Soul Rescuers: A 21st century guide to the spirit world. Natalia O’Sullivan
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soul rescuers – the shamans, priests and mystics – seek to cure the sickness in a person’s soul. This is exorcism in the traditional Christian sense: they deliver evil from a place or person. They communicate with the spirits and understand the rules of co-existence with the otherworld. They have learnt to walk the dangerous path of death and rebirth, surviving initiations involving all kinds of natural and supernatural phenomena while remaining faithful to their beliefs. We ourselves have followed this path.
THE INNOCENT GHOST HUNTER
TERRY’S STORY
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!
MY CHILDHOOD INITIATION
I saw my first ghost when I was very young. I remember being in my cot and seeing a strange-looking person standing before me in a purple robe. He looked quite like the mysterious Dr Fu Manchu, the Chinese character in the books of Sax Rohmer. This spirit was obviously a Mandarin Chinese. He had disappeared by the time I was about seven years old and we had moved to a different house. He appeared to me 20 years later through a psychic channelling medium. He said his name was Ching Ling and that he wished to help guide me through my life. He was my first experience with the spirit world.
I also recall seeing other spirits who used to come and stand by my bed. It never occurred to me to ask who they were or why they were there. After all, we used to say a prayer in school asking ‘angels to guard us while we slept’, so it seemed only natural that these were the angels of my prayers, even though they looked more like people than angels.
So, by the time I was 13 years old, I had already experienced psychic encounters, as well as religious enlightenment. The religious moment came after my first confession. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. After the first confession, the initiate is expected to turn up for a full confirmation ceremony and to receive the life of Christ. I stood up and immediately felt ecstatic, immortal, as though anything in life could be achieved or made possible. I had visions of angels. I was probably about eight years old at the time. I talked about how I felt to my peer group at school. We had all had different experiences, but mine seemed quite special. At that time I knew I loved God and Jesus, but I was in love with Mary, I believed her to be the Mother of the World.
However, there is a large gap between the ages of eight and 13, and by this time, though a lot of my original faith had held fast, the injustices of the world seduced me into questioning my relationship with the Church. The ‘angels’ had long since disappeared and my visions of immortality had been overtaken by my interest in listening to rock ’n’ roll on radio’s Saturday Club. The chart hits of the day and my growing awareness of girls became central interests in my life.
When I was 13 my maternal grandfather died. Grandfather Cooke was one of those ‘salt of the earth’ characters who work hard all their lives for little financial reward. Neither did he expect any charity. He was born during the 1880s, when everyone knew their place, whether rich or poor. He would not have called himself a Christian, but he did believe in Jesus. In fact he told me that his brother once saw Jesus walking through the living room, ‘as plain as day’. This vision of the Lord was probably enough to lend him the faith to prepare him for the afterlife.
He died on the chimes of midnight on New Year’s Eve 1960. Grandmother Cooke moved into our small flat the very next day. In a hurry she had neglected to bring along some essential things, which I was asked to go and collect.
It did not bother me going to the house, I always had a good relationship with my grandparents and I was very happy to help out in any way I could. It was only when I arrived at the front door that I had my doubts about going in. It was not the ghost of my grandfather that worried me, but I had to walk past the cupboard on the landing where the ‘bogey man’ lived. I had been