Can a whole town be infected by suicidal energy? It sounds crazy, doesn’t it, but it happens. There are many cases where suicide seems to spread through a town like an infection. You read about it in the newspapers. Suddenly, within the space of a few months, several people in the same area take their lives. Usually, they are youngsters – most often, teenagers – and, usually, they know each other.
From our vantage point on this side of the divide between life and death, it all seems like such a waste and so pointless, but step into the afterlife and our point of view is no longer relevant. All that matters is that the dead are at peace.
I experienced the spirit side of one of these suicide outbreaks, if you can call them that, when I held a show in Perth, Scotland, a few years ago.
It started with a hijacked message. I had picked up the brother of an elderly woman in the audience and, as I was talking to her, the image of a broken plank of wood slotted into my mind. Where did that come from? I thought to myself, and asked the woman, ‘Was there a piece of timber or something that got smashed in half?’
She shook her head, bemused.
There was no doubt about what I was being shown – the image was strong and clear – so I persisted. Another spirit then came into focus: a teenage boy. And I knew that he had taken his own life. He had hanged himself. He appeared directly in front of me, in human form, and pulled me to the other side of the stage. I realized it was a completely different message to the one that I had been delivering. He had sabotaged the reading, and he was insistent. I told the lady that her brother was fine and at peace and had to move on to this new message. I’m sure she was disappointed that I couldn’t give her more but, unfortunately, that is what happens with mass readings. There is no queuing system, like at the deli counter in the supermarket; I just pass on what I hear. There were over a thousand people in the audience and, if each of them has someone waiting for them in spirit, that’s a prospective one thousand-plus messages. There’s no way I can order all that information. I just have to go with the flow and let spirit direct me.
‘I have a young boy here,’ I told the audience. ‘I know that he committed suicide. I see a plank of wood, and it’s broken in the middle.’
I heard the name Daniel being whispered to me in my mind, and relayed it to the audience.
‘I think he hanged himself,’ I added.
Then another name: ‘Graham?’ I said.
A middle-aged lady in a purple top stood nervously.
‘Graham was a close friend,’ she told me. I didn’t know it at the time, but Graham had died in 2004. He lived in a village called Auchtermuchty and, within the space of a few years, several young people had died in the same area. They had all taken their own lives.
I continued: ‘So who is Daniel?’
A younger woman who was with Graham’s friend stood with her to explain. ‘It was the name of his house,’ she said. ‘It was called Dan’s.’
Suddenly I saw the relevance of the broken wood. There is nothing random about spirit, you see. I saw a bench in a graveyard, a memorial bench, and the plank across the middle of the seat had been broken.
I told the women, ‘If you go to his bench, someone has jumped on it. It’s broken.’
But once again, spirit had a trick up its sleeve.
‘That’s not Graham’s bench, that’s another of my friends. They’re in the same cemetery,’ explained the second woman. ‘There were a few of them; they all killed themselves. One of the others had his bench vandalized the other day.’
I was given a date: the 17th. It was the date that the boy whose memorial bench had been vandalized had died: 17 March.
So I had two teenagers in the same cemetery who had both lived in the same village and had both taken their own lives. And, in the audience, I had two women who knew them. You can’t tell me there’s anything coincidental about that.
And it got even stranger.
A while later, I picked up the names Gordon, and what sounded like Kerrie and Kirana.
Immediately, a lady stood up.
‘My daughter is Kiana, I’m Corrie and my brother was called Gordon.’
Gordon was only twenty-nine and had taken his own life a few years before.
He had a message.
‘He says he isn’t cold,’ I related to the women. ‘He says it’s just his body that is cold and he’s no longer in his body.’
I later learned the relevance of this information. Gordon’s mum went to visit her son in the mortuary after he died. He looked so peaceful and she bent down to gently kiss his cheek. As she did so, she drew back in shock. His lifeless skin was so cold. She had always been troubled by this but had never spoken to anyone about it. It was a moment in her life that I captured.
Then came the psychic coup de grâce.
Another name popped into my head.
‘Is there anyone called Anne Marie?’ I asked Gordon’s sister.
She turned and pointed to the two women I had been speaking to earlier whose friends had both committed suicide in Auchtermuchty. Marie Anne was the older woman’s daughter. She was also in spirit and had also come from that fated village.
It was an amazing reading, one of the most mind-bending I can remember. All those spirits from that small village had swarmed in that night to let the world know they were safe and sound in Heaven.