Could a home healer rescue my haunted house?
Spooky drawings on the wall. Vanishing earrings. And who IS knocking at the front door? When CLAUDIA CONNELL moved house she was terrified by a series of unexplained events. So . . .
APAINTBRUSH coated in dried, red paint on my kitchen table that did not belong to me, and had absolutely not been there when I left the house that morning, was what it took for me finally to accept that
something weird was happening in my new home.
It was the culmination of months of mysterious occurrences that I had done my best to put down to forgetfulness or my imagination. But this was a paintbrush, dipped in scarlet paint suddenly showing up in a house where I lived alone and was not having any decorating work done. I would have given anything for there to be a rational explanation — but I drew a blank.
Ask anybody who knows me and they’ll tell you that I’m the least ‘woo woo’ person you could meet. Until recently, I didn’t believe in anything supernatural and thought there was always a logical, scientific explanation for anything vaguely weird or paranormal. Then I moved into my house.
Like so many city dwellers, I decided to leave the capital for a new start somewhere less frantic. I chose a seaside
I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it AUTHOR TONI MORRISON
town because I had friends and family nearby, and had always adored it as a child.
I loved the house on first viewing and immediately put in an offer. The previous owners had lived there for more than 50 years and told me several times how happy a home it had been for them.
For me, it was a different story. Within days of moving in I felt crushingly low and anxious. I couldn’t sleep at night and constantly felt tearful and on edge.
I decided it was ‘relocation depression’ a recognised condition where the stresses of moving, coupled with the unfamiliarity of a new house and town, give you the blues. I told myself that things would get better — instead they just got weirder.
I’d lived in the house for two months when my possessions started to go missing. It began with a favourite pair of earrings.
I was cooking in the kitchen and the heavy earrings were starting to irritate my lobes, so I removed them and placed them in a nearby egg cup, making a mental note to take them upstairs to my jewellery box after I’d eaten.
When I went back for the earrings, the egg cup was empty. I turned the kitchen upside down and I never found them.
THE same thing happened with a new fountain pen I bought myself. I put it in a pen holder on my desk and never saw it again. A pair of flip-flops I left beside my bed at night weren’t there in the morning.
In the same way that I am not ‘woo woo’, I am also not scatty or disorganised. I’m tidy and methodical and people always remark on my incredible memory.
How likely was it that since moving house I had turned into such a forgetful, chaotic person? As well as losing things I also ex peri- enced a run of bad health. Normally, I’m fit as a fiddle, but it seemed to be one sore throat, migraine and ear infection after another.
I developed pains in my hands that I was having hospital treatment for, and had built up a large file of paperwork from the various physiotherapists and specialists that I’d seen. Another disappearing incident came when I was leaving to see a hand surgeon and had placed my hospital folder on the table to take with me.
By the time my taxi arrived to take me to my appointment, the file had vanished.
Again, I turned the house upside down — this time even rummaging through the contents of my wheelie bin, but to no avail.
Usually with mislaid items they will resurface again at some point. The things I lost never did. Not the earrings, the flipflops, the pen, the hospital file — or the sock.
Oh yes, the white sock. The incident for which even my most cynical of friends struggled to come up with an answer.
I had collected a bundle of laundry from my washing line and was taking it upstairs. As I climbed the stairs, a white sock fell from the pile and landed on a step.
I decided to carry on climbing the stairs, dump the laundry pile on my bed and return for the sock. When I went back 20 seconds later it wasn’t there.
‘Maybe you’ve got a mouse that took it away?’ suggested one of my friends. ‘Could a gust have wind have blown it out of the house?’ asked another. I don’t have mice,
and all doors and windows were shut. The single unpaired sock on my laundry pile told me that I hadn’t imagined seeing its other half on the step.
Then there were the heart shapes that were suddenly drawn on the wall in my hallway. There were four of them, about the size of twenty-cent pieces.
By that stage I’d been in the house almost six months, and I knew they hadn’t been there when I’d moved in. I had scrubbed the house from top to bottom, dusting picture rails, skirting boards and door frames. I would have seen them.
Everything I’d read about relocation depression suggested that it started to lift after a few months, but that wasn’t my experience.
I contacted an estate agent about selling the house only to discover that mortgage holders must be the registered owner of a property for a minimum of six months before they can remarket it.
I felt trapped and overwhelmed with despair. And then the paintbrush incident occurred.
I had been living in the house for eight months, I got home from work went into the kitchen and saw the paintbrush. I checked, and all doors and windows were tightly closed. I have no pets that could have brought it in.
It wasn’t my paintbrush and it had appeared when I was not at home. Red paint — the colour of blood, the colour of danger, made the incident even more sinister.
The next morning I rang a locksmith. I had the locks changed on the front door, the back door and extra locks put on the downstairs windows. I hadn’t changed locks since moving in, and I had no idea who had been given a set of keys over the years.
There was a three-month hiatus in activities, but just when I thought I’d turned a corner, a new wave of weirdness kicked in. I’d wake up in the early hours to the sound of someone knocking on my front door, although when I put my head out of the bedroom window to look, there was nobody there.
Then puddles of water started to appear all over the house. I’d come home to find them in strange places like the TV unit and the dressing table in the spare bedroom. There was no leak from the roof or pipework, and I hadn’t put any glasses of liquid on the surfaces. I had given up trying to explain the unexplainable. A friend suggested I got a priest in to bless the house. ‘But I don’t believe in God,’ was my reply. And, besides, don’t you need to be speaking in tongues and vomiting pea soup before they get involved?
Instead, I looked online at house healers because, by that stage, quite frankly, anything was worth a shot.
Most of them were as I expected — hippy-dippy with websites depicting images of Victorian
2 3 per cent of us think there are mysterious goings-on in our homes
ghosts. No thanks. I wanted to get the madness out of my house, not invite more in.
Then I stumbled across Emma Loveheart’s website. She looked reassuringly normal. She didn’t have home-dyed pink hair and there were no pictures of ghosts in nightcaps carrying candles.
When we met, I discovered that Emma, 51, hadn’t even considered herself to be spiritual until eight years ago.
‘I had a corporate career, I worked in HR for a large telecoms company. I didn’t know anything about spirituality and certainly nobody in my family had any psychic ability or interest in that area,’ she tells me.
Then, in 2011, she had a premonition. Emma, her husband and two daughters were about to go on a skiing holiday when she had a vision that her eldest child was going to be seriously injured on the slopes and end up paralysed.
Initially dismissing it as maternal fear — skiing is dangerous, after all — she said nothing. But the nearer the holiday got, the stronger the feeling became.
‘It became so vivid,’ she tells me. ‘It was like a movie playing out in my mind. I could absolutely put myself at the scene and see how it was going to happen.’
Two days before the family were due to fly off, her daughter, then aged 11, suddenly burst into tears at the breakfast table saying she didn’t want to go skiing because she felt sure something bad was going to happen. Until that moment Emma hadn’t spoken a word about her premonition.
‘We agreed that our feelings were too strong to ignore and we cancelled our trip.’
Cynics may say that Emma’s daughter was merely picking up on her mother’s fear, although Emma remains convinced she had a vision that meant she was able to avert disaster.
From that point on, she began to explore what she had experienced. She read about psychic energy, she went to workshops and spoke to other spiritual people.
‘I needed answers,’ she tells me. ‘And I realised I could connect to this energy, a source, the universe, whatever you want to call it. There’s something that exists outside of our known realms and once I made this connection it felt like second nature.
‘I worked out that I could talk to spirits, that I could work with darker energies. And that evolved to healing people’s homes.’
NOT that there wasn’t an incredibly high personal price to Emma’s calling. ‘Oh, I’ve been on a journey of rejection since discovering I had this ability; my life has been upturned,’ she says.
‘I’ve been told I’m mad. I have lost friends. I lost my marriage — my husband just couldn’t accept it. My father thought I had been kidnapped by a religious cult. But the pull I felt went far deeper than any fear of ridicule or exclusion.’
To date, Emma has ‘cleared’ more than 100 homes; her services start at €210 and the price varies according to the size of the property and the issues in the home.
Her clients are a mixture of very
spiritual people, and others like me. People who don’t normally believe that sort of thing, but have run out of reasonable explanations — and solutions — to the things they witness and feel in their houses.
Her work is done remotely, something that puzzles some people. But she explains that her healing comes from connecting with universal energy which is something she can do anywhere.
‘I don’t flounce around with twigs and incense, I’m afraid,’ she says.
The first step to my house healing is to give Emma my full address so she can tune into the energy of the house. Sometimes she imagines herself in the house, sometimes floating above it.
She was able to very quickly pick up on what she describes as ‘an entity’ living in my home. It wasn’t a human spirit (that’s a relief).
My fear was that I had a poltergeist (a particular type of spirit responsible for physical disturbances). I’d seen the film, I didn’t want to get sucked into my television. But Emma confirmed there was no poltergeist or any other type of ghost, rather a ‘creature’ or some form of sprite.
While a ghost is the spirit of a person or animal that once lived, an entity has been created as the result of constant negative energy and fear.
Emma explains: ‘It wasn’t evil, it didn’t want to hurt you or drive you away, it was just very mischievous, like a child desperate for your attention. It could have been there many years and it felt sad and rejected by the people who moved away.’
Emma said that she was able to connect with the entity psychically, converse with it and tell it to move on by guiding it into another ether. It may sound mad — but no crazier than sinister pools of water and vanishing socks.
And it didn’t stop there. Emma was able to detect psychic stresses in the form of negative vortexes. Five of them in the earth directly underneath the house. She tells me to imagine drain holes that are sucking the good energy out of the house and occasionally spewing negative energy back in.
She detected seven negative energy blocks — these are areas of the house that hold onto negative energy and create the bad atmosphere that I constantly felt.
The only good news was that the ‘geopathic stress’ in my house — the electromagnetic waves in the earth — was about average.
When Emma has gathered all her psychic readings from a house, she gives it a ‘vitality rating’. This is a way of measuring the positive life force within a property.
Anything less than 100% means energy is being drained in some way. Mine was a big, fat zero.
‘Zero is rock bottom and I have encountered it before, but to get that score there is usually some psychic activity in the house,’ Emma says.
Although her reading was shocking, it was also a relief. If changing my locks hadn’t helped, then I had nothing to lose with an energy cleanse.
SHE WAS able to work on healing my home remotely immediately, using her skills to close the negative vortexes and dissolve the blocks. She estimated that it would take two weeks.
Just 24 hours after she started her process, she reported that she’d already got the vitality rating up to 49%.
‘Tell me how you feel when you get home tonight,’ she emailed. ‘I think you’ll find the house feels very different.’
It did. The best way I can describe it is a huge feeling of blissful relief — a bit like taking your heels or bra off at the end of the day.
A week later, and as Emma’s distance healing continues, I feel happier and safer in my home. Nothing has gone missing; the puddles of water have stopped appearing and there have been no late-night door knocks.
Emma promises to get my house up to a 100% vitality rating, and says that once all the negative drains and blocks have been removed, there is no reason why they should ever return.
I still struggle with how bonkers it all sounds, but as Emma says: ‘I think we have to accept that there are some things that are so extraordinary that they can’t be explained. And why wouldn’t extraordinary happenings require an extraordinary solution?’
All I know is that for the first time in 15 months my stomach doesn’t lurch when I put the key in my door.
It would be nice to be reunited with my missing things, but if it means that devious little sprite returning, then I can definitely live without them.