An Angel Set Me Free: And other incredible true stories of the afterlife

I would have died, in other words.

Kurt came to ask me to explain to him how his brother, who died at the age of six, could have known about safety trip wires. I told him that once he died, his brother was not a child any more but a pure soul. He could see where things were going to go wrong and he saved Kurt, because he was meant to be saved at that point. Since then, his brother has been in contact with him several times during readings, and Kurt follows his advice on all kinds of matters. Well, you would after such a narrow escape, wouldn’t you?

After an Accident

I heard from a friend about another incident when a child was the angel who came back to save a life. A taxi driver called Harry had lost his little girl to a rare childhood cancer when she was only seven years old. Three years later, Harry’s taxi was in a multiple pile-up on a motorway.

I saw there had been an accident up ahead and I pushed my foot to the floor and just managed to stop before I hit the cars involved. But no sooner had I come to a standstill than there was a huge jolt as I was shunted from behind and forced into the front two cars, and then the world went black.

Suddenly a face appeared in the blackness, and when I focused I realised it was my daughter Jasmine. She looked beautiful, her blonde hair gleaming and a lovely smile on her face. She was talking to me but it took me a while to make out the words.

‘Daddy, it’s not your time to die. Call for help.’

I couldn’t make sense of it at first so she repeated the words. It was then I remembered about the accident. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps I should call for help. But what I really wanted was to stay there with her.

‘Call for help, Daddy,’ she urged again, and this time I obeyed.

My voice sounded very weak and pathetic when I first tried, so I called again, and suddenly I heard voices breaking through the blackness.

‘I think this one here’s alive,’ a voice said. ‘I’m sure I heard him trying to speak.’

Then I heard another voice. ‘There’s a pulse. It’s very weak but it’s there. Can you hear me, sir?’

I wanted to say yes but I didn’t have the strength. I stayed vaguely aware of what was going on as they used cutting equipment to free me from the wreck of my cab then transferred me onto a stretcher and took me to hospital. I didn’t want to regain full consciousness because while I remained in my semi-conscious state I could feel my daughter was still there, comforting me.

When I came round fully, I was told that the ambulancemen had originally written me off as dead. They wouldn’t have tried to resuscitate me if they hadn’t heard a faint noise coming from my lips. My daughter Jasmine saved my life that day by urging me to call out.

I spoke to Harry on the phone after I heard this story and explained to him that Jasmine is with him all the time, not just when he’s in danger. She’s beside him when he’s driving his cab, at home watching TV and even when he’s asleep. Just because he can’t see her doesn’t mean she’s not there, and he can speak to her any time he likes. Then, when it is his time to die, she will be there waiting for him, ready to take him over to the other side.

It Wasn’t Her Time

Nurses deal with death all the time and they tend to be very sensitive to the whole process. When they walk onto the ward in the morning, they can often sense which patients are going to die that day. If they’re not too busy, they can judge when to call the relatives to come and say goodbye, and, if there’s no time for that, they will sit with a dying patient themselves, holding their hand as they take their last breaths and slip peacefully away. Most nurses tend to be spiritual people with heightened awareness that helps them to notice messages from the other side. Here’s one nurse’s story of an angel intervention that really affected her.

I’d settled all the patients down for the night and was about to go and have a coffee in the nurses’ station when I saw a man standing in the ward. I turned to go and have a word with him but when I got there I couldn’t see him any more. The light was dim so I thought nothing more of it and went for my coffee.

Half an hour later, I saw the same man standing by the bed of one of my patients, down at the end of the ward. I walked along there and as I got closer I realised that he must be a spirit because his features were fuzzy and there was a kind of glow around him. His face looked beautiful as he gazed down at the elderly woman in the bed.

‘Is she your wife?’ I asked him.

‘She is my beloved,’ he replied, and I was struck by the old-fashioned phrase.

I looked at the lady in the bed and realised she was barely breathing. I pressed the call button and a colleague came hurrying up and together we worked hard to resuscitate her. By the time the doctor on call got there, she had a regular heartbeat again and he said that we had almost certainly saved her life.

When I discussed it with my colleague later, we agreed that the woman’s ‘beloved’ had made himself visible so that we would react. He had saved her life, not us. I found it very comforting because I had lost my mother at the age of fourteen and I’ve always had a feeling that she protects me but this was the proof I needed.

If you have a feeling that a loved one is protecting you and acting as your guardian angel, then it is true. Which relatives or friends do you believe are watching over you in spirit? I expect you have a very clear idea because they will have let you know by giving you a ‘feeling’ about it. These ‘feelings’ are your loved one’s way of letting you know that they’re there. Just as they can put words into your head, so they can put ‘feelings’ and emotions. As we will discuss next, they can even put an arm round your shoulder.

Delivering a Warning

Most people report hearing their friend’s or relative’s voice during a visitation, but some ‘feel’ their presence as well. It’s a sense memory, similar to the feeling you had when you were in the womb. You can feel a feather-light touch on your face, the weight of a hand on your shoulder, or maybe just a tightening of your skin all over. Many people have described feeling an arm around their shoulders at times of trouble, and then experiencing an overwhelming sense that things will be all right. If it is an angel they knew on earth, whether that person died a week before, or thirty or forty years before, they get a sense inside their head of who it is. You don’t necessarily hear the voice; sometimes there is just what I call an ‘inner knowing’.

Pure souls are omnipresent. The physical body doesn’t weigh them down any more so they can be with you at your work, with your sister in her car, and with your child at school, looking after every single family member at the same time.

Our guardian angels can come to bring comfort or they can come with a warning. Sometimes the message is as clear as crystal and other times it is just a general piece of advice to take care, as in this story about a woman called Donna.

I was standing at the sink doing the washing-up, not thinking about anything in particular, when suddenly I felt my mother was there and I picked up a clean tea-towel to hand to her so she could start drying. Then I stopped. What was I doing? My mother had died fifteen years before.

My brain had often played tricks on me in the past (or so I thought). I’d be in the middle of some chore when the thought would come into my head: ‘Call your mother. You haven’t spoken to her for a while.’ And I’d think, ‘Oh, I must do it,’ before remembering that she is dead and I can’t call her any more.

But that day in the kitchen, the feeling that she was present was so strong that I just knew something was wrong. I dropped the tea-towel and called my husband at work.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, fine,’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

I rang the school to check if our son was OK, and they said he was fine but I still had a funny feeling that we had to be extra-cautious.

The next morning, a Saturday, the three of us were going shopping together and we were in a hurry to get going, but I was still aware of this strange sense of unease. I was just reversing out of the driveway when all of a sudden my husband yelled ‘Stop!’ so I slammed my foot hard on the brake.

At that point a lorry came thundering round the corner at top speed and clipped the back of our car. The crunching noise was horrible but we were all unharmed. It was only when I got out to look at the damage, I realised that if I hadn’t braked when I did, that lorry would have gone straight into the back seat of the car where our son was sitting. And then I looked at the passenger seat where my husband had been and realised there was no way he could actually have seen the lorry coming from that angle.

‘Why did you shout “Stop”?’ I asked him.

‘I’ve got absolutely no idea,’ he said. ‘I didn’t consciously think anything. The words just came out of my mouth.’

I realised then that my mother had come back to warn me to be careful and her intervention had probably saved our son’s life. Since then, whenever I get a thought in my head that I should call her, I make sure I sit down somewhere quiet and have a little conversation with her in my mind. She’s looking out for me, and at last I have learned to listen.

I believe that Donna’s mother not only put the thought into her head that she should be cautious, but she also put the word ‘Stop!’ into her husband’s mouth. She wasn’t taking any chances with the safety of her beloved family.

Father Knows Best

In this instance a woman called Margaret, who lives in Cumbria, was saved from a horrible accident by her father.

It was a bitterly cold day in March and I was walking my two young sons to school. We were wrapped up warmly but still the driving sleet stung our faces. We stopped at a newsagent’s and I picked up a newspaper while the boys got a packet of crisps each. It was a relief to reach the warmth of the school, but then I faced the prospect of the journey home again. I decided to catch a bus back but I waited and waited at the stop without any sign of one so eventually I realised I would have to walk again.

There were some tiny lambs in the field opposite the newsagent’s so I thought I would go and have a look, worried about how they were coping with the freezing weather. I was about to step off the pavement when I heard my father’s voice just by my right ear: ‘Go and buy a paper.’ Dad had died twelve years earlier. I shook my head. It was silly. I already had a paper that I’d bought earlier. Disregarding the voice, I stepped into the road to cross over.

The voice was angry now. ‘Do as you’re bloody well told. Go and buy a paper!’

I’d never argued with my father when he was alive and I wasn’t about to start now he was dead, so I turned and went back to the newsagent’s. I’d just bent down to pick up a Daily Mail when there was a screech of brakes outside and then an almighty clattering sound.

The newsagent and I rushed out to find that a lorry had skidded and a huge pile of girders strapped on the back had come loose and fallen off onto the pavement at exactly the spot where I had been planning to stand and watch the lambs. I was so shaken, I sat down on the kerb, sleet or no sleet. Dad had saved my life.

Once my heart had stopped racing, I went back inside to pay for my Daily Mail. When I got home and opened it, between the pages there was a white feather and I felt instinctively that was a sign from Dad telling me he’d been there.

Finding a tiny white feather after an angel visitation is quite common. It’s like a little calling card from the other side. I’ll explain more about this on page 98.

The Smell of Smoke