It begins with a soft hum, a gentle buzz in the back of my mind, like that of a single light bulb in an otherwise silent room. I can hear it in my head but it is not quite noise, more like a current of electricity. It is hard to describe because, frankly, I don’t yet fully understand myself what goes on, and I’ve been experiencing it for nearly sixty years. The best way I can explain it is like this: have you ever sat in one of those fake electric chairs at a funfair where you hold the metal handles and a current slowly builds up along your arms? Well, it’s like that, but it happens in my head. I sound mad already, don’t I?
The build-up starts with individual currents humming in harmony with each other. Sometimes a part of the humming crystallizes into a thought or a sound and I hear a whisper, a word, usually a name.
Each individual strand of energy is a spirit; it is the soul of a departed being. Congregating together, they create the hum, that distant call from a place I still don’t completely understand. It’s the collective energy of spirit. It’s the noise of the afterlife, the voices of hundreds of spirits murmuring through my thoughts, calling to me from across the divide, excited and sometimes urgent, hoping to get a message to someone in the audience at one of my live shows.
The process begins to happen when I’m sitting alone in the bowels of a theatre – any theatre, it doesn’t matter, it’s always the same. Spirits do not exist in the same realm as we do, so space and time have no meaning for them. I’ll usually be putting on my make-up, doing my hair and changing into my stage outfit when it starts.
At every show I have a little ritual, and I didn’t even realize I performed it until one of my stage crew pointed it out to me. I’ll go to my dressing room and I’ll hang my three garments for the evening in exactly the same way. The hangers will always point in the same direction and the outfits will always be in the same order: first-half stage outfit at the front, second-half stage outfit in the middle and book-signing outfit at the back. Then I’ll carefully lay out my make-up in order: brushes to the side, eye make-up, lippy, foundation and powder all grouped together in sections on the counter in front of the mirror. I haven’t got OCD, honestly! I think the ritual just helps me focus on the show. And as I go through the funny little routines of getting ready, the humming starts, because they know. They know soon I will open myself up to spirit and soon their loved ones will be coming through the front doors, taking their seats and praying for a sign, for a connection. They know something amazing is about to happen. They know the impossible is about to become possible. And they are getting excited, just as, hopefully, their loved ones are getting excited about the night ahead too.
I’ve been touring for several years now and, at first, when I sat there in my dressing room full of nerves and apprehension, crossing everything for a good night, the energy in my head seemed unusual and alien. I’d been used to it in a much clearer, defined way when I did one-to-one readings for clients in my home. The energy then was a distinct inner voice, like a thought process, but not my own and not one I was consciously controlling. It would pop words and images into my head, like a postman dropping mail through the letterbox. This otherworldly thought process ran parallel with my own and it would place such clear thoughts in my mind that I would see things, sometimes great, sweeping visions of men during wartime or a family surrounding a dying woman in a hospital ward, and other times a single object, such as a leather-bound book or a gold ring. I’d know automatically that whatever I was being ‘given’ in these thoughts was important to the person I was sitting with and I’d explain exactly and in as much detail as I could what I was seeing and hearing in my mind.
But in the theatres those single strands of energy congregate into a bustling mass. The locations and the scenery change, but the process that takes place within me remains the same. At first the energy building up is calming, a steady background noise, like waves or running water. As the auditorium begins to fill with people, the noise gets louder and louder. The theatre fills with life – and death.
Lately, this energy build-up is becoming more pronounced. It’s as if word is spreading. Sometimes it’s an effort to keep the energy at bay until the curtain goes up. You see, I’ve been practising, and practice makes perfect, as we all know. I’ve been touring for several years now, taking my psychic roadshow to larger and larger audiences, and I get the impression that spirit knows this. In the hour or so before the show starts, the energy can become a cacophony as spirits jostle for position, eager to connect with lost loves and family members, to give important messages or warnings, or sometimes just to say, ‘Hello, I’m here, I love you.’ Luckily, I’m able to have a degree of control over the whole process, otherwise they’d all come through in one big rush, like shoppers barging through the door at the New Year sales, and I’d probably fry my brain.
As I sit there, slicking on my lippy, some of those energy strands will form into clear thoughts, feelings, visions and voices. A name will suddenly jump out of my subconscious into the front of my mind. Often, it’s so defined, I hear it as a sound in my head: ‘Fred!’ or ‘Annie!’ Sometimes, it’s so clear and unexpected it makes me jump. You’d think I would be used to it by now, wouldn’t you? But the truth is I never quite get used to dead people talking in my head, using me as a mouthpiece, especially when I’m not in work mode. If I see something or hear something from spirit when I’m not expecting it, I freak out, just like everybody else.
At other times, the thoughts present themselves as whispers: ‘I’m here, Val. I miss you,’ or ‘Mummy, I’m OK, I’m with Gramps.’ Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes so tragically sad and desperate my heart aches and I cry with the person the message is meant for. Sometimes the spirits delivering the messages are shy; sometimes they are forceful. The one thing they all have in common is an air of expectation. I used to be daunted by it. I hate letting people down, living and dead, and when I have an audience of over a thousand people in front of me waiting for a message from a passed loved one and a cloud of expectant spirit energy surrounding me, I just never have enough time to pair every spirit up with every member of the audience. I know that I can’t please everyone every night. I know that every night there will, sadly, be people who leave disappointed, for a number of reasons. They may have wanted a message but not have one, I may not have worked in the way they expected a medium to work (I think it’s good to be unconventional, though – I don’t get any complaints from spirit!), they may feel the whole process is too emotional for them. But I can’t get too worried because, if I did, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do. All I can hope for is that, each night when I step out on stage, I’ll make some important connections, I’ll reassure some people, I’ll entertain others and I’ll give everyone a sense of hope – hope that there is something when our loved ones and we ourselves pass away. Not much of a tick-list, is it?
Despite the pressure, though, I love my work. When I step out before an audience, I feel like I’m surrounded by my friends, living and dead.
By the time the curtain goes up, the energy is like white noise and individual thought patterns are popping into my head. Some people may have a preconceived idea that, before a show, I sit in my dressing room meditating in front of an altar or burning incense and chanting to spirit world to summon up my spirit guides. Sorry to disappoint but I’m more likely to be fussing about my hair! My work, connecting with spirit, is unaffected. I don’t need to perform any magic rites or incantations. Why would I? That isn’t what I’m about and never has been. I try to keep my show and my gift as genuine as possible. What happens to me happens naturally – or supernaturally, depending on which way you look at it. It’s weird enough as it is: I’ve never felt the need to embellish it with any extra mysticism. In fact, quite the opposite: I try to analyse what I do scientifically – but I’ll go into that a bit later.
For now, the best description I can give is that, when I start to receive messages, it’s as if I take on the thought patterns and the memories of the person who is dead, as if these are dropped into my head. As you can imagine, it’s not the easiest thing to describe, and I’m sure any psychiatrists reading this will be pulling on their white coats and knocking on my door pronto. It’s not like the inner dialogue we all have inside our minds. That is conscious thought, which is the way we all talk to ourselves internally. No, this is subconscious, involuntary thoughts. If I said the words ‘ice cream’ to you, the chances are you would have an image of a lovely ice-cream cornet floating in your mind. You didn’t think to yourself, Now what does an icecream cone look like? What colour is it? What does it taste like? Your mental image of an ice cream just popped into your head. That’s how it happens with me. The thoughts are not mine, they belong to someone else but, because that someone else does not possess the ability to speak in the way we recognize, they use me as a mouthpiece instead. It’s as if a trap door is opened in the crown of my head and all these random thoughts and memories are poured in and then they spill out of my mouth, like in a Monty Python cartoon.
The skill, and the thing that I have become much better at since I’ve been on the road doing my live theatre shows, is the ability to focus on specific messages and energies within the cloud of spirits and to shut out others. It’s as if I can put a bouncer on that trap door who allows the messages to come in one or two at a time rather than all together. Imagine that kind of psychic energy flowing through you for three hours without regulation. I’d end up a gibbering wreck. Even as it is, the force of nature I feel flowing through me is explosive. After each show, having been plugged into the psychic mains for several hours, you could virtually scrape me off the ceiling. It takes me two hours to come down because of all that collective energy. I wish I could say it leaves me exhausted and that I sleep like a baby but, unfortunately, the opposite is true. I’m buzzing so much it often leaves me nursing a bout of insomnia, my mind racing and unable to shut down. Sometimes I wonder what the long-term effects will be. It could give me longevity – that’s what I’m hoping: I certainly feel younger since I’ve been experiencing this energy in such large amounts. I feel energized after each show. I feel as if I’ve been shocked with a defibrillator every night. Then again, it could kill me – who knows? Speak to me when I’m a hundred and I might have a better idea! Can you imagine? I’ll be in a home somewhere and the staff will be saying: ‘See that woman over there? She reckons she used to be friends with the Princess of Wales and she speaks to dead people. She’s nutty.’
The ability to regulate the thoughts and feelings popping into my head isn’t a wholly conscious action. I can’t choose the messages I receive. I can’t reach in and pluck out specific thoughts or invite in specific spirits. It’s not like choosing raffle tickets from some great psychic tombola. But when specific messages drop into my head I can concentrate on them and hold the others at bay. I can help them be heard. It’s almost a reflex action, like moving an arm or a leg. You don’t consciously have an inner dialogue with the muscles of your arm to instruct them what to do, it just seems to happen, allowing you to get on with other things, like chatting on the phone or doing your shopping. It’s the same with me. To a degree, I can orchestrate the messages from spirit and stop the spirit energy overwhelming me while, back on earth plane, I speak to the audience, give a performance and act like a normal human being … well, normal-ish!
When I’m on stage, as those thoughts and memories drop into my head, I tend to take on the characteristics of the spirit that is supplying them. So I might suddenly develop a limp, or a squint. An opera singer came through to me recently and, without even realizing, I found myself straight-backed with a theatrically puffed-out chest. It’s a little like being possessed, but there’s no malice in it. My head doesn’t spin around. As far as I can tell, it’s just that, with the amount of practice I’ve had, my gift is developed to the point where the messages and personalities that come through to me now are so clear it’s not just my mind that is affected, my body is too. Think, for example, of an athlete who trains for years to be a shot-putter. The most important muscles he or she develops are the ones around the arm and shoulder that will be doing the throwing, but the rest of his or her body develops too. The part of my brain that communicates with spirit has become increasingly developed over the years because I use it so much, but I reckon other pathways have opened up through my body as well which allow these psychic neurons to zip in and affect my arms, my legs or my face.
After the chaotic psychic orchestra of a show, those pathways take a little while to close. After each show I do book signings and what we call meet-and-greets in the foyer. It gives me a chance to say hello to my lovely fans. The funny thing is that, because I’m so ‘switched on’, whenever I shake a hand or give a hug – any physical contact – I get a jolt of energy like a small electric shock from the person I touch and bam!, suddenly I know something about them, and I blurt it out.
‘I’m sorry to hear about your job,’ I’ll say. Or: ‘You wanted a message from your mum, didn’t you, love? Don’t worry, she’s with you and she’s proud of you.’ They’re often as surprised as I am. If I had a pound for everyone who has stood open-mouthed and asked me, ‘How on earth do you know that?’, I’d be a rich woman by now.
The truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself, but my theory is that spirits are always with us and around us, and they know everything about us; they know what we are getting up to, where we’ve been and what we’ve done. They exist in a very different place to the world we inhabit. They aren’t constrained like we are to the physical world; they aren’t bound to the past, the present or the future. They’re not held down by space or time and they’re attuned to the ones they love. So when I get a seemingly random message about a new pair of shoes someone might have just bought and I blurt it out to the new owner of those shoes, it comes from spirit, and it is that specific spirit’s way of saying, ‘I’m here, this is the proof.’
I’m not a mind reader and, thankfully, I can control this inbuilt psychic tuner, to an extent. So when I’m queuing up to buy my groceries in Tesco, I’m not looking around at all the other shoppers and being shown what they got up to the night before. Heaven forbid! If I started doing that I’d be the most unpopular woman in the country. It’s not my business and, frankly, I don’t want to know. I’ve also made a very conscious effort not to pick up spirit at home and not to invite in spirits connected to me or to my family. I feel it would make my personal life too complicated. It would drive my husband, John, and daughters, Fern and Rebecca, mad if I kept my psychic radar switched on all the time. After all, at the end of the day, we all need to have boundaries and I’m not sure I’d want passed relatives constantly contacting me, no matter how much they are missed. So, most of the time, the messages I pick up are for people in the audience. I think my friends and family in spirit probably recognize this and respect my wishes. Mainly, they stay away. They know they will see me again one day, and in the meantime they leave me to do my work. Well, they do most of the time anyway, but the thing with spirits is that they come to us when we need them.