Читать книгу Soul Rescuers: A 21st century guide to the spirit world - Natalia O’Sullivan - Страница 8

As I recall I had just left school at the tender age of 15. At my first job in a shoe factory, making ladies’ high-heeled shoes and the winkle pickers that were very popular during the 1960s, I made friends with Gordon Landles, an older boy around 19 years old. At the time he was a devout Christian, a member of the local Baptist church. I was a more rebellious character, interested in pop music and motorbikes. But we still hit it off.

During the breaks at work, Gordon and I began deep discussions exploring belief in God, life after death and any topic surrounding the Holy Ghost. Gordon would use any method he could to try and convert me to the Baptist Church, as if he were one of Jesus’ great crusaders. Unfortunately for Gordon it went over my head and I would only use his arguments as ammunition in our discussions.

One day we strayed into the unusual territory of the paranormal and whether we believed in ghosts, as there had been the sighting of a ghost at the factory. It had taken place in the basement, where the shoes were stored and dispatched. The ghost had actually been seen and heard by several staff over the years. When the machinery was switched off and silence fell on the shop floor, shuffling noises would be followed by a clunking sound and then a dragging, scraping noise would echo across the stone floor, causing many of the grown men in the factory to run away or stop stone dead in their tracks. The ghost was nicknamed ‘Stumpy’; he appeared to be an old sailor with a wooden leg. It was believed he was a seaman who had died in tragic circumstances and as a result was unable to rest in peace.

This inspired Gordon and I to go on a ghost hunt, although neither of us had seen Stumpy, even though we had spent the night in the basement awaiting a ghostly encounter with him. We decided to go to a haunted graveyard, at night, just to prove the existence of ghosts. The haunting of factories, burial grounds, hospitals, pubs and castles was well documented in many books. I suspect Gordon had some romantic notion of catching sight of a guardian angel, just like St Paul had seen on the road to Damascus, and I had always had a fascination for the supernatural.

It was a cold winter’s evening – 1963 was particularly cold. Having chosen a Saxon church with a derelict churchyard, we packed a snack and prepared ourselves for a night vigil. Gordon negotiated the iced dirt track on his motorbike with me riding pillion. We arrived safely and began to search around the grounds. The church dated from around AD 800 and lay in open ground. It had a wooden perimeter fence and gate, and the surrounding land was farmed with scrub and heath, reaching out like a hand into the bitterly cold North Sea.

Gordon left the motorbike at the gate and left the main beam shining at the privet hedge around the fence, so we could see. There were no streetlights and the moon was not yet full. We made our way separately across the graveyard, trying our best to avoid standing on the old gravestones, which mainly lay sunken in the sandy soil, eroded by time and the elements.

After a short time Gordon began to get edgy and to complain about the cold wind shaking the old church and causing creaking noises to join in the symphony of squeaking trees. But I was unwilling to give up our ghost hunt.

Then I lost sight of Gordon for a while. He disappeared as if swallowed up by the ground. When he did reappear his face was ashen white, as if reflecting a full moon on a still lake. He had seen ‘something’ in the courtyard of the church. He wanted to leave immediately, but I insisted that he took me back to the place. As we walked around the front of the church there was an apparition – tall, still and ethereal.

Terrified, we left the church and skidded across the ice on the motorbike until, miraculously, we reached town in one piece.

Though what we had seen could have been a shadow of one of the trees against the light of the motorbike, I always wanted to believe that it really had been an apparition and this was the beginning of my interest in haunted places. At that time I had no idea that in the future I would see ghosts and apparitions as real as the physical body and experience poltergeists and malevolent ghosts causing paranormal activity worthy of Hollywood movies.

I had, however, always had an awareness on a psychic level. When you are young you think everyone is the same as you. Then it transpires that you are set apart from others, because of this gift. It is easy to compensate by trying too hard to fit in, to be everyone’s friend. In doing so the psychic gift then gradually becomes a curse, as people demand advice and support from you or they begin to see you as weird or eccentric. Some will even accuse you of being evil or of doing the work of the Devil!