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

‘I’m so sorry, you’ve been burgled,’ she said.

We sat in shock for just a moment. I initially stayed in the car with the girls so that John could quickly check the house was safe for the girls to enter. We had no idea what we might find. As soon as he nodded that the coast was clear I came in with the girls and put them to bed. They were too young to really understand but we just mentioned that it was okay as none of their toys had been taken. Then we began to look around at what had happened.

The burglars had climbed in through the kitchen window. Our home looked out onto open fields, and what had once attracted me to the house now became my biggest fear. We were open and exposed. The window catch had been broken and the glass had been smashed.

John boarded up the window and replaced the glass immediately the next day. I insisted he nail it shut, and we never opened that window again. The remaining glass had been dusted for finger prints by the police and the shiny dust was still on the window. I shuddered at the thought of what they might have found. Real people had entered our home. I remember feeling cross that no one had thought to secure the building before our return. It would have been easy for the burglars to have returned for more of our things.

The burglars had walked right to the master bedroom, stopping only to break the lock on a briefcase where they had taken the expensive gold pens John had received as gifts for his twenty-first birthday. In the bedroom they had opened every drawer and every jewellery box and tipped everything onto the bed. These burglars were only looking for specific things and they had picked out every single piece of gold jewellery, and left every single item of silver. I glanced down at my wrist and noticed the bracelets still on my arm. I still had ‘one body’s worth of jewellery’ left.

When the insurance company came to assess the burglary, I had already listed every item that was missing and found out the price of replacing each piece. Seeing the piles of empty jewellery boxes they didn’t query the claim and the cheque came a few weeks later. I had already decided that I wouldn’t replace any of the pieces but use the money to buy a car and learn to drive. I was determined that this negative experience would have a positive affect on my life. So passing my driving test later was a big healing experience for me. I was able to silently say, ‘Thanks for the car.’ I never did replace that gold jewellery.

The day after we arrived home, the police came to visit, and one of the things they suggested was that we buy a dog for security. With John’s working schedule I was often alone with the girls and it seemed the natural thing to do. I could still hear my words of the previous day: ‘We’ll probably buy a dog but we shouldn’t.’ The words echoed in my ear before disappearing into the distance. I’d heard and promptly ignored the warning from my inner guidance.

A couple of days later I bought a dog bowl and a packet of dog food and we made the trip to the local RSPCA dog home to purchase and ‘rescue’ a dog. With no planning at all we chose a beautiful Collie-cross puppy and after our home inspection from the charity we brought our puppy, ‘Shandy’, home.

I have never seen such an intelligent dog and he was a fast learner and picked up many tricks, but he was harder work than the children. He couldn’t be left for a minute and totally destroyed the kitchen and large parts of the house, as puppies do. He ate his way through the kitchen cupboards and the kitchen chairs. We decided to make him a kennel outside but he ate that too, and then he ate his way through the garden fence and later dug his way under. When he was a little bigger he jumped over the fence and escaped.

Why had I not listened to my own premonition about the dog? The guidance I had heard was clear enough but we’d bought the dog just the same. I was no longer able to cope and John began walking the dog on his own. Shandy regularly slipped his lead and would disappear for two hours or more with John walking for miles calling his name. One day he ate another large hole in the garden fence and followed a woman home on her bicycle, all the way to the next village. He escaped three times that week and twice we phoned the police to see if anyone had handed him in because we just did not know what else to do.

When John was working away the following week I remember trying to take Shandy for a walk in the pouring rain. I had to push the girls in a double buggy, and Shandy almost pulled us all into the road. I came home wet and tired and cried all the way home. Later when I fed Shandy, my eldest daughter Charlotte walked past him and he snapped at her. I just screamed hysterically and shut him in the kitchen.

He was a beautiful dog but the mistake in taking him on was ours. When you purchase a dog from the RSPCA, you agree to return it if there is a problem, so we took him back. On the day we handed him over I cried for several hours. I felt such a failure and I felt so ashamed. When they rang us a few days later to say that he had been taken home by a family who lived on a farm and wanted him as a working dog I cried some more. He was so intelligent he would love it. It was a difficult time and the guilt I felt was unbelievable.

Anthony had died, and so had my grandmother. We had been burgled and I had given up my dog and all this happened in a very short time. It was no wonder that I slipped into a deep depression but had no idea what was happening to me. I didn’t know anyone who’d suffered from depression and so I had no one to discuss it with. I was good at keeping up appearances and although the house was in a serious mess, inside and out I was good at hiding the worst of it when people came around.

I used to have an ironing cupboard and all the clean washing would get thrown in there. I was too ill to do more than look after the children each day and breathed a sigh of relief as I dropped the eldest off at playgroup twice a week. I usually managed to hide my tears. One day I remember one of the mothers walking up to me outside the playgroup to see if I was okay. I’d been crying for several hours and my make up couldn’t hide it any longer. She walked back home with me for coffee and it was the first time I was able to talk about how I was feeling.

I realized that something serious was wrong and finally made a trip to the doctor. The doctor placed me on antidepressant tablets. The tablets made me feel like I was living in a fog, but they did help a little. The psychic experiences had gone (probably as a result of the antidepressants) but I still felt unable to do anything other than the bare minimum of work in the home. Everything we ate came straight out of the freezer. I didn’t cook – I just warmed things up. I felt numb and only half on the planet.

I remember feeling as if I had a ball and chain around my ankle. I couldn’t manage even the simplest of tasks. I spent hours sitting on the sofa watching television and when John came home at night he would often enquire politely about my day. I would make something up because I couldn’t remember doing anything at all. What did I do? I day-dreamed my life away…

Later, I began working as a temp and did occasional work as a personal assistant or receptionist in many of the large companies in our local brewing town. I was able to cope with the short-term jobs and it was great to get out of the house again. As soon as a job became a little longer, though, I started to get into difficulties. I just couldn’t manage, even though I was offered permanent positions constantly. I knew that I would not be able to keep it together for more than a few days a week.

At one time I had a trainee nanny from the local college to help me for a few days each week, and my youngest daughter went to a nursery one day a week and a childminder another. I finally had some time to myself but it was getting too complicated and when my mother offered to have the children whilst I worked I immediately said yes. The car I had bought with the insurance money from the burglary gave me a great deal of freedom and with a little money in my pocket I was able to take my mum out shopping on the days I was not working. We helped each other and I felt a lot better.

In time, I found that the antidepressant tablets were holding me back, and I knew I had to stop taking them. The doctor had warned me not to stop taking the tablets in one go but I did it anyway. I literally took the tablets one day and stopped the next. The fog cleared almost immediately and I was fine for a while. I’d missed the psychic experiences even though I feared them and whilst I was taking the tablets I seemed unable to feel the unseen spiritual help and guidance which was my birthright. Guardian angels were with me – but I’d been unable to ‘feel’ anything when I had been depressed. I lost them, and they lost me.

I still spent a lot of time in front of the television. One day I was watching the daytime television show This Morning, which was focusing on angels. It reminded me of the experience I’d had as a child where I’d felt I’d been saved by angels and I began to investigate the whole angel phenomenon in depth. My life suddenly had new meaning. I wanted to find out more about angels.

By this time we had a computer and it gave me the perfect opportunity to learn how to use it. Amazing things were beginning to appear on the internet and at last I was able to do the research that I’d longed to do in the years before. Now I could type any paranormal word into a search engine and the internet would open up the whole world to psychic investigation. It was very exciting.

The week after I’d watched the angel programme my youngest daughter had an upset stomach. I quickly ran out of sheets and towels so I made her up a bed on the bathroom floor and laid her down to sleep on some towels. She called me steadily throughout the day, which was exhausting. After she called me for the twentieth time that day I called out to the universe for ‘someone’ to come and help me with her as I was now so tired, and again found myself unable to cope.

Much to my confusion, as I walked into the bathroom, the sound of a celestial choir filled the room. I searched the house looking for the source of that sound, and even stuck my head outside the window but I realized that angels (or some other helpful spirits) were showing me they were around and watching over us. Angels were with me, and at last I was able to feel them around me again.

More and more spontaneous paranormal experiences were occurring. Less than a year later I had another ‘out-of-body experience’ like I’d had as a young child on holiday. I was suffering from a sore throat and was taking antibiotics. One night, and after my husband had gone to bed I decided to get myself a hot chocolate before retiring. As I opened the fridge I spotted the remains of an open bottle of wine in the bottom of the door. I’d opened it a couple of days before. ‘Why not?’ I thought to myself. This was exactly what I needed to cheer myself up so I decided to pour myself a glass, which I drank quickly before switching off the lights to go to bed. I thought no more about it.

Whether it was the mixture of the wine with the antibiotics, or just tiredness, I was never too sure but as I started to walk upstairs I found myself becoming ‘taller and taller’. By the time I reached the top step I was well aware that something was not right. Our house was an older property and our bedroom was part of a new extension. To get the ceiling height in the bedroom, there was a step down into it, so the floor in our bedroom was slightly lower than the other upstairs rooms. As I stood on this top step of the bedroom this particular night, it felt as if the step had been raised somehow.

‘What have you done to the step?’ I asked John who was drifting off to sleep.

My spiritual body had slipped out of the top of my head somehow, and I was now ‘looking down’ upon myself in the mirrored wardrobe door. My logical brain was still trying to explain what had happened and I was aggressively questioning my husband, and trying to work out if he’d had someone raise the entire bedroom floor just to trick me! As if! I was standing level with the mirrored wardrobe door yet at the same time I was almost up on the ceiling. How could this be happening?

I took off my jacket and opened the sliding wardrobe door to hang it up on the rail, but instead of my eye line being half way between the two clothes rails as usual, I could now see over the top rail and was amazed to discover dust, which would normally be out of sight!

I figured that my spiritual body had ‘slipped’ about a head-height above my normal level. All the while this bizarre experience was happening I was actually able to talk in a normal way, explaining what I was experiencing as it happened. How strange is that?

I hung on tightly to the wall as I made my way into the en-suite bathroom but as I walked back into the room my body and spirit had come back into alignment! I was able to see normally. It was over almost as soon as it had happened. I’d had a waking out-of-body experience and then within minutes I had plopped back into my body again. Weird – but also kind of fun!

Over the next few days I told everyone who would listen about what had happened to me and even found someone who’d had the same experience. It wasn’t long before I found myself back on the internet and was pleased to discover a lot of websites where people shared their own out-of-body experiences. I found an internet forum and spent many hours talking to other people, before discovering that there were many people who had learnt how to recreate the out-of-body experiences on purpose. This was something I HAD to do! I wanted to do this again and I just had to learn how.

CHAPTER 2 Taking Control (#ulink_9c0842c7-0e71-5479-a2e1-6b56ea15294a)

Come to the edge.

We might fall.

Come to the edge.

It’s too high!

Come to the edge.

And they came,

and we pushed,

and they flew.

Christopher Logue (1968)

This chapter is where it starts to get a little crazy. Bear in mind I was trying to develop my psychic ability and tune into my angels and the higher realms. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I just knew that I wanted to do this.

Mostly I was reading about psychic development and out-of-body techniques on the internet and trying them out, which was perhaps not the most sensible thing to have done. The trouble is that at this time, there was no one that I could talk to about these things in my local village. Would you? Can you imagine it? ‘What a lovely new dress…by the way, I am trying to leave my body by a series of meditation techniques…’ You get my point! People would think I was crazy…perhaps I was, or maybe I still am. I still find it a little hard to share the personal things that I was trying out at that time. But it’s important for you to understand who I am.

Although much of what I am telling you might sound a little bizarre, believe me, everything happened exactly as I am explaining it. Through all this time I always felt as if I was being guided in some way. It wasn’t just a random series of paranormal experiences, I felt as if I were being guided by a higher source. My angels and guides were with me every step of the way.

‘Let Jacky try a little of this, and a little of that,’ they seemed to say. With each experience I went out and read about what had happened and what was continuing to happen to me. I explored the subjects and investigated each paranormal experience by chatting to people on the internet. The internet was my lifesaver. And these things just seemed to ‘drip’ slowly into my life, a bit at a time. In the meantime I was hot on the trail of the out-of-body experience.

Could I learn how to come ‘out-of-body’ on purpose? Was this the opportunity to begin to control some of the things that had always happened to me? I started asking questions about how other people had experienced out-of-body travel, or astral projection, as it was sometimes called. I realized that for some people there were different types of experiences.

Some websites explained that we have several different spirit bodies – layers of energy bodies, each becoming finer and finer. These faster vibrating bodies enable us to travel to higher spiritual levels. Perhaps, I figured, this is what Jesus was talking about when he said, ‘In my father’s house are many mansions.’ Maybe these different astral planes represented the different mansions. I read about people who’d not just flown about their bedrooms in their spirit body, but had travelled to different heavenly realms and even different planets. I was intrigued and I wanted to do this too. I started to keep a journal of my experiments.

Some people had begun as I had with a spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE). This might have happened during ‘a time of crisis, illness, grief, tiredness or during an accident’, I read. Well, I guess I’d been ill before as I was taking medicine at the time of my own first out-of-body experience (although hardly what you could call a serious illness), but I wanted to learn how to do this without being ill just the same. There were many different techniques that people had tried with success. The idea was to get your body as close to sleep as possible but to keep your mind awake. ‘This would enable someone to lift out of their physical body…’ I read.

Have you ever heard yourself snore? The body appears to paralyse when we dream (a natural phenomenon). The methods of creating both an out-of-body experience and a lucid dreaming state (where we are dreaming but aware that we are dreaming) had similar techniques. I wanted to be able to hear myself snore; to know that I was asleep whilst my brain remained active and aware. This stuff seemed crazy but I wanted to try it so badly.

It sounds unbelievable but these internet people were convinced you could lift your spirit out of your body on purpose. Was this a natural ability which humans had somehow forgotten how to do, or was this ‘paranormal’; above and beyond ‘normal’? Either way, I was determined to have a go rather than hang around waiting for the next thing to happen to me.