An Angel Saved My Life: And Other True Stories of the Afterlife

The power of Thought, the magic of the Mindl

Lord Byron

‘Mummy, Mummy, there’s a man in my room!’

Usually Dad would come in and search under the bed, open the wardrobe and pull back the curtains, as dads do when they are searching for ‘monsters in the bedroom’ – although of course he never found anyone or anything! Many years later I realized that I was seeing a spirit guardian or angel, and that I have always had this spirit with me, and still do.

Kabam is my own guardian angel or spiritual guide and when I looked back I realized how, like most people, I had experienced psychic and paranormal activity in my ‘normal’ life. Like most people, this phenomenon was filed away in my mind under the ‘…that was weird wasn’t it…’ moment and I had completely forgotten about it. I truly feel that we are all psychic in one way or another and from time to time we tap into these other realms and alternative states.

When our minds fall into a daydream, when we drop off to sleep, and when we meditate, our minds are in an altered state; a state different to our normal waking consciousness. It is during these times that we are most likely to have supernatural experiences of our own.

I remember having several ‘paranormal’ experiences as a child. On a family holiday on the Isle of Wight I got into difficulties in the sea (I wrote about this in full in An Angel Treasury). A calm presence aided me back to shore; a presence unseen but heard and felt. Had an angel saved my life?

Another day my family and I walked along the windy seaside pier and struggled to stand upright. The wind was so strong and pushed us along and it was enormous fun. My sister and I fantasized about being lifted up by the breeze and floating in the air. Later that night I had a dream so real that I thought I had really spent the evening flying down the pier. Years later I realized that this was called an ‘out-of-body experience’ (OBE) and after reminiscing with my sister over the holiday we had as children, I realized that the two of us had the same ‘dream’ memory! We actually had flown down the pier but we did so in our spiritual or astral bodies rather than physically. For me it was the first of many such experiences.

I always read a lot as a child, and as a teenager I had piles of paperbacks stacked up by my bed. One of those books was the groundbreaking work by Dr Raymond Moody, Life After Life. It was piled up amongst the other books which my mum had recently bought from the local jumble sale. Those works included typical teenage reads of the time…things like Confessions of a Window Cleaner and pretty well anything by the English romance writer Barbara Cartland! My friends and I shared similar tastes.

Dr Moody’s book was very different of course and was not a work of fiction. It had quite obviously been picked up ‘by mistake’ by my mother, and yet his work, about near death experiences (and the now well-known ‘white light and tunnel’ experiences that people have at the point of psychical death), was to change the course of my life.

The near death experience is now part of our popular culture. Who hasn’t seen Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze? Patrick of course plays Sam who is murdered in the film, but when he is finally ready to pass over he is taken into the familiar ‘white light and tunnel’ to heaven.

Millions have had this experience all over the world. With the advancement of medical techniques, many are now literally brought back from the very brink of death. Many have found themselves floating above their body and seeing the white light ahead of them – they know that this light is waiting to take them to the heavenly realms. Of course, not every out-of-body experience is related to near death. Many people have out-of-body experiences where, like me, they had a need to go somewhere or do something which physically they were unable to do at the time. This can cause the spiritual body to leave the physical. A severe shock or trauma can also do the same thing.

But back to the real world…I remember as a teenager, waking up in the early hours of the morning as an ambulance arrived to take my dad to hospital. When my dad collapsed behind the bathroom door with a stomach ulcer he later swore that he had tried to help my mother open the door from his side, even though he was unconscious at the time. I remember my mum’s frustration when she tried to explain to my dad that he had passed out behind the door which basically trapped him inside. Later I understood that the experience he’d had was as an NDE or near death experience as explained by Dr Moody in his book. He too had left his body for just a few moments, and even though he was unconscious, he was still mentally aware.

Oh how I wish that the internet had been around then. My local library didn’t really hold the information that I was seeking as a teenager, and I didn’t have the money to buy esoteric books, even if I had been able to locate them. It was a frustrating time.

Later when my sister bought the books written by the medium Doris Stokes I devoured them all. There was a distinct lack of material to read on anything remotely ‘paranormal’, and her work found me very excited indeed.

When my husband and I moved into our second house I often used to wake up at night worried that the next-door neighbour of our semi-detached house would be burgled. Night after night I woke up and would hang my head out of the bedroom window. I became paranoid about it happening. In my mind I could see that it would happen. Then one night my neighbour actually was burgled, and strangely I slept through the whole thing! I often wondered if this had been a premonition of some sort.

When my husband John and I were first married I often used to see spirit people in my room at night, in the way that I had as a child. Sometimes it was one person and on other occasions there were whole crowds of people. My bedroom was fast becoming the local waiting room for spirits. The whole thing frightened me until I shared my experience with a more knowledgeable friend. ‘Ask them to go away,’ she suggested and I tried it. I was amazed that it worked and I began to get some sleep at last.

All the time I was growing up, I longed to be psychic but of course I already was – we all are, in our own individual way. When my girls were small I used to work in a local pub on a Sunday. Much of the work was boring and as I cleaned tables my mind would wander and I would often pick up very unimportant premonitions of things that might happen later in the day or sometimes in just a few minutes’ time.

One day I distinctly heard a question in my head. ‘What’s in those spray bottles you use to clean the tables with?’ In my mind I answered the question but then a few minutes later, a gentleman walked up to the bar and, passing me on the way, stopped to ask me the very same question, which I believe he’d been thinking about just a few minutes earlier, and I, in my daydreaming state, had somehow picked up his thoughts. It was just washing up liquid and water and I’d already rehearsed the answer in my head. This ‘day-dreaming’ state is the perfect opportunity for us to pick up information psychically or hear messages from our guardian angels.

One of the waitress’s jobs in this pub was to make up the complicated ice-cream desserts which we layered with fruit, sauces and cream into tall glasses. I remember one day looking longingly at a particularly delicious chocolate concoction and I clearly heard a voice in my head say, ‘There will be a spare one later today and you will be offered it.’ Right at the end of the afternoon, one of the waitresses made a mistake and created too many of the chocolate ice-creams and the manager suggested that she offer it to one of the staff. She picked me. No one knew of my thoughts and even I remember mulling over this experience and wondering what the purpose was of such a seemingly useless premonition. I enjoyed the ice-cream just the same…

The thought of the ‘useless premonitions’ came back to haunt me when some weeks later my sister-in-law telephoned us at home. She had some horrific news for us. Her husband Anthony had died at work. He’d been found dead at the bottom of the hold of the ship where he had been working for Customs and Excise, and it blew the bottom out of our world.

The world literally stood still for several moments as I digested what she had said, and passed the phone over to my stunned husband. Anthony was dead. How could this be? He was a young dad with four children. I immediately went into shock.

I had no idea what to say as denial flooded my brain. My husband immediately packed a bag and drove the two hours to Cardiff so that he could be with his sister. I remember how awful it was to stay home at the time but the girls were small and it was just impractical to travel with them. Strange memories of the year before came flooding back over the next few days…

Twelve months before I’d had some outlandish psychic predictions which came to me like pieces of a puzzle…had I had some idea that this terrible thing was going to happen? I remember feeling really shocked one day when I had a vision of jumping out of a plane with a parachute. My mind’s eye was focussed on the ground and as it got closer and closer my palms began to sweat. I felt like someone we knew was going to fall and I said so to my husband. It seemed a strange thing to say but it seemed to unlock a psychic doorway and this was just the beginning.

As the weeks went by I became more and more obsessed with the idea that someone was going to fall and die, and when one of my sisters and I spent the day together I talked to her about it too. We stood looking out of my children’s bedroom window one day and I actually said to her, ‘It’s a bigger fall than this,’ as if I were searching desperately for what I had been given. I couldn’t make any sense of what I was experiencing and of course I didn’t want to hear what I was hearing. Then when we took the children to the local swimming pool I looked over the restaurant balcony to the swimming pool below and my palms began to sweat again. ‘It’s not as high a fall as this,’ I said crazily.

I remember another day when we had recently finished decorating our smallest bedroom, and how proud I was. I commented on how my sister-in-law would love to stay in the room. But then I reasoned out loud that this was a ridiculous idea. Why would my sister-in-law come and stay without her husband…unless he died? I was totally shocked at what I had said. These were just random thoughts mulling through my head, or were they? Why would I say such an awful thing or even think it? I couldn’t even fathom such a thing and immediately wiped it from my mind.

Of course, you don’t ring someone up and tell them that you have just had the most awful thought about them, and so I pushed the idea to the back of my mind. Later, when I heard the details of the accident over the phone, all the other pieces of the puzzle came together, and I realized that I’d had what amounted to a premonition but without enough information to do anything about it.

We used to visit the family every few months or so but for some reason we had become enthralled with the idea of moving to the Cardiff area where they lived in the three weeks before Anthony died. My husband John was working in Birmingham at the time so it actually didn’t make any sense to move out of the area. Nevertheless, we visited and stayed with my sister-in-law and her husband for three weeks in a row whilst we ‘house hunted’. I remember on the third weekend, having a conversation with Anthony about the afterlife and I shared with him my knowledge of what happens when you die and go to the ‘light’. It was probably the most intimate conversation we had ever had and the last proper conversation we had together. The following week he died.

The whole crazy ‘let’s move’ idea had given us the opportunity to spend some time together before he passed and for that I will always be grateful.

I was at home alone, a few days after he passed. John of course was still in Cardiff. I was in the kitchen when I suddenly felt I was not alone. For just a few moments the energy of the room changed. I momentary saw a streak of light pass my vision. It was nothing definite but I still knew what it was.

‘Is that you?’ I asked into the air. I called his name. In an instant the energy changed back to normal and I knew I had been visited by Anthony’s spirit one last time.

I travelled down for the funeral. Another relative looked after the children and my parents drove me there. Everyone was amazingly ‘together and calm’ as they celebrated his life with joy. The house was full of people as it had been over the whole week apparently. Later, as John, my sister-in-law and I drove to the church for the funeral, the streets were lined with hundreds of Customs officers. Police were directing the traffic and had to stop cars to let us through. It was a bizarre sight. So many people had lined the streets to show their respects for this well-loved man. We knew that he would be watching down and laughing at the commotion he had caused. We laughed too. It’s amazing how human beings have the ability to laugh along with their tears.

After the Mass, we walked to the graveside. My sister-in-law stepped forward. It occurred to me that another adult should be supporting her in her grief, but as my husband was helping to carry the coffin, I understood with disbelief that this role was mine. I was the chief mourner’s first support. I became a real adult that day.

We visited most weekends for nearly a year after that. We all wanted to be together as one large family. John attended to many maintenance jobs in my sister-in-law’s house, putting up shelves and so on. We cleaned and cleared, almost as if moving the sadness out of the home. One afternoon, after a busy day of maintenance, we sat down for a coffee in the small family room at the front of the house. John had isolated the electrics only moments after the kettle had boiled but as we all sat in the room, the lights flickered on and then off again.

‘I thought you switched those off?’ I asked, surprised.

‘I did! But I’ll go and check again,’ said John, rushing off to the fuse box. ‘Yes, it was switched off but I have pulled out all of the electricity fuses just to be on the safe side.’

But the lights were still on and now began to flicker on and off teasingly! We all laughed that the lights were a message from Anthony, but we still decided to get an electrician in to check before John did any more work with the electricity. By the time the electrician arrived an hour later the lights had switched off. He spent an hour checking wires and cables and then came back to ask us again about the lights.

‘Are you sure the lights were on when all the fuses were pulled out?’ he queried.

‘Yes,’ we assured him, several times!

We sent the electrician on his way but were not concerned. We knew who had been messing with the electrics! We’d had a clear signal from the other side. All of these things were creating a drive in me – a need to find out what is going on in these other realms.

All through the next year I remained mad with frustration at my own poor ‘psychic skills’. What was the point of picking up premonitions if there was never enough proof or facts to do anything to stop it? I suffered from depression for quite a long time after Anthony died. It was a combination of different things which I felt had triggered this.

My husband worked away from home a lot and later I lost my grandmother, which hit me hard. On the day of the funeral my youngest daughter, who was just two at the time, looked up at the ceiling and said in an excited voice, ‘Look Mummy, a fairy man!’ I couldn’t decide if her vision was an angel or perhaps my grandmother coming to say goodbye. Children do seem to see things that adults cannot.

In less than six months’ time it happened again. I received another unwanted forewarning and this time it was much clearer. We had been invited down to the south coast to the fiftieth birthday party of a family friend. We decided to stay overnight as it was a good five hours’ drive, and piled our luggage and two small daughters into the car. I closed the front door and walked towards the car. As John began to pull off the drive I had a blinding premonition.

‘Stop!’ I yelled.

Confusion passed over his face as he asked me what the matter was.

‘I think we’re going to be burgled,’ I yelled.

It was an extreme thing to say but he calmly asked me what I wanted to do. I decided to go back into the house. I checked that all of the windows were locked downstairs and then I rushed up to my bedroom where I had stored a considerable amount of gold and silver jewellery, much of which had been inherited. I often hid it out of sight if we went away, but today I hadn’t.

I searched through several jewellery boxes and picked out my favourite pair of earrings and put them on. Then I placed the gold sovereign necklace that my parents had given me for my eighteenth birthday around my neck. I poked through and found the ring which my husband had given me on our engagement and a couple of other rings, followed by three gold bracelets. It was all I could wear in one go and when I had finished I closed the lid and replaced the box on my dressing table. Why did I do this?

My husband was amazed that I hadn’t hidden all the jewellery away as I had on previous occasions, but today this felt the right thing to do. We talked in the car about what I had felt and why I had chosen to pick out certain pieces of jewellery. I felt sure that we were going to be broken into when we were away and nothing could convince me otherwise. The conversation continued once we arrived at our friends’ home and I told everyone how being burgled would probably leave me feeling unsafe and I would probably go out and buy a dog, and that it was a bad thing for us to do! It was almost as if I had some memory from a moment which had been preplanned as a lesson in my life. Had I ‘seen’ this happening as a life choice before I had been born? How did this work?

The next day we began the long drive home and as we pulled onto the front drive our neighbour rushed out to meet us.