Haunted Scotland Read Online Free PDF Page A

which departed spirits become lost, sometimes for centuries. All that those poor people wanted me to do was to help them to find their way to the light.’ He went on
to tell me that he and Marion had returned to the river bank with a Bible and spent the afternoon in prayer. After a while, the prevailing sense of gloom had dispersed and a warm sun touched their
faces. ‘After all those centuries I was able to show them the light,’ said Henry with satisfaction. ‘It enabled them to pass over to a better place.’
    Henry died peacefully in his sleep four years ago at the age of ninety-two, but every time I drive along the A72 between Galashiels and Walkerburn, I think of him.

4
AN AWAKENING
    Two orders of being, the visible and the invisible, pause on the doorstep of this grey hour, and which is going to advance upon you you hardly know.
    Neil Miller Gunn,
The Other Landscape
(1954)
    As was emphasised by Gordon McNeill-Wilkie in Chapter Two, the gift of clairvoyance can become a curse. It takes courage to come to terms with it and to lower the barriers.
Nobody enjoys being made fun of. Nor does anyone relish being accused of self-delusion.
    Joan Charles has worked in personal and intuitive development for over twenty-five years. A cheery, stylishly dressed personality with bobbed blond hair, she is a regular contributor to
lifestyle magazines, writing on such subjects as intuition, self-discovery and psychic awareness. Based in the town of Gourock, where she was born, her own self-awareness began when she was seven
years old and she found herself looking into a mirror as if from outside herself.
    ‘I didn’t have a clue what it was all about,’ she protested. ‘I was a very timorous and highly strung child. I simply didn’t understand the sensations that I was
experiencing. There was no one tohelp me so I decided to put whatever it was on hold until I was eleven.’
    Joan remembered going home from school over her lunch break one day to walk the family dog. When she arrived at the front door, she heard somebody calling out her name, yet there was nobody in
the house. The voices continued until she was twenty-four, by which time her mother had died of cancer and Joan was married with four children. Around this time she and her husband separated, but
she insists that the voices were not the only pressures on their relationship. ‘It was not the best of marriages,’ she recalled regretfully.
    However, it was only after her marriage had come to an end that she summoned up the courage to start visiting ‘spirit churches’. Her next move was to buy herself a book on tarot
reading. ‘I knew almost at once that I didn’t need a book,’ she said. ‘I could manage very well without one.’
    And it was this realisation that persuaded her to become involved with alternative therapies. For a time she worked in a health clinic, and several of her clients remained with her when she set
up on her own after it closed down. ‘I started to give readings to audiences in Glasgow,’ she explained.
    Soon afterwards, she was approached by an agent who suggested she put together a stage act. Almost before she knew it, she was performing in pubs and clubs, which in turn led to her running
corporate courses on intuitive leadership and being signed up to write a column on star signs in the
Sunday Post
.
    Training groups in team-building, self-belief, awareness and intuition came easily to Joan, especially when engaging with children. ‘Once people open themselves up to the possibilities
available to them, they become infinitely more confident in their own powers. I learned that lesson very early on in my own life.But you have to be prepared for every kind of
eventuality. Things may not always turn out the way you want them to.’
    She remembered one reading in particular. A girl came to ask her for advice, and Joan told her that she could see black bin bags stuffed full of money. It had something to do with the
girl’s