Touched by Divine Love

This journey has not always been one that I cared to make. Raised a Catholic, I was taught to believe in certain things and in particular ways. Although I was never good at being told what to do or what to believe, I followed my religion.
        As I grew, I found myself questioning what I was being taught. I became a thorn in the side of all authority figures who couldn’t give me reasonable answers to my queries. “Because the Bible says so,” or “This is the Word of the Lord,” and (my favourite) “Because it has always been that way” were never responses that I could accept.
       I began to play up at school and was asked to leave by at least two schools, one of which my niece ended up attending. She told me that some of the nuns remembered me. I was asked to leave that school when I was nine. What a legacy! I was the classic case of a child needing to be understood.

—oo0oo—

As a child, I could communicate with the spirits of the dead. I saw winged creatures, which I believed to be angels, and would hear them as clearly as if I were having a conversation with a living person. I was often called odd by people who would hear me having conversations with beings they could not see. The spirits would have me stop people on the street and relay messages, which would make the recipients feel uncomfortable. Having a thirteen-year-old girl tell them things she couldn’t possibly know was very disconcerting.
        I realised after a while that what was normal for me was not normal for society, so I tried to conform. Over time, I learned to ignore the entities that wanted messages sent. Eventually, they stopped showing themselves to me, but I would always get verbal requests. I never complied—until my first date with a boy.
       I was an athlete and had little interest in boys until I was about sixteen years old. My physical training and dysfunctional schooling took up most of my time until I was around eighteen. I met a young man in a pub who invited me out to dinner. He was blonde and cute, so I agreed.
       We went to a restaurant in London and ordered our meals. Unfortunately, I felt the familiar sensation of a spirit entity beginning to make its presence known. My head seemed to be inside a clamp, and there was a buzzing in my right ear. I knew the spirit was about to speak. Silently, I told it to go away. It didn’t, and I began squirming uncomfortably in my seat. My date asked me if I was all right.
       As he posed the question, a little girl about four to six years old materialised beside him. She was pretty, wore a little white dress, and had beautiful blonde hair and blue eyes. She was rosy cheeked and had a huge grin plastered all over her little face. She told me she was my date’s sister.
       Selfishly, I didn’t want to ruin my evening, but the little girl pleaded with me to pass a message on to her brother. How could I refuse her?
       I looked at my date and blurted out that his sister was standing beside him. I gave him a description of her, explaining that she wanted him to know that she was happy and that it wasn’t his fault that she had died. He was to stop feeling guilty.
       He went as white as a sheet and asked me to repeat what I had said, so I did. He began to cry and through his tears told me that his little sister had drowned when she was four, a year younger than he was at the time. She had fallen into water, and since he couldn’t swim, he was unable to help her. He had lived with the guilt ever since, believing that her death was his fault.
       Suddenly, he focussed on me with quiet fury. He stood up and told me that I was a freak and that he never wanted to see me again.
       I was shattered, since I didn’t understand that what I had done was wrong. Of course, I now realise the enormity of what happened, including the pain he was carrying, but back then I had no idea. In my head, I agreed with him and began reiterating to myself that I was a freak.
       Unfortunately, the incidents kept occurring and I got little reprieve from the onslaught even when I reached adulthood.
       When I was nineteen, my girlfriend Katherine and I visited my sister Nicky in Somerset, UK. She and her husband were living in an old manor house owned by his parents. Kath and I were shown to our room. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it. Kath entered first. As I stepped over the threshold, I felt an awful chill run through my body. The room went freezing and I could see my breath. “Get out!” a malevolent voice hissed at me. I grabbed Kath’s hand and ran from the room. She told me that she had also felt the room go cold.
       We spent the evening laughing and eating with my family. (I didn’t drink alcohol back then, and even today I may have only a glass or two a week.) We decided that nothing had happened, that we were just spooked because the house was so old.
       At about midnight, we wearily made our way to bed. The temperature in the room was normal as we entered. Nothing was amiss when we climbed into our beds and started chatting.
       Out of nowhere, I felt a presence close to my face. It breathed cold air onto me and shouted, “I told you to get out. Go now!” I screamed, jumped out of bed, and asked Kath if I could climb into bed with her. In my naiveté, I thought the entity would leave us alone if we shared a bed. Safety in numbers. We hid under the covers, and I recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over again.
       I felt something slip under the covers and my body went icy cold. “It’s under the covers and on me!” I hysterically told Kath. We yanked the covers off of us, and as we did, the presence moved close to my face again. Now Kath was afraid. “Get out! Get out! Get out!” the voice bellowed in my ear.
       I screamed again, and Kath and I bolted from the room. We ran downstairs and hid in the kitchen until 6.30 a.m. when Nicky walked in for her morning cup of tea. We threw ourselves on her and relayed our story.
        “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. I forgot to tell you that your room used to be the old nursery and it’s haunted,” Nicky informed us. She said that whenever children stayed in that room, they would say, “I don’t mind the man visiting, but it would be nice if he put his head back on.” Great! Thanks a lot! We refused to stay in that room again. The man may have liked children, but he hated young adults.
       My first out-of-body experience happened in the manor a year later when I visited with my boyfriend. We were given a room in the attic, since I refused the nursery room due to my previous experience.