At the age of 15, I felt my own psychic skills take a radical shift. Life had been going along as it normally did, which meant school, dance class, home, homework, tea and then sleep. It's strange how we move into living like robots where we typically regurgitate days similar to the ones we had the day before, without questioning, if there is more to life.
One particular morning, as usual I caught the bus to school, and about half way through its journey, the bus always sat for a few minutes before continuing on its way. As I looked out of the window, I remember distinctly thinking, I don't want to live my life always being here. When I looked at my family and friends, they all schooled in the same place, met someone, settled down and raised their own families in the same place.
The thought of doing that just did not resonate with me. Now living in the UK in the 1970's we still had not advanced to the stage where once you left school you moved out of your parents home and became independent. We were a little more parochial, and it was unheard of for a young girl to leave home unless she got married.
Bus journeys were always a strange experience for me. The bus could be empty and only me on it, but I guarantee that who ever got on, had to sit at the side of me and go into all the nitty-gritty details of their life. At 15, I hated bus journeys, I always seemed to attract nutters, or have weird experiences.
You see, I didn't know anything about auras or energies back then. I didn't realise how I was already being prepared on how to listen and talk to people. I was never your shy type of person. I was always confident, spoke as I found and I never ever had the emotional intelligence to consider how others may feel about what I said. Looking back now, I think that was when I was my most authentic self. I never censured what I said, I always was, well, just me.
That day when I sat on that bus realising I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in Rotherham, was a profound moment, because the moment I thought it, I just knew, that I wouldn't. I was going to live my life overseas.
I never stopped to think about how it would happen, or even if it would ever happen. I just had this knowing that I was going to travel and I would 'not' be just existing where I was now.
June 1st 1978 was a day I will never forget, I was woken up quite abruptly to find the grey lady stood at the foot of my bed. She looked at me, smiled and then waved goodbye. She had never waved at me before, and I remember feeling like this was her way of saying goodbye. I had an uneasy feeling in my stomach and knew what was coming.
My grandfather was in a Sheffield hospital, he had cancer and had not been well for some time, so since the grey lady had been to visit me, I knew why she had come. Mum was already planning to go and see her dad, so I didn't feel the need to add to her drama by telling her the grey lady had been. Mum was beyond close to her dad, she absolutely idolised him. Sadly, later that day my grandfather made his transition into the spirit world.
Mum had been and seen her father. She had already returned home when the telephone call had come to say he had slipped peacefully away. Mum was beside herself, my dad just didn't know what to do as there seemed to be no consoling her. Nothing me or my sister did, seemed to help, so we all had to just allow her to cry and cry. I don't think there is anything worse than seeing someone else racked with emotional pain and feeling helpless to do anything to make them feel better.
I think that was the first time I began to feel energies, the energies in the house felt oppressive. That same day a few of my friends from school were meeting up to visit a derelict house which they claimed was haunted. They rang and asked me if I wanted to come along. Well, I thought, anything is better that sitting here, there was nothing I could do. Dad had an evening show he couldn't get out of. My sister was staying to console my mum and mum said it would be good for me to get out, so off I went. As soon as I stepped out of the house, I felt so much lighter that I scurried along eager to meet up with my friends.
I met up with Karen, Diane and Denise and we all chatted as we made our way to the house. How we found out about the house I can't remember, but the house was at the bottom of a cul-de-sac with boards across the windows with signs saying stay out.
When you're kids, you don't realise that the place could be derelict because it's unsafe. We snuck around the back and someone had already been in the property before us, there was a gap in the back door which you could squeeze through.
We were giggling and teasing each other about who would go in first, Diane said she didn't think it was anything but an empty house, so she pushed through the back door and entered into the building with Denise in tow. The house was empty except for a few newspaper pages on the floor. As Karen and I made our way in the darkness into the hall, we saw old wallpaper and peeling painted skirting boards. The place smelt damp and stuffy.
Diane and Denise had take the stairs whilst Karen and I entered into the kitchen. We noticed it felt strange, quite heavy. I think that was the first time I had begun to talk about feeling energies. Whilst we were talking about the energies of the home, we both looked at one another and said at the same time 'Sad'. The place felt sad. We wondered who had lived here, what stories had unfolded. In the middle of chatting about who might have lived here and what had happened, Diane and Denise screamed and came running down the stairs saying there was something upstairs in the bedroom. They ran out of the house refusing to go back in.
They said that as they went into the main bedroom, something moved. We thought they were joking. Karen said, 'If you're winding us up, you're in for it', I wasn't sure if they were joking or not. Diane said "If you don't believe us, go up there yourself, there is definitely something up there."
We stopped talking and looked at one another, we went back to the back door opening and waited to see if we could here anything and then there was a creak upstairs. "Is someone up there?" I asked, "ssshhh" said Diane.
We stood still holding each others hands, Karen said "Why don't I go up with Jill?" "Oh great volunteer me, why don't you" I replied. Karen said "Well if anyone can talk to ghosts its you."
"oh lovely just what I wanted the day my grandad had died' I said.
We stood at the bottom of the stairs and looked at each other, 'You first', Karen said standing behind me. So gingerly, one step at a time, we walked up the steps. Because the house was boarded up, it was dark. We didn't have mobile phones with torches on in those days, you either had a torch, which none of us thought to bring, or you just had to let your eyes adjust.
I remember thinking why am I doing this? As we got to the top of the stairs. We slowly pushed open the first bedroom door, nothing. We pushed open the second door, again nothing. The bathroom was ahead, it was dirty and didn't smell very nice at all, and then there was the main bedroom door.
We gingerly pushed open the door, ready to scarper if we did see anything, and at first, it looked like there wasn't anything there. Karen grunted in disappointment and said, 'Diane had been messing with us'.
She turned around and set off back downstairs, as I turned to go, I felt something behind me, I spun around and there was this blue light hovering like a band in the middle of the room. The only way I can describe it, is as if, someone had a blindfold on and you couldn't see the body but only the blindfold. As I stared at this 'band' thing, it suddenly had eyes that blinked and looked back at me.
My heart was pounding but I knew I was safe, I didn't feel frightened, I just felt very odd. It was as if someone had wrapped me in a blanket. I turned, walked down the stairs and outside to my friends who were waiting for me. "God, you're brave" said Karen," I thought you were behind me, when I realised you weren't, I didn't know what to do. You've been up there ages, we were all deciding who was going to go in and get you".
"Ages?" I said,
"Der, yes, you've been up there at least fifteen minutes" said Karen.
"I thought you were taking a dump" said Denise. We all laughed.
"Well, did you see anything?" asked Karen.
For some reason, I didn't feel like saying anything. "Er, not really no". I said, not really sure what I had seen, and had I 'really' been up there for fifteen minutes?
We all set off to the shop for some drinks and sweets, but I felt like I really just wanted to go home. I felt tired, drained almost, so I made my excuses and made my way back home. I tried to put the experience of the house behind me, but that night, I kept having nightmares about clowns. I kept waking up, as each dream progressed on from the previous one. One dream however, in particular, has always stayed with me.
The dream began with something tapping on my window. Now as we don't have any trees or anything that could touch my bedroom window, I got out of bed and opened the curtain to see what the tapping was. When I open the curtain I can see a clown on a bicycle. Now what's strange is, that as I was training to be a ballet dancer, I wasn't allowed to ride on a bike. Nor was I allowed on roller-skates, or anything else that moved which may end my dancing prospects. I opened the window to take the bike, but the clown takes my hand and encourages me to go out through my window to see the circus. I never get to the circus, I just see faces of clowns coming in and out, laughing, whatever is happening, I know I don't like it. One of the clowns is holding my wrist really tight and I am really fighting to get free. I then wake up because I broke free. The touch of the clowns hand was really cold. It was touching the clowns hand that woke me. I remember sitting in my bed scared to death. (To this day, I don't like clowns or the circus, they really do give me the creeps.)
Now the dream in itself wasn't perhaps anything to be really bothered about, but something definitely happened either whilst I was in the house, or in those dreams I had, because I noticed that when I was at school, and I was in the middle of writing something down, I would write down so many words in english and then a word here or there, that looked like utter nonsense. I kept wanting to write things down using symbols and lines which joined up. My teachers weren't impressed, with all the crossing outs and rewriting, I was told to stop doing things for attention.
I wasn't after attention, even to this day, if I am writing by hand, I see the word in my mind differently to how it's normally written, it's a bit like a form of shorthand, but none that I have every found anywhere else.
It was at this point that my tarot card readings began to take on a different meaning too. I began to pick up the tiniest of symbols in the cards and would get an instant different meaning, even if it didn't make sense to me, it often made sense to the person I was reading for. Symbology began to become more prominent in my readings, and I began to dream of symbols. I had a special notebook to write them down in, if I wasn't really paying attention, I often found myself doodling them constantly.
The more I drew them, the more I became aware of different energies and meanings to what was being given to me. Even at fifteen, I began to recognise that just when I thought I knew everything about the tarot, there were more layers and depths to the messages and guidance they held.
I never did see the grey lady again after my grandad passed. My mum used to ask if I had seen her, or my grandad, but I didn't. I never really understood what happened in that house either, or in my dreams. I have since heard of people claiming they were abducted by aliens, who represented clowns, owls or cats, but in all honesty, I don't feel I could put my clown dreams down to that either. I kind of feel I don't need to know how or why, but just accept whatever unfolded, was meant to be.
If there's one thing I've learnt through all of my years as a psychic it's, uncertainty is the doorway to creating change.
Rather than keep going over stuff, trying to make it fit, trying to understand it or find a reason to why, one of the best things you can do is accept, it is what it is, and if you're meant to learn more, when the time is right, the lesson or experience will make itself known once again.