A helping HAND...
A psychic’s prophecy was to come true when my husband needed it most. By Maureen Humphreys
It was the mid-nineties and I’d gone for a reading with Swein McDonald, the notorious ‘Seer of the Highlands’ at his croft house.
Sitting by the fire, with his flowing white beard, he looked more like Father Christmas than a world-famous psychic!
Any doubts evaporated when Swein told me he could see a young man in uniform standing behind me, a hand on my shoulder.
‘He’s the image of you, and says he’s sorry he couldn’t be there when you were young, but he’ll always be your guardian and help from the afterlife when you need it.’
I gasped. How could Swein have known my dad, who’d been in the Merchant Navy and had died in World War II, aged 25, when I was a baby? And that I apparently looked just like him?
‘You’ve got a son, haven’t you?’ Swein continued. ‘He’ll wear a uniform one day too.’
I thought about my Robert, then a typical teenager. A military career seemed unlikely!
‘I just hope it’s not a prison uniform!’ his dad, Arthur, joked after.
But just as Swein had predicted, Robert did join the Army and, in 2019, he invited us to visit him for four weeks in Kenya, where he was stationed. Running a hotel in the Scottish Highlands meant holidays were rare for Arthur and me, so a month in Africa was really exciting.
But a week before we were due to leave, Arthur suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and was given less than a 30 per cent chance of survival.
We’d been looking forward to the holiday of a lifetime. Now I didn’t know if my husband would last the day.
I was still at Arthur’s bedside in critical care when a tall, young man appeared, wearing old-fashioned slacks and an Aran sweater. ‘Hold his hand tightly and don’t let go,’ he advised. ‘Touch is the last sense we lose before we pass over. Then pray.’
I did as I was told, taking Arthur’s pale, icy hand and saying a silent prayer for him to survive. When I looked up again, the man was gone.
‘Who was I just talking to?’ I asked a passing nurse.
‘There’s only the consultant and me here,’ she replied, looking puzzled.
Then she added, more quietly, ‘People do have some odd experiences in this room though…’
I was still wondering how the man had got onto the locked ward without being seen, when the consultant came to examine Arthur.
‘He’s starting to show a very slight improvement,’ he said, his surprise obvious.
I thought about the young man who’d come in to the room – and then something hit me.
I’d only ever seen the one surviving photo of my dad and, though I hadn’t looked clearly at the young man’s face, he’d been tall, like my 6ft 2in father.
Miraculously, Arthur recovered and, although we didn’t make it to Kenya, we had another good three years together before, more recently, he was diagnosed with dementia.
I’m convinced it was Dad who appeared by Arthur’s bedside to support us, just as the Seer of the Highlands had predicted.