MEET THE VICAR WHO DEALS WITH SPIRITS
Paranormal activity in his house led Jason to become a ‘deliverance minister’
WHEN vicar Jason Bray and his wife moved into their new home, they sensed something wasn’t quite right with the property. Little did they know then that the problem would eventually lead to Jason taking on an unusual extra role – dealing with the paranormal.
The house was always chilly, dark, and gloomy even on the brightest summer’s day: “It was always cold,” said Jason, 52, a vicar at St Giles in Wrexham.
“I remember my mother making me curtains to put over the doors because she said ‘there is always a draft in this house’... you could never work out where the draft was coming from.”
Then, while Jason was away on a training course, the problem intensified when his wife Laura became concerned about the temperature plunging in their baby son’s room.
“My wife, who is really levelheaded, said, ‘This is awful, I walked into his room and it was like walking into a walk-in freezer because it was really really cold by his cot.’
“So she said, ‘I am really worried about this, I do not know what is going on.’
“She said it was so cold she actually had him in bed with her because it felt freezing next to his cot.”
On his return, Jason had his own “weird experience”.
“I was reading in bed, got up to go to the toilet and I knew that there was somebody standing on the other side of the door, I just got this impression of somebody with a big wooden mask, eye holes and glaring at me through the door and I knew sort of instinctively that this person was a priest.”
Jason consulted his local vicar, who visited and sprinkled holy water and prayed. After this, Jason says the house was transformed.
“Instead of living in a cold house we were turning the thermostat down.... people would walk in and say, ‘What have you done with this place?’”
It spurred him on to become a “deliverance minister” – an Anglican church role dealing with any spirits or presences people may feel are in their homes or even within themselves.
It is a role he has now been carrying out for more than 20 years, and it has even led to him appearing on popular ITV daytime show This Morning.
“We are the people who deal with the paranormal or things that look like the paranormal, so we deal with two sorts of things, one is houses and one is people,” he said.
“So people see something that shouldn’t be there in the house, stuff moves around, poltergeist activity... sometimes we get called in because people are seeing shadows, a string of bad luck that they might be associating to something paranormal.”
Once in the house, as part of the free service Jason will sprinkle holy water, bless the house, and talk to the residents about their paranormal problems. But the role – which people don’t have to be a member of the church to access – isn’t all about spirits.
Jason, who grew up in Merthyr Tydfil and is the son of a sweetmaker, explained: “Most of the training we actually go on is about mental illness rather than about spooky stuff... people hear voices and we just need to make sure; 99 times out of 100 it is going to be people suffering from mental illnesses.
“I listen to them, I have worked out from experience whether it is something they are experiencing which is external to them, or internal to them.”
In most cases Jason will nevertheless bless the house, regardless of the root cause of the problem.
“I will still almost always say prayers”, he added. “I would usually bless the house, which gives them reassurance – I am a priest at the end of the day, so prayer is a really good thing to do.
“Very often that gives them the reassurance to be able to cope with whatever it is that they are dealing with and if there is something that really shouldn’t be there, it will move it on.”
Other times, he is called upon to make repeat visits, which he says can be linked to poltergeist activity – a phenomenon which can be triggered by somebody alive and present.
“[The] classic incident involves an exploding vase,” he said. “It is just this energy that builds up, often associated with teenagers, teenage angst and also with older people often who are suffering from just beginning Alzheimer’s or something like that.”
From this Jason has to have the tricky conversation of telling the person that the problem lies with them.
“We call it the poltergeist conversation, which is a nightmare... you have to go and have a very serious conversation with them, saying ‘actually we think this is probably you now’ – which is not an easy conversation to have.”
Recently, as a result of all of his interesting experiences, Jason was spurred on by a friend to write about them, while being careful not to reveal the details of the people he had dealt with. The result was his book Deliverance, which sparked his appearance on This Morning and a positive response from viewers.
“A surprising amount of people have been really positive about it. A lot of people say, ‘Actually that is really interesting, something like that happened to me once,’” he said.
Meanwhile, for those who are sceptical or cynical about all things paranormal, Jason says he has sympathy for their views.
“I know that a lot of people are sceptical,” he said. “I can be fairly sceptical myself about these
things, so to some extent I know where they are coming from.”
Deliverance: E v e r y d a y Investigations Into Poltergeists, Ghosts And Other Supernatural Phenomena By An Anglican Priest, by Jason Bray, is published by Coronet, priced £20