I became fairly involved, and because there was often masses of paperwork to wade through, I spent a lot of time on the organization's premises, sometimes until quite late in the evening. One night, I was alone upstairs in the building (there were people downstairs) and suddenly, for only a tiny fraction of a second, the room I was sitting in changed.....in this split second, I managed to "feel" and "see" myself in a room, furnished in 1930s style, with a crackling fire burning in the grate. There was an old man in a rocking chair, and I distinctly heard his very gruff voice, in a true East London cockney accent, say " 'Allo Darlin' ". I also had the impression of a little girl with long dark curly hair, wearing a white frilly dress, sitting quietly on the floor playing with a huge china doll. The vision left me instantly, and I put it to the back of my mind, thinking I'd maybe had some kind of very brief hallucination (being as in my teens and early 20s I was a psychedelic drug-abuser, I thought I was just having a belated flashback).
Over the ensuing weeks though, I couldn't get this image I'd had that night out of my head, and I began to phone around the other volunteers, asking if they'd seen or heard anything unusual in the building. I was astonished to learn that more than 30 people (out of a total of 80 volunteers) had seen and/or heard odd things, yet hadn't spoken about it in case everybody else thought they were lying, or going mad. Without giving anything away of what I'd seen and heard myself, I asked each of these people to describe their experiences to me. Most said that whilst downstairs in the building, they'd distinctly heard the sound of a child's footsteps running, coming from the ceiling area, and some said they'd on frequent occasions heard a child crying. Nobody had seen, felt or heard the old man, but quite a few said they'd heard like a muffled, gentle thudding sound on the ceiling - I asked each person if it could have been a rocking chair, and each one said yes, it had sounded just like that.
Having collected my information from speaking to these people, I published an article in the organization's "in-house" magazine, describing my experiences. I said nothing about what those other people had told me, and after the publication of the magazine, several more people phoned me and described hearing and "seeing" similar things.
It certainly wasn't possible that these noises could have come from an adjoining house, because the organization's premises was totally detached, and there were no houses at all within 200 yards of the premises all around.
A few years ago the building was demolished, and I felt a little sad......wondering what had happened to my "ghosts".
5. Almost 20 years ago, and during a very very good time of my life, I had a phone call one evening from a man called James. James was the friend of a friend, and though we'd met a few times at social gatherings and had a few light conversations, we hardly knew one another at all. I was pleased that James had phoned me, but wondered how he'd got my number as he didn't know my surname, and he informed me that he'd asked one of our mutual friends for it because he wanted to talk to me. Before we began to chat, James said "I have a feeling you are in need of a reading". I knew that James was a medium, but it hadn't occurred to me to think anything of it particularly. There was a sort of an excited urgency in James' voice, and I agreed to go along to his house for a reading. I didn't really expect to get anything from it, but went out of curiosity more than anything.
I took a bus to James' house, and he invited me into his comfortable living room and told me to make myself at home. He made me coffee, provided a plate piled high with chocolate biscuits, and had a glass of water for himself, saying he only drank water when doing his readings. We sat quiet for a few moments, then James' gentle voice began speaking. He wasn't saying much of relevance to begin with.....just saying small things, such as telling me the color of the digital display on my bedside clock-radio, telling me that life was about to really open up for me in a big way (and with hindsight, he was right, as it did)......then he sat quiet for a few moments more, with his eyes closed. I didn't say a word to him at all, as I'd heard that mediums can "feed" off of what we say to them, ask open-ended questions, and glean information from us that we aren't aware we're giving, and build a "reading" up on that basis which appears accurate, but is no more than what we've inadvertently already told them. I wasn't going to give him the opportunity of doing this, so I stayed totally quiet. Whilst James was sitting quietly with his eyes closed, I had a very strange sensation. He and I were completely alone in his house, but I had a feeling that there were crowds of people outside of his living-room door. Then James opened his eyes and began to speak......and, what he said completely threw me off balance.
He said he had two people "coming through" - the first of them was a lady called "Auntie", but he said that wasn't quite the name he was "hearing".....and he was just assuming it was Auntie. He then asked if me I knew anybody called "Arnie", as that was what he was actually hearing. All I did was merely, with one word, confirm that someone called "Arnie" had been at one time a part of my life. James then said that "Arnie" was introducing a man with a Scots accent to me. He then went on to describe this Scotsman in the most intimate of detail........hair color and type, eye color, body shape....all sorts of things. James told me that this Scotsman was calling himself by two names, Frank and Jock, and that Frank/Jock's surname was the same as his, James'. I had no idea what James' surname was - then he told me his surname! I gasped, as it was the same as my maiden-name, my father's surname. My father's christian name was Frank, and he was known as Jock to his friends. Every single thing James told me about my father's physical appearance was 100% accurate, and he wasn't getting that from looking at me, as I strongly resemble my mother, looks-wise. He even described my dad's tattoos in great detail.
I won't record here the other things James said to me regarding and "on behalf" of my dad, because a lot of them are very personal and private - but James' accuracy was absolutely, fully, totally 100% in all ways. There is no way that James could possibly have known any of these things, either from me or from the mutual friends we had, as they were things that I have always kept extremely private and never spoken about to anybody......not even my mother knew about them....also, I stayed more or less completely quiet for the duration of the reading. All I did was confirm, just with the use of the word "yes" and nothing more, each thing that James told me. I could almost feel the presence of my father too, and of course "Arnie", throughout the reading. At the end, James said Frank/Jock and "Arnie" had given all they could on that particular occasion, and that they wished me goodbye and good luck, assuring that they were "looking over" and "looking after" me.
I found the whole experience of that reading with James very profound and moving, and it raised so many questions about the paranormal that I still have no answers for. I walked away after the reading was over, happy that I had felt a strong contact with my beloved, long-departed dad and the also long-departed "Arnie", who, though not related to me, had been a large part of my life and meant so much to me when I was a small child.
Over the next couple of years, James and I kept in very loose contact, mostly through our mutual friends. In 1992, I bought my very first place to live (had always lived in rented accommodation before), and I decided to ask James if he'd come and do a reading for me in my new place. He agreed, and visited me one Sunday afternoon.
He sat on my sofa, eyes closed and silent, then after a few moments said to me that he was unable to bring up either my dad or "Arnie", and that in fact, there was very little he could tell me. He concentrated again for a while, eyes closed again, then when he opened his eyes he said "I'm sorry Jackie, but all I'm seeing is just water, water, water, just pouring, gushing, flooding water....gallons of it, oceans of it". He then went on to explain that he had no idea what the "water" images he was getting were about, and that maybe I could place my own interpretations upon it all. He offered a few suggestions in that it could mean water in the literal sense, but he couldn't see how that could be part of my life, or that it could mean an overseas trip, or an inner journey of some kind.....or that it could signify powerful emotion. James then left, and invited me to phone him if I had any queries or wanted to discuss the reading further.
I got on with my life and put James' latest reading to the back of my mind.
About six months later, I woke up one Saturday morning, got out of bed, and made my way to the bathroom. Still half asleep, I suddenly became aware that my feet were wet......I looked down, and my carpet was sodden. The whole floor throughout my flat (apartment) was seeped in gallons of water. I began to panic, wondering where on earth the water was coming from. I went back to the bathroom, looked upwards, and saw a deluge coming through the ceiling from the flat (apartment) upstairs. To cut a long story short, my neighbor upstairs had turned his bath taps on, and gone back to bed......fallen asleep, and left the bath running, which eventually flooded through my ceiling. After a lot of negotiating, we managed to sort things out and over the next few days, my place gradually began to dry out.
Soon afterwards, my upstairs neighbor moved out, and a new one moved in. One evening I was sitting watching TV in my living room, when I heard a loud dripping noise. I went to investigate, and the noise was coming from the bathroom. I looked up at the ceiling, and sure enough - there it was again - a deluge pouring from the flat above, through into my bathroom. The new upstairs neighbor had done exactly the same thing as her predecessor - fallen asleep after turning the bath taps on. Again it eventually got sorted out - and, within six months, exactly the same thing happened once more.
All in all, it happened a total of six times during the five years I was living in that place before I sold up and moved on.
Another interesting thing regarding what James had said about the interpretation of the images of water he'd passed across to me in his last reading, was that the five years I occupied that place before selling and moving on, were the years that I was involved in the most passionate romance of my whole lifetime, plus the ensuing breakup of it. The whole experience of that romantic relationship and its loss, brought out extreme emotions of all kinds in me that I didn't even know I was capable of. On analysis of that, James' words echoed in my head.....water possibly signifying powerful emotion. So, he was right on several counts!
That brings me onto my last but not least paranormal experience.
6. Last July (2007), my beautiful friend Alan left this world. He had been ill for a while with cancer, and after spending some months in remission, Alan sadly lost his battle with life.
Alan and I had been very, very close friends for twenty years, and he was what I (and he) would term as a very spiritual type of person......not religious, but very aware of something deeper at work in the universe than the everyday norm. He had a fiery nature.....sometimes a fiery temper, but was a good, kind person. In life, Alan always used to joke that if he died before me, he'd somehow make sure he "sent" me something - he had no idea what, but said that I'd know it was him. Because of Alan's very passionate and fiery nature, his nickname was "Dragon".
Alan had a humanist funeral, and it was very touching as the congregation said "goodbye" to a very much loved and admired friend who'd injected so much light, positivity and inspiration into our lives. As the curtains closed and the coffin travelled along its journey into the flames, the congregation made their way outside to pay their respects to Alan at the plot designated for him in the crematorium. We stood silently around the floral tributes by his plot, then suddenly out of nowhere, a dragonfly appeared......hovered for a few seconds over Alan's flowers, then vanished. Those who had always called Alan by his "Dragon" nickname were shocked and astonished. It is interesting to note that the crematorium is in the middle of a large urban area, with no water anywhere in the vicinity. The sight of a dragonfly in such an urbanised region, particularly in an area so far away from water, truly is a once-in-a-lifetime event......yet that event happened at the exact moment the mourners were paying their respects to their departed friend, nicknamed "Dragon".
Gradually the congregation dispersed, and I made my way home.
As soon as I arrived home, I switched on the radio....which is permanently tuned in to BBC Radio 2, a radio station in the UK which is renowned for playing easy-listening, middle-of-the-road music. I was stopped in my tracks.....the music playing on Radio 2 was the opera piece, "Carma Burana". Alan had requested that "Carma Burana" be played at his funeral, which it was. But, what was so strange about me arriving home and it being the very first thing on the radio? Of course coincidence instantly springs to mind, but firstly Alan wasn't really a music lover, especially opera - though he did love "Carma Burana" and had always told people that's what he wanted played at his funeral - and, secondly, it is astonishingly rare to hear opera played on BBC Radio 2, as the station is almost wholly reserved for the softer end of mainstream oldies pop music.
Coincidence? Or a "message" (along with the dragonfly) from Alan?
The End.