First I’m a 26 year old female, sharing a house with my parents and four dogs and various other animals. I also run my own business

When I was a child I had imaginary friends, I didn’t just have humans though I also had a dog called Scampy and her litter of puppies. My parents just thought I had an overactive imagination.

When I was 6 my Great Grandmother died after the funeral we stayed with my Great Granddad for a few days and like any young child I got into mischief, my punishment was to sit at the top of the stairs for 10 minutes, within seconds of being left alone my Great Grandmother sat down next to me, you’ve never seen a child run down stairs quite as fast as I did, absolulty terrified. Funnily enough my imaginary friends disappeared that day. I believe that the sheer terror I felt somehow blocked something inside me. Until the day my Great Granddad moved out of that house I never once walked up those stairs alone.

As I got older I become accustomed to the feeling of never quite being alone, always seeing something out of the corner of my eye. When we visited Stately homes (what child doesn’t love National Trust properties!) I would always get ‘feelings’ that often had the attendants amazed, you don’t often get kids telling you they don’t like the feeling of a room. The older I got the more interested I became until the age of 14 when I started to get a feeling that something was missing, it felt like a part of me wasn’t quite whole and I obsessively started to research into the paranormal and also Wicca and Paganism. I started meditating and using visualization. Finally life started to make sense. I started using a pendulum and began reading tarot with surprisingly accurate results. Then life turned upside-down within the space of one week both my grandfathers died, the first as a result of pneumonia, on the day of his funeral my other granddad had a severe stroke, he died 3 days later. Suddenly nothing made sense, how could my family be torn apart like this? Was is some kind of sick cosmic joke? Was it somehow my fault for dabbling in the paranormal? It was all too much for me and there started the next two years of my life of depression, alcohol abuse and self harm. All my books, everything to do with my believes were thrown into a box. Only thanks to my amazing family did I manage to get through this time.

Skip forward to 2004, I had started meditating again and during one of these I saw my grandfather, he told me not to worry or to be sad anymore, he was ok and was waiting for my grandma ( I think he is going to have a long wait as at 76 she is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon!) shortly afterward my cat was put down and that night I clearly felt her climb onto the bed, pad around (as cats do) before settling down to sleep at me feet.

Forward again to 2005 and we moved house into a largish 100 year old property, about a month after moving in I was awoken to the sound of a woman singing and could hear her walking around my bed, I then sensed a malevolent male force who tried to pull me out of bed and rip my duvet off, the female presence somehow sent him away and continued singing until I fell asleep (I now sleep with my Labrador Retriever on the bed!) Nothing much more happened in the main house other than a ghostly cat who we all regularly see an the landing, the annexe however, where I run my business from, was another story. Doors open and close, we hear tapping, mumbled talking and often smell pipe smoke.
During this time my feeling of something missing surfaced again along with the need to understand what was going on, so out came the books, and this time a lot slower and more cautiously than before I started my research into the paranormal.

Early 2007 I was sat at home, a bit bored flicking channels on the television and came across Most Haunted. A show I didn’t like as I felt the medium, Derek, was at worst a fake and at best expanding on the truth. But during this episode it wasn’t Derek it was another Medium called David Wells I sat riveted through the whole show. There was something about him that just made sense, for the next few months I watched every show with David in it, and I bought his books, greedily gobbling up his words but always wanting more. But then I started to get annoyed, not with David but with the Most Haunted team, they were gradually ignoring his advice and becoming very provoking and rude to the spirits, the final straw was during a most haunted live when they hung a pentagram upside-down, That was the last show David did with them.

Continue into 2008 and I was again awoken by a voice in my ear “I’ll do to you what I did to the others, I’ll bury you” Interestingly enough in our back garden there are 5 slightly slumped areas that the grass always grows differently on. Family and friends often joke that they are just the right size for graves. Enough was enough, if I was hearing voices it was one of two things, the first I was going mad, the second our house was haunted. I chose the second option as I figured mad people don’t know they are mad. So I again threw myself into research buying every book on the paranormal, visiting websites looking into different Religions constantly looking for answers. Scared that the more I opened myself to these things, the stronger they would become. Would I be able to control it? I don’t have the answer to that question yet. I then had a tarot reading which was amazingly accurate and part of it told me to embrace who I was becoming.

I continued to read and David Wells brought out a new book and CD which I immediately bought. Then my mum asked what I wanted for Christmas. She knew my beliefs and is also interested in the paranormal so when I asked for a ghost hunt she agreed and decided to come along. You can read that bit in “The Christmas supper section”

I finally met David on Friday and he taught me a lot, a few tips and tricks for visualization. How to not be afraid to ask and questions with what you see, and most importantly not to be afraid. I can quite honestly say its like a switch has been flicked in my mind. So where does that leave me now? To be honest I have even more questions than before. I have booked a course with David on Qabalah, and have another ghost hunt lined up for January. This time at Warwick castle.

I want this blog to be a record of what’s going on with me, if you don’t believe or in fact think I’m as mad as a hatter, then please leave this isn’t the place for you. However if you do believe then please share your stories and maybe we can answer some questions together.