to her house as her mother was not at home. It was the first time I had been to her house and on the way back she warned me that it was haunted by the spirit of her grandmother. It was a comfortable middle-class home with nothing strange or unusual about it except that it was cold and there was a feeling of someone watching us. Jenny showed me a picture of her grandmother as a child, pointing out a shadow behind her which, she said, had become bigger since her death.
Nothing happened until we went up to Jenny’s bedroom. We were sitting drinking tea and chatting when she suddenly looked behind me. I felt a cold draught entering the room and Jenny whispered that her grandmother had just walked in. I was petrified. I felt this chilly hand stroke my head and all I wanted to do was scream and run away. But then Jenny told me that her grandmother wanted to communicate with me. Speaking through Jenny, she told me that I had ‘the gift’ and that when I grew up I would be working with spirit. This was hard to believe at that time, as I had set my heart on becoming a psychologist.
MY INITIATION
Often the family went to Spain for holidays. One year we decided instead to go to Portugal. It was while I was there I encountered a mystic, a man who could see my future mapped out before me.
We were staying in a town close to the mountains and during one of my solitary walks away from the family I was approached by an elderly gentleman. He spoke to me first in Portuguese, then, when I did not reply, in English, asking whether I knew him. I was very wary and replied that I did not. He laughed at my resistance and I responded to his peaceful and warm manner. This encounter led to a long guiding relationship.
Once I had permission from my family to meet him every day, we walked for hours through the beautiful wild countryside as he taught me about reincarnation, life after death, angels, guiding spirits and most importantly karma, the cycles of life of the soul. We spent a month together and before I left Portugal, he warned me that I would go through a very dark initiation and that this experience would change my life.
So it did. Just after my ‘A’ level exams, I was looking forward to a fun summer. With a place lined up at university to study psychology, I felt nothing could go wrong. Then at the end of the summer I met a ‘wizard’. He was a powerful man with a magnetic charm and was seeking young people to initiate. He used his music business contacts to entice us. Our youthful yearning for fame and power made us vulnerable and he was able to manipulate and coerce us into leaving home, joining his cult and performing rituals and magic that would have frightened even the most adept psychic.
During this period of my life I ‘lost’ myself to the powers of the wizard. Over time, though, I slowly began to become suspicious of the integrity of his methods and through my God-given protection, my intuition, I was able to turn against his cultist regime. This resulted in a serious psychic attack and possession by malevolent forces, which caused a debilitating illness, insomnia and a digestive disorder which led me to lose two stone in weight. My family and friends suggested that I needed help, and for the first time since my meeting with the wizard, I listened to them.
I was not alone in this encounter with the wizard’s wrath. I found two other victims and we set up ritual protection against his powers. We were then approached by a group of occultists who were members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, following the teachings of Dion Fortune and others. With their knowledge and protection, we managed to escape the wizard and return home. The members of the occult group offered healing, guidance and support, and through their knowledge and compassion I was able to recover from this ordeal. It took a year, but with their help I gained an understanding of the practice of magic, ritual and occult lore.
Since the ‘wizard’ had forced us to leave our family homes and stop all professional duties, I lost my place at university, took a job in marketing and my life took a very different turn...
I met Gillian Griffiths, a well known medium who used to run psychic development and healing groups. She also told me that I had a natural talent and encouraged my development. I would come to class with stories of haunted houses and other numerous psychic encounters which became the focus of the class each week. Gillian helped me to become adept at helping the spirits move on until I became involved in a haunting which was far too malevolent for purely psychic skills to deal with. It was then that she suggested that I call on a renowned ghosthunter and healer called Terry O’Sullivan.
THE ST MARGARETS POLTERGEIST
At that time, it was customary for my friends and me to socialize in the pub at weekends and later go on to a party at a friend’s house. One night, my brother Paul, his girlfriend Sîan, Rick, a friend of ours, and I went to Matthew’s house in St Margarets, a quiet part of town close to the river Thames. Matthew was a friend of my brother’s and I had not met him before. I knew very little about him except that his mother had been a heroin addict and had died in the house, and his father had recently died of a heart attack.
It was a small Victorian terraced house. We all sat in the front room and put on some modern rock-type music that was popular at that time. Sîan, Paul, Rick and I sat on the sofa opposite the fireplace, which had a mirror hanging over it.
Within about half an hour the atmosphere began to feel a little tense, slightly chaotic. The boys started arguing over the music. Then suddenly I started to feel a pressure on my chest. I looked up into the mirror and instead of seeing the four of us on the sofa, I saw two old ladies, a white-haired man in his fifties, who I presumed was Matthew’s father, and a woman I did not recognize. This startled me. Then Sîan started to complain of the same kind of symptoms.
The music on the sound system supernaturally transformed itself into the organ music that you would hear on the old black-and-white horror movies of the 1930s. The next moment Sîan and I had both been pinned up against the wall by an invisible force. The pressure on my chest was excruciating and I thought I was about to suffer a heart attack. I held on to Rick’s hand and my fingerprints came out on his flesh as if I had burnt him with my hand! Then the plates in the kitchen started to smash on the floor, the windows and doors started to open and close and we all began to scream!
I had very little understanding of what to do under these unusual circumstances, as I had never been attacked by a poltergeist before, so I just thought I should summon the angelic beings to help! I prayed to God and to God’s protecting angels, my guides and ancestors... From the moment I began to pray and concentrated my focus on calling upon God, the music stopped and the dark atmosphere that had entered the room disappeared. As the mood lightened, Sîan and I settled back down into the sofa. Everyone laughed hysterically and then pretended nothing had happened!
Later I asked Matthew if he had ever experienced anything like this before. He said he had, just after his father had died. During the night he had sometimes felt something get in the bed with him and on occasions throw him out.
The following week I went to my class and told Gillian about this encounter. She lit a candle for the spirits of the dead that had been trapped in the house and suggested that some kind of poltergeist, possibly non-human, was living off the life force of human souls. She believed that we had gathered enough energy for it to manifest its powers. Since I had been able to banish it from the front room and prevent it attacking us, she suggested I go back and check out what it wanted and examine the history of the house for any clues as to what it could be.
The following weekend I went back, this time during the afternoon, rather than at night. I felt I was being watched, but the poltergeist did not come close. I located the spirits of the two old ladies in the main bedroom upstairs. They were earthbound and afraid. I tried in my naïve inexperienced way to rescue them, but they felt trapped and I certainly did not have the power to help them move on.
After my invocation to release the old ladies, I heard plates being smashed in the kitchen. There was nobody in there and the moment I walked into the kitchen, it stopped.
The next moment, a loud bang came from the bathroom. Matthew went running upstairs to find out what had happened. Water was leaking all over the floor and the clothes from the airing cupboard had been thrown down the stairs.
I