GHOST WRITER
Dead rock stars send me letters
It took a few seconds for my eyes to focus in the half-light of my room. A moment later I let out an almighty scream. I was eight years old and I’d woken to find a stranger perched on the end of my bed, watching me sleep.
She was an older lady, small, with curly brown-grey hair and wearing a brown Summer dress. Although she’d looked solid, she had vanished by the time Mum and Dad came running into my room.
When I described the woman, Dad looked thoughtful, before disappearing and returning with an old photo of four women I’d never seen before.
‘That’s her!’ I gasped, pointing at one of the women. ‘She’s the one who was on my bed!’ Dad nodded.
‘That’s my nan, your great-nan, who died before you were born. I thought it sounded like her.’
Knowing I’d seen a ghost terrified me and I prayed nothing like it would ever happen to me again. At night I’d keep my eyes screwed shut with the covers pulled up tight, just in case my great-nan came back.
Before long though, I had other things to worry about...
I was 11 when Mum was diagnosed with cervical cancer which spread to her bladder and bowel. She had surgery and radiotherapy, but when I was 15 she died of septicemia after her bowel ruptured.
Afterwards I wondered if she’d come to me as a ghost, like Dad’s nan had. The idea of Mum’s ghost didn’t seem as scary as a random relative I’d never met, but I never saw her.
Over the years that followed I went to see various mediums and took part in loads of psychic nights, always wondering if Mum would come through, but although I got messages from other relatives nothing ever came through from her.
Then one night in 2008 my mate Kelly and I decided to go on a ghost hunt and both saw unexplained shadows and felt cold spots.
Instead of the terror I’d felt encountering Spirit as a child, ghost hunting seemed fun and I was soon a regular on the hunts.
Trouble was, as soon as I started to relax about Spirit, I began to sense things around me again. I’d see and feel things in my room at night and, before long, I was barely sleeping.
The lady who ran the ghost hunts was a medium and she invited me to join her spiritual circle where I could learn to open up, close down and protect myself.
Even as I developed, I still didn’t hear from Mum, except once when I was trying and failing to meditate and I saw her in my mind’s eye – though afterwards I wondered if it had just been my imagination.
Then one day in circle, out of the blue, my arms started moving on their own.
It felt really weird, like someone other than me was controlling them!
A couple of weeks later the same thing happened again and this time
I tried asking questions about who was there. My arms seemed to jerk in response, but I had no way of interpreting what the movements meant.
Back at home I had an idea. I tried putting pen to paper before letting my arms move however they wanted.
Soon the paper in front of me was covered in weird marks. Some looked like pictures of figures or places, others turned out to be existing symbols when I looked online, like the one for ‘man’.
After that one of the other circle members, John, suggested I try automatic writing.
‘You could try to connect with Derek,’ he said. ‘Find out his real name!’
I began to sense things around me
‘Derek’ was the jokey name given to the entity who haunted the hall where the circle met each week.
It seemed a harmless plan, so I sat down, set the intention of connecting to ‘Derek’ and tried to empty my mind.
Before I knew it, words were flowing onto the page, but when I looked the writing clearly wasn’t English. Intrigued, I copied the words into Google Translate and it identified them as an old Germanic language called Frisian.
It turned out ‘Derek’ was actually a Viking warrior called ‘Waughaa’!
Knowing I’d given this long-dead Spirit a voice had felt amazing and I was soon learning all I could about automatic writing, joining various groups on Facebook.
Next, John suggested I try to connect with some celebrities in Spirit, with him asking questions while I channelled any responses onto paper.
First up was the late Michael Hutchence from the band INXS who were big in the eighties and nineties. This time, although lots of words flowed, they made little sense. Michael seemed disorientated, though one poignant line stuck out when I read it back:
‘Keep me awake I never died.’ After that we tried Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd and got what seemed like unpublished song lyrics!
Next up was David Bowie and he turned out to be the most chatty yet.
I could see him sitting opposite me with his floppy hair, wry smile and a drink in his hand, as John asked questions and I let my hand move over the paper with David’s answers.
David wasn’t keen to talk about his music, saying he’d ‘been there, done that’, but John, who has also battled cancer, talked about his own fight with the disease.
David’s dry sense of humour had John and I giggling – especially when John asked if he was interested in reincarnating back on
Earth and David replied: ‘Not on your nelly!’
After that we tried a few more celebrated faces from the past, but the scientist Marie Curie didn’t seem at all amused by our attempt to connect with her, while Queen Boudica was disappointing.
The weirdest thing was when I tried to connect with George Michael and my right arm twisted uncomfortably the whole time. It was only afterwards that I learnt he was left-handed!
It was in the Summer of 2019 that I started seeing a man who looked a bit like my dad in my mind’s eye.
I’ve been researching my family tree for a while and, looking through photos,
I finally realised the man was my dad’s great-uncle, who had died in the First World War.
I thought it would be interesting to try to connect with him through automatic writing, but I’d not been trying long when ‘my’ writing noticeably changed, becoming incredibly neat, with all the letters the same size.
My heart started banging in my chest as I recognised the beautiful script. It was my Mum’s handwriting! She’d found a way to come through to me at last.
Mum told me she was around to help me but to be careful.
She also suggested I stop looking into Dad’s side of the family for a bit and look into her Scottish ancestors instead.
Afterwards I felt a sense of comfort knowing Mum was still around, but also a strange feeling of release.
I realised she’d been waiting until I was truly ready to hear from her.
Nowadays I still do automatic writing as part of my spiritual life. I also help out a friend, Ben, who has started his own ghost-hunting group.
I used to be scared of the dead, but automatic writing has allowed me to connect with some fascinating characters from history – and more importantly, my lovely Mum, at last.
David Bowie was the most chatty