Blithe spirit

When a spiritual ‘strangeness’ pervaded her home, Stevie Martin called in the cleansers

Last month I

rang a spiritual clearer because

I was scared of my own

shoe cupboard.

‘I can’t detect any real negative energy. Has the house been blessed?’ a nice psychic lady said to me over the phone. I told her that of course the house hadn’t been blessed, bid her a polite goodbye, and hung up feeling like an idiot.

I’ve always been interested in spirituality. As a teenager, after ruling out most religions, I came across Paganism, and proceeded to mildly concern my parents by reading their palms and stealing basil from the kitchen to make protection charms. I liked it then because, amid crashing hormonal chaos, it seemed simple. Instinctive and more free form than the rules and regulations of conventional belief systems. It revolved around the fact that everything has an energy, and this energy can be directed however you want.

Amid the similarly crashing chaos of London, I’m still drawn to that simplicity. So when, at 28 years old, I started lodging in my friend’s newly bought flat and promptly began sleeping in the living room because everything unnerved me about my bedroom – the quiet walls, vast expanse of space, not to mention the shoe cupboard and how I’d once dreamed about waking up and seeing an eye staring back at me through the crack in the cupboard door ( just like that

episode of Round The Twist I’d watched, and wet myself at, aged 10) – I started thinking about spiritual clearing.

Spiritual clearing, for those not in the know, is the act of removing the negative energy from a flat, house or person. Another tradition is, as the psychic mentioned, a blessing, which can be done by someone of any faith and is a way of ensuring the house is settled before the new owner moves in, but without actively looking for ghosts or energy. And yes, I felt embarrassed when I brought it up with my new housemate. ‘Oh, that’s weird the psychic asked if the house had been blessed,’ she said. ‘Because I did do that.’ I nearly had a cardiac arrest. ‘I didn’t know what else to do, everything was going wrong and it was like the house was conspiring against me. We’d strip the carpets to reveal rotten floorboards. We had mice and then suddenly the ceiling caved in,’ she explained. ‘I thought it couldn’t do any harm.’

That settled it. I immediately called another two psychics (I’m thorough) I’d found after googling ‘spiritual clearers London’ but this time I demanded a proper examination, and found out that I’m just one of many. In fact, it’s becoming positively fashionable among the young London set.

‘Most of my clients are in their twenties,’ renowned psychic and spiritual healer Hayley Rogers tells me upon arriving at my flat, taking various objects out of her bag including a drum, a bell, an ornate-looking knife, some incense. I start feeling like I am in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and, just to be clear, I am a huge fan of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Straight-talking and no-nonsense, Rogers couldn’t be further from how you’d expect a psychic to be. You know, wearing 12 capes that blow in the breeze despite the fact we’re stood in my kitchen, tonnes of eyeliner, three rings on each finger and a cat called Merlin. Instead, she looks like a perfectly normal woman in her late forties except, on closer inspection, she’s wearing a small blue crystal necklace (more of that later) which, if I’m honest, could have come from Accessorize (it didn’t).

‘Older generations were a bit more practical and sceptical,’ she adds. ‘Younger generations are more open to the spiritual now, probably because they’re less interested in the traditional religions the previous generations swore by and have the freedom to be more questioning.’

Rogers trained in Japan as a ritual magician, has received countless certificates in a variety of healing and spiritual practices and now runs classes on empowerment in southeast London, as well as doing call-outs all over the place.

Just to clear up what we mean when we talk about ghosts, we’re not talking Casper. Rather, it’s an umbrella term for an energy that can form and be picked up by those who are slightly more sensitive to these sorts of things. Most places have some sort of ‘ghost’, but a restless, angry one could cause you to feel stressed and upset in your own home, for example. If you’re super sensitive like Rogers or one of the other space clearers, then you may get an impression of a human form, and the story behind when the energy was a living form, or pick up on the emotions more acutely, but not always.

The increasing number of people calling on Rogers’ services is not surprising. Wherever you look, spirituality is back with a breathy, mysterious vengeance. From commuters reading books on meditation to evening yoga classes spent breathing through your various chakras, we’re a generation obsessed with Things We Don’t Understand But Sound Cool. Think how many times in the last few years someone told you how mindfulness has ‘like, absolutely changed my life’ while wearing an aura of eerie (dare I say smug?) calm and sipping on a peppermint tea. Think about the Kabbalah craze a few years back, and, these days, the fact that whenever there’s a Blood Moon, a Supermoon or a Blue Moon, we know about it. Simply put, we’re drawn to the mysterious.

A study by religious think tank Theos found that threequarters of all UK adults believe that ‘there are things in life that we simply cannot explain through science or any other means’*. Another by University College London revealed that a fifth of people in the UK describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’**, a figure that has been increasing as the popularity of religion decreases. The simplicity of spirituality, and its acceptance of everyone, makes it timeless.

When you think about it, what’s the difference between getting a priest to read off an old bit of paper and having Rogers work a crystal? The aim is the same: an attempt to control chaos and seek out meaning. Adulting is harder now than it was for previous generations; we’re more likely to flit than have careers, rent than buy, date than settle down. According to Ingrid Collins, who’s a part-time healer and psychologist at London Medical Centre, London’s leading private medical clinic, this is the key to religion and spirituality. ‘When we are kids we have parents who are our gods,’ she says. ‘But as we grow to adulthood, we still crave that feeling of someone who looks after us, and it’s a real need for nurturing and protection. People need that now more than ever.’

So back at my flat, Rogers has begun the first step in the clearing process: using a Lapis Lazuli crystal to feel vibrations from various corners of each room of the house (known as ‘dowsing’), and a ‘chimer’ – a small bell – to detect energy changes by listening to variations in sound.

‘Call-outs definitely tend to get busier during each full moon, when people are a little more sensitive,’ she explains as she prepares some holy water in a metal bowl for sprinkling purposes. For a reasonably sized two-bedroom flat like mine, she’ll charge about £100, and increase the price the more ‘dangerous’ it gets. When I ask what she means by ‘dangerous’, she seems unwilling to elaborate, in case it sounds over the top. ‘Let’s just say that if you had called me with a dangerous problem, I would have known immediately and you would barely be able to speak,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes there are psychic attacks, objects moving around, a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t want to frighten people with. People can pay thousands the more serious a clear-out gets.’

For some, there’s no price limit on a spiritual clear-out. Another psychic, west London-based Philena Bruce, works almost exclusively for upmarket properties where people can pay up to £3,000 for a session. ‘I’ve been flown out to Belgium and France before,’ she tells me. ‘And my team and I also often go to businesses in the city. We’ve had investment banks who just haven’t been performing and after we’ve been in they’ve seen incredible results.’

I’m hoping for incredible results in my own room. Rogers asks me to chime the bell in each corner to note what I hear. Preparing an elaborate lie, I’m relieved – and concerned – to find I can actually detect a difference when striking it in the direction of the dreaded shoe cupboard. It sounds lower. She asks me whether I can sleep and I tell her about my living room nights, and how uncomfortable I feel in my room despite being a 28-year-old adult who once abseiled backwards from a bridge.

‘There’s something off about that room,’ she says, nodding in the direction of the cupboard. ‘I got a flicker of a ghost when I walked in before, but wanted to be sure. I think the house guardian here is a bit upset. And as the shoe cupboard is right by your head, that’s probably why you’ve been struggling to sleep.’

All houses have a house guardian, apparently. In the Middle Ages it was common practice to hold parties upon moving in, to let the spirit know you’d claimed the space – something we still do now, in the form of a house warming. Thankfully, there are also traditional rituals for when someone finds a ghost man living in your cupboard. Rogers reassures me that this isn’t anything to worry about as I eye the cupboard warily. ‘It’s very common,’ she says. ‘When a house is old and gets converted into flats, the energy becomes disrupted and the house guardian – in this case, the man who was here before – is unsettled. I can help you clear it.’ Great news.

First, we ‘smudge’, which involves burning sage and doing a bit of wafting. Second, she drums in a gentle rhythm to help stir the energy. Third, I wait on my bed while she goes into the cupboard and, through a crack in the door, I can see her talking animatedly to what appears to be nothing. After 10 minutes, she comes back in.

‘He’s lived here the whole time, and doesn’t understand why there’s been so much disruption,’ she tells me. ‘This used to be his room, as the dividing wall is probably a false one, and he hates the fact that it’s messy and uncared for.’

A quick tap on the wall reveals it is in fact false, and I can’t deny that I’ve been throwing shoes around in the boiler room. The upshot is that I have to tidy it, clean it, and keep it looking respectable – and then in return, he’ll let me sleep and be a little more settled in the dead of night. And yes, that does sound crazier when written down than it did at the time.

After Rogers has left, I look at the cupboard like it’s going to sprout a mouth and talk to me. Then I take a deep breath and tidy it. I hadn’t spent any time there because it gave me the creeps, but just standing in it for a bit starts to make me feel better. I put a vase of flowers on the windowsill, arrange my shoes properly, add some nice-looking storage boxes and throw away the cardboard. That night I realise how little it matters if there is a man living there or not, because another adult has validated my irrational fear of it. ‘When something emotionally affects us, we create neuropeptides, a string of protein that reacts with cells all over our bodies,’ explains Collins. ‘More simply, we are energy and information, and we react to energy and information. There’s a real crossover in psychology and spirituality. People feel negativity in a certain space because the light, heat or electrical energy resonates at a particular frequency to our bodies. We’re drawn to wearing certain colours on certain days because colour vibrates at different levels, too. Whatever you believe, you are being affected by the energy around you.’

I was affected by the weird energy in my shoe cupboard, and whether or not that was because of a ghostly presence or because I’ve seen one too many horror films, I’ve now claimed that space as my own. And, regardless of how or why, where’s the harm in that?