'I've seen proof of the afterlife'
By SONIA POULTON
Daily Mail
19th April 2007
Since I was a young child, I have been confident there is another life after this one. How do I know? I have regular contact with it, and have done for as long as I can remember.
I accept the cynics will label me as deranged, but they've never seen tables tip over of their own volition, glass tumblers move around untouched and a CD holder lift off the floor and hang in the air for several seconds.
Sonia Poulter (below): I know it sounds barmy but I've seen proof of the afterlife
Recently, I was chatting to a girlfriend and watched with some curiosity as the blurred outline of an elderly lady circled the top of my friend's head with the palm of her hand. My friend sensed something was happening, but she couldn't see what I did.
Why didn't I run screaming from the room? Because for many years I thought such experiences were entirely normal.
It was only when I left my home town in Gloucestershire at 18, to study drama in London, that I realised not everyone believed in ghosts.
The reason for my unshakeable beliefs is that my mother, Elizabeth "Bet" Ann Rose Duggan, was a medium. That word meant little to me as a child, but I just knew my mum was "different" to other parents.
It is through her that I have witnessed scenarios that leave me in no doubt that there is another world where the departed go.
Born in 1926 in Llangollen, South Wales, of Irish-Welsh mining heritage, she gave great credence to all types of paranormal behaviour, whether it was the TV suddenly switching off or a door slamming shut.
People would flock to our house to have their tea-leaves read or sit in on a seance. From as early as I can remember, I was involved in my mother's spiritual readings, which were always an enthusiastically awaited event.
Each sitting - they would sometimes take place several times a month - would include Mum, my older brother Gerald, myself, and two or three other people from our village (my father -a craft designer who was thoroughly sensible and never got involved with the seances - separated from my mother when I was three).
Occasionally, my older sister Teresa would sit in, but not often as it used to give her nightmares. Not me, seven years her junior - I loved taking part. To me, it was thrilling.
Our living room would be cleared in preparation for a seance. The draylon sofa would be pushed back against the wall and the lime green fireside rug rolled up.
The brown wooden dining table would be strategically placed in the centre of the room and the dining chairs were placed around it.
Letters of the alphabet were positioned around the table edges and the words "Yes" and "No" were placed at opposite ends of the table.
Mum would take a glass tumbler, breathe into it and then pass it round the table for all the participants to do the same. When this was done, the tumbler would be placed, rim down, in the middle of the table.
We would then each lightly place an index finger on the bottom of the glass and Mum would begin.
"Is there anybody there?" she would ask. We would sit, in great anticipation, waiting for some indication that we were not alone. Then, if no such sign was forthcoming, we would all ask, together: "Is there anybody there?"
It could be seconds or minutes before a "connection" was made. Sometimes it didn't happen at all and we would pack away the letters and return the living room to its day state.
Other times the glass would stir from its inanimate state and our fingers would trail after it around the table. All our index fingers lent on the glass and I can still recall the frisson of excitement and fear that was generated among us.
Critics often claim that people are pushing the glass, but that is easy to detect because the bed of a fingernail reddens with the slightest pressure.
Then the mobile glass would spell out words and names and answer "Yes" and "No" to our questions, such as who they were, how did they die and whether they had a message they wanted passed on.
Some sessions were more illuminating than others. One Sunday afternoon, the spirit of my mother's first husband, Bernard Poulton Senior, joined us.
I was there and he spelt out who he was and that he wanted to talk with Mum. He had died of cancer 14 years before, leaving Mum, my two brothers and sister. Four years later, Mum met, and married, my father.
Mum asked him what it was like "where he was" and he quickly spelt out: "Like a lovely garden."
A sense of great well-being enveloped those of us present: my brother Gerald and his friend Johnny, my sister's fiance Andrew and me and Mum. But the next moment the mood changed.
Bernard Senior had more to impart and our fingers followed his energy in the glass as it spelt out:
'Y-O-U W-I-L-L B-E J-O-I-N-I-N-G M-E S-O-O-N.'
Before that year was over, Mum was dead. She died of polycystic kidneys on an autumn day, two months into my 11th year. Naturally, we were devastated. But having witnessed the seance months earlier, we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that she had gone to a better place.
Some of the people I tell about my childhood are horrified by what I saw. A number view it as a form of abuse. They say the adults around me, and in particular my own mother, failed to protect my health and well-being and introduced me to inappropriate, and potentially dangerous, behaviour.
As a mother, I appreciate those misgivings. It's fair to say I wouldn't be happy for my own daughter Shaye, nine, to attend a seance - and I have not been involved in one since my mother's death.
I would be concerned that it may have a detrimental psychological impact on my daughter, and besides, I'm not sure seances are the best way to contact the dead - it can be too intrusive for them, like banging on their front door.
But I wouldn't change my childhood for anyone else's. I believe there was a reason why my mother "hot-housed" my paranormal understanding:
I think she knew that, because of the ill health she suffered due to an inherited disease, she would die while I was still a child and she wanted to prepare me for a life ahead without her.
My eldest brother, Bernard, refused to take part in the family seances. Even now he refers to them as "antics - like parlour games". But I'm different.
I've been accused of being a fantasist and an attention-seeker. But I know what I've seen.
Thankfully, my spiritual experiences have been primarily positive. I've frequently heard voices, smelled others' fragrance - sometimes lavender water, other times tobacco - and watched body shadows and silhouettes moving from one space to another.
Once, when I was 12, I saw, briefly, my former best friend hiding under my bed as if playing hide and seek. She'd been dead for three years. Of course, I was shocked and pulled back from the bed so that the covers fell down. When I looked again, she was gone.
It was the first time I'd seen a physical manifestation of a ghost. But I was so schooled in the idea of the supernatural that I remember feeling sanguine about the whole episode.
Thankfully, I can recall only two negative events. The first occurred when I was only eight. Our three-bedroom semidetached home, in a cul de sac in the Cotswolds, was opposite an old manor building which was being transformed into flats.
During the building work, Mum acquired a round antique oak table and one evening she prepared it for a seance. Within moments of the tumbler being returned to the table, it seemed to be filling with an unseen force and began vibrating.
Swiftly the tumbler moved around the letters and then came to an abrupt halt after frenziedly zigzagging round the table.
The obscene message it spelt out, and the accompanying dark, menacing aura that filled the room, caused Mum to stop the seance immediately and return the table.
At that moment I understood the concepts of fear and evil. Even Mum didn't know from whom the message came or at whom it was directed, but the feeling was that we shouldn't have brought the table into the house.
In retrospect, it was irresponsible for Mum to have let me get involved in things like that, but I'm convinced that she was preparing me for a life without her, and trying to show me that she would not be taken away from me for ever.
My other deeply negative encounter occurred more recently, when my daughter was five days old.
It was about 10pm on a September night in 1997 and my two brothers and their families had just left our home after visiting our new arrival. My partner, Stephen, was watching TV in the living room and I had gone to bed after settling Shaye in her moses basket in our room.
Moments after lying down, I became aware of something in the room. My mouth ran dry and I couldn't open my eyes or even speak. I felt deeply threatened and consumed by fear for the safety of my child.
Panic filled me, my eyes were still clamped shut as if every muscle had been removed from the lids, and I pleaded in my head for God to help us. As quickly as the presence came, it disappeared and my eyes opened and I screamed out.
Thankfully I have not experienced anything like it since. Merely to recall it fills me with unease and fear about the darker forces I am convinced move among us.
Some things are beyond words, and you don't have to believe me - but I know it happened. It was real to me.
Scientifically, of course, the question of life after death is unequivocal: there isn't one. Science has no tools to grapple with the unseeable - it cannot prove the existence of ghosts. But should we place so much importance on visual evidence?
Our eyes, according to psychologist Dr Jane Morton, are notoriously unreliable. "Eyewitness accounts are highly fallible," she says. Far more effective, in the act of recognition, she says, are the physiological functions of our body.
Some people refer to it as "gut instinct", but I know when a spirit of some kind is around me because my palms sweat, my heart palpitates, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my mouth runs dry.
Not dissimilar, in some respects, to how a cat reacts whenever it feels a presence in the room.
But it is not just physical or spiritual manifestations. I regularly hear voices around me, even when I am alone, and most nights, for decades now, a soft, comforting voice whispers: "Goodnight Sonia" as I am drifting off to sleep.
I don't know if it is a boy or a girl, man or a woman. Yet it exists. And I love it.
No, I am not psychotic. Neither have I suffered a brain injury. I am reasonably intelligent and educated (up to degree level) and I am studying the scientific discipline of psychology. Which, for the most part, has little time for things that can't be observed or measured.
But I know there is more to life than, well, life. When I was at primary school, some of my classmates used to call my mum a witch and even though the cynicism has become more sophisticated there is no denying how some people perceive me and people like me.
I don't blame them. If I hadn't had my experiences, I might have been as cynical as them.
But I am confident there is something more because it is continually revealing itself to me. Take, for example, an incident four years ago, when I was living in a 400-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds.
One evening, as I was packing cases to move home, a wooden CD rack which was leaning against the wall set itself straight in front of my eyes and raised itself a foot or two into the air. Then it sank down to the floor and rose up again before coming to rest on the carpet.
By then I was beyond being shocked. I didn't feel threatened by it, and it was almost as though someone was helping me with the moving. So yes, the paranormal is there for all of us. We just have to allow for the possibility of its existence.
Death, claimed Freud, is a fearsome prospect for many. Might it be less of a worrying proposition if we knew more about what it entailed? That there was more to death than the nothingness we dread. That's how I feel, and the thought reassures me.
I take umbrage when mediums and spiritualists describe themselves as having "the gift", because that suggests it is only available to the few. It isn't. I believe everyone is capable of spiritual contact.
The only difference in my case is that I have been raised with that understanding and taught it on an intimate level by my own mother.
So if you ask whether she did me disservice by introducing me to such things at a young age, I say no, she opened my eyes to a host of extraordinary experiences which have made my life richer than it would otherwise have been.
dailymail.co.uk
By SONIA POULTON
Daily Mail
19th April 2007
Since I was a young child, I have been confident there is another life after this one. How do I know? I have regular contact with it, and have done for as long as I can remember.
I accept the cynics will label me as deranged, but they've never seen tables tip over of their own volition, glass tumblers move around untouched and a CD holder lift off the floor and hang in the air for several seconds.
Sonia Poulter (below): I know it sounds barmy but I've seen proof of the afterlife
Recently, I was chatting to a girlfriend and watched with some curiosity as the blurred outline of an elderly lady circled the top of my friend's head with the palm of her hand. My friend sensed something was happening, but she couldn't see what I did.
Why didn't I run screaming from the room? Because for many years I thought such experiences were entirely normal.
It was only when I left my home town in Gloucestershire at 18, to study drama in London, that I realised not everyone believed in ghosts.
The reason for my unshakeable beliefs is that my mother, Elizabeth "Bet" Ann Rose Duggan, was a medium. That word meant little to me as a child, but I just knew my mum was "different" to other parents.
It is through her that I have witnessed scenarios that leave me in no doubt that there is another world where the departed go.
Born in 1926 in Llangollen, South Wales, of Irish-Welsh mining heritage, she gave great credence to all types of paranormal behaviour, whether it was the TV suddenly switching off or a door slamming shut.
People would flock to our house to have their tea-leaves read or sit in on a seance. From as early as I can remember, I was involved in my mother's spiritual readings, which were always an enthusiastically awaited event.
Each sitting - they would sometimes take place several times a month - would include Mum, my older brother Gerald, myself, and two or three other people from our village (my father -a craft designer who was thoroughly sensible and never got involved with the seances - separated from my mother when I was three).
Occasionally, my older sister Teresa would sit in, but not often as it used to give her nightmares. Not me, seven years her junior - I loved taking part. To me, it was thrilling.
Our living room would be cleared in preparation for a seance. The draylon sofa would be pushed back against the wall and the lime green fireside rug rolled up.
The brown wooden dining table would be strategically placed in the centre of the room and the dining chairs were placed around it.
Letters of the alphabet were positioned around the table edges and the words "Yes" and "No" were placed at opposite ends of the table.
Mum would take a glass tumbler, breathe into it and then pass it round the table for all the participants to do the same. When this was done, the tumbler would be placed, rim down, in the middle of the table.
We would then each lightly place an index finger on the bottom of the glass and Mum would begin.
"Is there anybody there?" she would ask. We would sit, in great anticipation, waiting for some indication that we were not alone. Then, if no such sign was forthcoming, we would all ask, together: "Is there anybody there?"
It could be seconds or minutes before a "connection" was made. Sometimes it didn't happen at all and we would pack away the letters and return the living room to its day state.
Other times the glass would stir from its inanimate state and our fingers would trail after it around the table. All our index fingers lent on the glass and I can still recall the frisson of excitement and fear that was generated among us.
Critics often claim that people are pushing the glass, but that is easy to detect because the bed of a fingernail reddens with the slightest pressure.
Then the mobile glass would spell out words and names and answer "Yes" and "No" to our questions, such as who they were, how did they die and whether they had a message they wanted passed on.
Some sessions were more illuminating than others. One Sunday afternoon, the spirit of my mother's first husband, Bernard Poulton Senior, joined us.
I was there and he spelt out who he was and that he wanted to talk with Mum. He had died of cancer 14 years before, leaving Mum, my two brothers and sister. Four years later, Mum met, and married, my father.
Mum asked him what it was like "where he was" and he quickly spelt out: "Like a lovely garden."
A sense of great well-being enveloped those of us present: my brother Gerald and his friend Johnny, my sister's fiance Andrew and me and Mum. But the next moment the mood changed.
Bernard Senior had more to impart and our fingers followed his energy in the glass as it spelt out:
'Y-O-U W-I-L-L B-E J-O-I-N-I-N-G M-E S-O-O-N.'
Before that year was over, Mum was dead. She died of polycystic kidneys on an autumn day, two months into my 11th year. Naturally, we were devastated. But having witnessed the seance months earlier, we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that she had gone to a better place.
Some of the people I tell about my childhood are horrified by what I saw. A number view it as a form of abuse. They say the adults around me, and in particular my own mother, failed to protect my health and well-being and introduced me to inappropriate, and potentially dangerous, behaviour.
As a mother, I appreciate those misgivings. It's fair to say I wouldn't be happy for my own daughter Shaye, nine, to attend a seance - and I have not been involved in one since my mother's death.
I would be concerned that it may have a detrimental psychological impact on my daughter, and besides, I'm not sure seances are the best way to contact the dead - it can be too intrusive for them, like banging on their front door.
But I wouldn't change my childhood for anyone else's. I believe there was a reason why my mother "hot-housed" my paranormal understanding:
I think she knew that, because of the ill health she suffered due to an inherited disease, she would die while I was still a child and she wanted to prepare me for a life ahead without her.
My eldest brother, Bernard, refused to take part in the family seances. Even now he refers to them as "antics - like parlour games". But I'm different.
I've been accused of being a fantasist and an attention-seeker. But I know what I've seen.
Thankfully, my spiritual experiences have been primarily positive. I've frequently heard voices, smelled others' fragrance - sometimes lavender water, other times tobacco - and watched body shadows and silhouettes moving from one space to another.
Once, when I was 12, I saw, briefly, my former best friend hiding under my bed as if playing hide and seek. She'd been dead for three years. Of course, I was shocked and pulled back from the bed so that the covers fell down. When I looked again, she was gone.
It was the first time I'd seen a physical manifestation of a ghost. But I was so schooled in the idea of the supernatural that I remember feeling sanguine about the whole episode.
Thankfully, I can recall only two negative events. The first occurred when I was only eight. Our three-bedroom semidetached home, in a cul de sac in the Cotswolds, was opposite an old manor building which was being transformed into flats.
During the building work, Mum acquired a round antique oak table and one evening she prepared it for a seance. Within moments of the tumbler being returned to the table, it seemed to be filling with an unseen force and began vibrating.
Swiftly the tumbler moved around the letters and then came to an abrupt halt after frenziedly zigzagging round the table.
The obscene message it spelt out, and the accompanying dark, menacing aura that filled the room, caused Mum to stop the seance immediately and return the table.
At that moment I understood the concepts of fear and evil. Even Mum didn't know from whom the message came or at whom it was directed, but the feeling was that we shouldn't have brought the table into the house.
In retrospect, it was irresponsible for Mum to have let me get involved in things like that, but I'm convinced that she was preparing me for a life without her, and trying to show me that she would not be taken away from me for ever.
My other deeply negative encounter occurred more recently, when my daughter was five days old.
It was about 10pm on a September night in 1997 and my two brothers and their families had just left our home after visiting our new arrival. My partner, Stephen, was watching TV in the living room and I had gone to bed after settling Shaye in her moses basket in our room.
Moments after lying down, I became aware of something in the room. My mouth ran dry and I couldn't open my eyes or even speak. I felt deeply threatened and consumed by fear for the safety of my child.
Panic filled me, my eyes were still clamped shut as if every muscle had been removed from the lids, and I pleaded in my head for God to help us. As quickly as the presence came, it disappeared and my eyes opened and I screamed out.
Thankfully I have not experienced anything like it since. Merely to recall it fills me with unease and fear about the darker forces I am convinced move among us.
Some things are beyond words, and you don't have to believe me - but I know it happened. It was real to me.
Scientifically, of course, the question of life after death is unequivocal: there isn't one. Science has no tools to grapple with the unseeable - it cannot prove the existence of ghosts. But should we place so much importance on visual evidence?
Our eyes, according to psychologist Dr Jane Morton, are notoriously unreliable. "Eyewitness accounts are highly fallible," she says. Far more effective, in the act of recognition, she says, are the physiological functions of our body.
Some people refer to it as "gut instinct", but I know when a spirit of some kind is around me because my palms sweat, my heart palpitates, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and my mouth runs dry.
Not dissimilar, in some respects, to how a cat reacts whenever it feels a presence in the room.
But it is not just physical or spiritual manifestations. I regularly hear voices around me, even when I am alone, and most nights, for decades now, a soft, comforting voice whispers: "Goodnight Sonia" as I am drifting off to sleep.
I don't know if it is a boy or a girl, man or a woman. Yet it exists. And I love it.
No, I am not psychotic. Neither have I suffered a brain injury. I am reasonably intelligent and educated (up to degree level) and I am studying the scientific discipline of psychology. Which, for the most part, has little time for things that can't be observed or measured.
But I know there is more to life than, well, life. When I was at primary school, some of my classmates used to call my mum a witch and even though the cynicism has become more sophisticated there is no denying how some people perceive me and people like me.
I don't blame them. If I hadn't had my experiences, I might have been as cynical as them.
But I am confident there is something more because it is continually revealing itself to me. Take, for example, an incident four years ago, when I was living in a 400-year-old cottage in the Cotswolds.
One evening, as I was packing cases to move home, a wooden CD rack which was leaning against the wall set itself straight in front of my eyes and raised itself a foot or two into the air. Then it sank down to the floor and rose up again before coming to rest on the carpet.
By then I was beyond being shocked. I didn't feel threatened by it, and it was almost as though someone was helping me with the moving. So yes, the paranormal is there for all of us. We just have to allow for the possibility of its existence.
Death, claimed Freud, is a fearsome prospect for many. Might it be less of a worrying proposition if we knew more about what it entailed? That there was more to death than the nothingness we dread. That's how I feel, and the thought reassures me.
I take umbrage when mediums and spiritualists describe themselves as having "the gift", because that suggests it is only available to the few. It isn't. I believe everyone is capable of spiritual contact.
The only difference in my case is that I have been raised with that understanding and taught it on an intimate level by my own mother.
So if you ask whether she did me disservice by introducing me to such things at a young age, I say no, she opened my eyes to a host of extraordinary experiences which have made my life richer than it would otherwise have been.
dailymail.co.uk
