Connected

Chapter 1

The early years

Iwas four or five years old when I saw my first ghost or at least that’s the first memory I have of the paranormal.  At that age though, I had no idea that the man I saw, as solid as you or I standing at the end of the upstairs landing was anything but a normal, living human. I had gone upstairs to play in my bedroom mid-afternoon and as I reached the top and stood on the landing, I noticed this man stood with his back to me at the far end, just before the corridor turned left towards my parents’ bedroom.

I can still see him in my mind now. He was approx. mid 30’s, very slim bordering on skinny. Wearing well-worn jeans and a simple t-shirt. His faded, red and wavy, unbrushed hair hung down past his ears, mid-way down his neck. I stopped in my tracks as he turned around and we just stood staring at each other for a second or two before he turned around again and went left towards my parents’ room. I wasn’t scared, I didn’t go screaming downstairs back to my mum. For all I knew he was a workman or a visitor. I didn’t even mention him to anyone until much later.

I was born in that very same house. It was Sept 1977 when my dramatic entrance into this world began. I was born early evening with the cord wrapped around my neck, in distress and choking on my own first bowel movement. The midwife exclaimed it was the scariest home birth she’d ever attended. My mum sat up with me the entire first night as I coughed and spluttered meconium to make sure I survived. I was also a contraceptive failure; I wasn’t even supposed to be here. The first strange coincidence was perhaps my name, that was picked from various names on pieces of paper. Eve came out first, which means ‘life’.  I was about to embark on a life filled with the most incredible, most bizarre experiences that I couldn’t have even dreamt of.

I was now seven years old and we were moving to a new home.  The removal van had already left with all our worldly goods. The house was completely empty and locked up. I was sat in the back of my parent’s car with my two older brothers who were 12 and 14yrs old at the time. We were parked to the rear of the house and as we drove off, both myself and my 12yr old brother turned to get our last look at the place. As I glanced up, I was surprised to see that same man looking back at us, giving us a small wave in the window of my brother’s bedroom and yes, my brother saw him too. Being that bit older than the first time I’d seen him, I knew he shouldn’t have been there, couldn’t have been there. What other explanation could there be other than he was not of this world? Years later I did tell my mum about him. Speaking to my mum about him again as I write this book, she confirmed that my brother who had seen him at the window as we left had also seen him in the house before as well. Forget telling my Dad though, he’s always been close-minded to all this kind of thing. It would just be my imagination, there’s no such thing as ghosts according to him but I know what I saw, I wasn’t the only one to see him and that was just a tiny taster of what was to come.

Years later I discovered that house had been built on farmland. The farmhouse was about a mile away on the same side of the very long road and still existed as a working farm for many years after. Some of the land had been sold to build multiple houses on. We were the first people to live in it. Was this ghost a farmer or farmhand, wandering around my house wondering where the fields had gone? He certainly looked the part with how he was dressed and his general appearance.

I don’t remember anything else happening in that house apart from insisting to my mum that I could see all sorts of faces in my bedroom curtains which were a hideous, lurid orange with brown swirls and flowers. Now that scared me! Pareidolia was certainly a distinct possibility in this case. However, I never really liked that room and it’s only now I come to share my stories and speaking to my mum about it as I write, that I find out my brothers both slept in that same room before I was born and they also weren’t keen on sleeping in there either.

Nothing too dramatic happened between the ages of eight and fifteen. The odd random smell such as cigarettes, perfume or onions which had no explanation, then suddenly vanish again moments later. Items set down going missing from underneath my nose and suddenly turning up in the same spot weeks later.  Odd and very frequent moments of Deja-Vue that left me confused and wondering what the hell just happened, strange coincidences, that kind of thing. Things that could be easily explained away.

There is one occasion that I vividly remember when I was around 13yrs old. My family were looking around various properties to find another new home and I was dragged along with them. One in particular, a bungalow that was empty of its occupants and furniture. It was dark and dreary looking, nothing special.  As soon as I walked into it, I said to my mum, ‘I don’t like this, I’m not living here.’  She had the same feeling. It wasn’t just because of how it looked but a sense of coldness that you could feel in your bones, a sense of unease. As I walked into one of the bedrooms it got worse. I said to my mum, ‘someone’s died in here’ with a feeling of deep knowing and absolute certainty.  We both couldn’t get out of there fast enough; we didn’t even bother looking at the rest of the rooms. The estate agent showing us around told my dad, who was still inside wandering around oblivious to it all that the previous owner had died two weeks before, inside the house and the family wanted a quick sale! Thankfully, my parents didn’t buy the house.

Chapter 2

The mid-late teen years

It was around the age of 16 after I’d finished with school that everything started to ramp up again. A lot of my spare time was spent with my aunt, who was only 14 years older than me. I looked a lot older than my age then which I took great delight in when I was able to walk into nightclubs and bars and no one batted an eyelid.  It wasn’t the alcohol I was interested in; I’ve never been particularly fussed about drinking but I had a great time enjoying the music and dancing for hours.

Then one day, I bought a teenage girl’s magazine, nothing unusual in that, I bought it often. However, this particular issue had an article about how to read the tarot using a normal pack of playing cards. So, I gave it a go, it was all straightforward, hearts were meant to be the equivalent to cups and one joker was used for the fool etc. It was really easy to do. The article had a few sentences for each card with basic meanings.  After working with them by myself for a month or so I decided to try them with family and give them readings. It was all just a bit of fun, right?

My aunt was on her second marriage and had one 11yr old child from her first. She desperately wanted another but had no luck falling pregnant again despite trying for years and being given medical treatment. We were sat in her flat one afternoon passing the time before we went out clubbing again and I was giving her a reading using these playing cards, when all of a sudden there was this feeling of deep knowing, a story unfolding in my thoughts but really quickly. The words came rushing out my mouth. ‘You’re going to have a baby soon but it’s not with Ben.’ (her husband at the time) My aunt didn’t say anything, just looked at me as I looked back at her thinking to myself, where did that come from? How is that going to happen? She hasn’t been able to get pregnant. I felt a bit bad for saying it out loud. It was just nonsense, wasn’t it?  But I just knew that within the next six months she’d be pregnant. Wasn’t the tarot supposed to be more to do with exploring your current emotional state and working through it? That’s all the cards gave me when I did readings for myself.

Two months later while out clubbing again, my aunt started chatting to a man, dancing with him and quite quickly it became obvious there was some chemistry going on between them. She split up with her husband and got together with this new man and three months later she was pregnant. I was shocked that my reading had come true. Coincidence? Maybe. Except every reading I gave after that all came true, except for one. Only one turned out to be partially true but it was many years later after the reading. I ‘saw’ my cousin having five or six kids. Many years later, she ended up with only one child but many years further on when her brother and his girlfriend had a baby, it was unknown to all of us until three months before she gave birth that she was even pregnant. Unfortunately, this baby was taken by Social Services for a forced adoption and my cousin went through the very invasive process to be considered as his guardian.

To make a long story short, even though my cousin passed the process to be an adoptive mum to this baby and in general, meaning she could go on to foster more, at that time, things changed in her life and she did not go on to foster her brother’s child nor any others. What I had seen all those years ago could have been the possibility of her fostering multiple children. I didn’t really understand at the time how the tarot worked; all I knew was that it did. It’s only now I understand where that deep knowing and information came from but we’ll get to that later.

I had an uncle who was at a crossroads in his life, had got divorced and asked me to do a reading for him. I ‘saw’ him move away from England to be with a woman he would meet online but then that deep knowing happened again. ‘You’re going to have a baby.’ I thought that can’t be right, he was in his 50’s at that stage. So, I didn’t tell him that bit. I should have listened to my intuition though.  He did move away, to Wales and moved in with a woman he met online. His partner’s daughter then unfortunately passed away, leaving her son behind who was just a baby. They took him in and raised him as their own.

There were plenty of other readings that followed that came true, some were weeks or months later and a few that happened years later. It seemed I had a particular talent where babies were concerned. I could tell when someone was pregnant before they even knew it themselves. I’d just look at them and get that deep knowing of ‘you’re pregnant’. I never told anyone that I knew they were pregnant but it was nice to hear confirmation of my ‘knowing’ not long after when they found out themselves. I was having some chiropractic treatment at age 17 and knew not only was she pregnant but I also knew it was twins. The next time I saw her she told me she was pregnant and a couple of months after that when I saw her for further treatment, she told me she’d just found out it was twins.

Around the same age, I started getting something really strange happening to me at night. I’d go to bed, lay down and try to sleep but as I laid there, I could feel my mind becoming hyper-aware and full of mental energy and I couldn’t fall asleep, yet at the same time I found I couldn’t move my body at all, not even a finger. My mind felt so odd as if I was about to start hallucinating or something, I had no clue what was going on. Then this incredibly loud, roaring sound filled my head and ears until they vibrated strongly. It was so loud I half expected a jumbo jet to come crashing through my house. I was so scared, I thought something was really wrong with me, that I had developed some nasty disease or a brain tumour. This strange state felt like it went on for hours and I had no idea what to do or how to stop it. Eventually my mind must have shut down and I fell asleep. It kept happening, sometimes several times a week for months and months. If I knew then what I know now, things would have been very different. I understand now that it was the beginning of astral projection. After a year or so it happened less and less, then stopped.

I also started getting ‘foresight’ or premonitions. Random, weird ones like a fire starting in a barn in some obscure, rural location that I’d never heard of before. Again, they just popped into my head, along with that same feeling of absolute certainty. Imagine my shock when I heard on the news about this fire in a barn in the exact place name of my premonition a week later. There were the usual small ones such as knowing when the phone was about to ring and who it was, other slightly bigger premonitions about various accidents and disasters. I didn’t understand why I was getting them and I certainly didn’t like them. What was the point? I couldn’t do anything to stop these predicted events from happening and even if I tried no one would believe me.

Around the age of 19, I bought my first set of proper tarot cards, the tarot nova set. They were cheap and cheerful but they spoke to me as soon as I saw them.  I had been using the same deck of playing cards all this time. I took them with me in my bag wherever I went, along with the ripped-out page from the magazine with the meanings. Not that I really needed it anymore, I had learnt to just go along with this deep knowing, even if I still didn’t understand it or where it came from. I would look through the book that came with my proper set of cards and it seemed overwhelming with all the different meanings, it was far more complex than what I had been using. As I got used to using my new cards, I would use the book to start me off, to give some more meaning to them than what I had been doing, then that feeling of deep knowing would start again and take over and I was off. Words came tumbling out of my mouth to try to keep up with everything I was feeling and seeing in my mind’s eye. I had started ’seeing‘ pictures, scenes and symbols as well.

Chapter 3

Spirit Presence

Iwas almost 20yrs old, it was a perfectly normal, bright and sunny day. I had walked into the living room when I felt someone looking at me but no one was at home but me. I turned around and there in the doorway I had just walked through, stood a man in his mid to late 60’s, wearing slightly loose, dark slacks, a white shirt and his rounded belly pushing out a knitted cable type cardigan over the top with big buttons done up from mid torso down.  I had no idea who he was. By this stage of my life of course, I had wised up to all the strange things I had experienced over my life so far, had started reading a few ‘new age’ books as they called them then and I knew he was not a living person. There was just something not quite right about him, as if I had seen him in my mind’s eye and he was projected in the doorway, that’s about the only way I can describe it. We just looked at each other for a few seconds and then he vanished. I just mentally shrugged it off and got on with my day. I assumed it must have been the previous owner of the house, as it had been owned by an older couple before, even though I had lived there since around the age of 14 and I hadn’t seen him or any other presence in the place before.

It was a year or so later when my mum got out huge boxes of old photos for us to look through one day for something to do and she had stacks of old photographs going way back, some I hadn’t seen before. We were both sat on the floor of the living room. We eventually started going through the really old ones, my mum pointing out my great aunt when she was young, how different she looked back then. My nan at a young age pushing my mum in her pram through the town and my grandad much younger leaning on his shovel, posing in his vegetable patch. Then my mum picked up another one from the bottom of the box. This photo had two couples in it. Both sets looked to be in their 60’s with my mum as a toddler. One of the men caught my eye.  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked her, ‘that’s the man I saw standing in the doorway that time.’

In the photo he was even wearing very similar clothes to what he was wearing when I saw him, apart from the cardigan. In the photo he was wearing a waistcoat but everything else was the same.

‘That’s my grandpa Alfred and my nanna,’ she said.

She explained that he was her dad’s, dad. He died aged 67 in 1952 from a burst appendix, two years after my mum was born and he had doted on her.  After he died, my mum would call out at night in her cot, ‘no grandpa’ and start giggling as if he was trying to play with her. It frightened my nan, my mum’s mother.

The other couple in the photo was my nan’s mum and dad. There was absolutely no denying that who I saw in the photo was the man I’d seen in the doorway.  Little did I know then what an important part he’d play and was playing in my spiritual journey. There had also been many times my mum and I felt random warm spots on the floor in that same doorway during the time we lived there. At one point she’d even got a psychic out to visit us. The psychic told my mum that her grandad (grandpa Alfred) was always watching over her and it was him causing these warm spots in the doorway. Neither of us had told the psychic I had seen him stood there.

My great grandpa Alfred.

My mum had been given her nanna’s wedding and engagement rings bought by grandpa Alfred when she married my dad and wore them as her own bridal set for 54yrs. I’d always known where they’d come from but never really paid much attention to the link to my great grandpa Alfred. It’s only through this weird and wonderful spiritual adventure did they become more meaningful to me. That 18ct gold wedding band from the early 1900’s is now in my possession. It’s so nice to have that physical link to him, my great grandmother as well as my mum as it’s been passed down the family line.

It was 1999. I was 22 with a young son. We had just moved into a house we called the Tardis. It looked quite small from the outside but once you stepped inside, all the rooms downstairs were huge and flowed from one room into another. Many decades before the downstairs had been a grocery shop. The upstairs wasn’t quite as large but it had three decent sized bedrooms plus an attic room up a further set of stairs. The middle (second) bedroom had the weirdest atmosphere I had ever experienced. You’d walk in, shut the door and it felt like you’d been transported elsewhere, somewhere where life outside didn’t exist. It wasn’t a bad feeling at all, it was strangely still and calm but too calm, like a nothingness. I painted and decorated it in lilac tones myself to make it feel more like home but it didn’t make any difference to its odd ambiance.

To start with, that room became my bedroom because my son’s room was right next door sharing a wall with it. I had also decorated his room the way he wanted it. His room felt a bit different to mine. Still with a slight feeling of nothingness but sometimes I had a bit of an uneasy feeling in there, as if I was being watched. I was far too busy decorating and making it home, so I didn’t pay too much attention to it to start with. Despite those two rooms feeling off, the rest of it was fine. I loved that house otherwise; it was one of my most favourite places I’d lived in and we stayed there for 10 years, even if it did turn out to be one of the most haunted.

It wasn’t long before my son was terrified. Crying, tantrums and refusing to sleep in there, he was in such a state. He wouldn’t tell me why. We’d been there barely three weeks when he refused to sleep in that room for the entire time we were living there. I thought it was just typical kids’ stuff at first. New, strange home, his own bedroom and being alone in it at night, as we’d been sharing a bedroom in our previous, much smaller place. That was until I saw what he was seeing.

I was sat reading on my bed one day in the middle of the afternoon and suddenly in my peripheral vision, I noticed a change in the room. I looked up and there, stood at the corner end of my bed was a semi-solid figure of a man who seemed completely unaware I was there and then he just walked through the wall in front of him, which was the wall adjoining my son’s bedroom. I just stared in surprise at the place he’d been. Now I knew why my son was so petrified of sleeping in his bedroom.

As the weeks and months went by, I was often seeing semi-solid and transparent figures, male and female but mostly males, appearing then disappearing through the wall from my room into my son’s and sometimes vice-versa. This was quite an intense upgrade from the previous couple of experiences of seeing ghosts. However, I wasn’t scared because none of them interacted with me and were completely oblivious that I was even there. It was a couple of years later that I finally managed to get my son to talk about what he was so terrified about and he admitted that there were lots of people in his room and some animals too. Now I never saw the ghostly animals that he did but plenty of people! It became such a normal part of my life, I didn’t even bat an eyelid at their comings and goings through the wall. I did however get even more curious about a life after this one and started devouring even more books and watching anything related to the paranormal I could find. Most Haunted on tv was about as good as it got in the 90’s though!

Several years into living there, I switched bedrooms to the main one, not because of the ghosts but because it was bigger and had its own bathroom plus my son still wasn’t sleeping in the room next door anyway.  I never saw any of these ghostly figures in my new bedroom, the other one was like a