Three spiritual healers share their stories about discovering their soulful talents

“I’m psychic and I’m scared”

Natalie Osborne-Thomason tells how she helped people with their hauntings, once even saving a couple from a haunted mirror by taking it home – only to be haunted herself! Although she was scared, she continued to help others and practise her gifts.

Listen to ghost stories

When my mother had me, she had a hibernation pregnancy – I was in the womb for 13 months. When they induced her, they accidentally anesthetised and killed me. I died before I was even born and I think that switched something on.
As a little girl, my dad used to tell me terrifying ghost stories all the time. My sisters wouldn’t listen, but I used to love them. When I was seven, my granny died from a long illness. I was in my bedroom and suddenly her ghost appeared to me. I ran downstairs and told my mother, “Granny’s here! She’s alright, she’s chubby and cuddly again!” What did I get? A smacked bottom for telling stories. That was the first ghost I saw and ever since then I have done hundreds of interesting investigations.

Move on spirits

When I was older, I joined a team called Extreme Investigations to find ghosts and help move spirits on. I’d drive to the other end of the country to help people that were haunted. “It’s the living that can hurt you, not the dead,” I would say.
A few years ago, I was asked to visit the haunted flat of a young couple. In the mirror that hung in their living room I saw a man, hanging. They begged me to take it away and it wasn’t a pleasant journey. All I could hear were profanities being shouted at me from within the mirror. When I got home, I put the mirror facing the wall because I didn’t want to see him again. But then, we started seeing shadow people.

Face your fear

Shadow people are a dark entity, a person, that appears as a black shadow and feeds on your fear. My daughter told me she kept seeing the shadow people even when she was at work. So, we tried to sell it on eBay as a haunted mirror and stated we didn’t want it back. “Why don’t you just break it?” someone asked me. If I broke it whatever is attached would be free to roam wherever. I was absolutely terrified.

See the future

In September 2019, I had a premonition. I was in a cemetery next to my mum’s grave. I looked around the grave and saw bodies wrapped in sheets. “Something’s coming and it will kill millions. There’s not enough people to bury the dead,” she told me. I told my son and that same night he had a dream that there was a virus, but people couldn’t tell who had it and who didn’t. So, when the pandemic started, I thought this is what mum was talking about. What terrifies me is, what’s the point of seeing it if I can’t stop it? However, I do believe I have been given these gifts for a reason. In the future, I’d like to find missing people and missing pets around the world.

Natalie Osborne-Thomason is a mum of three, grandmother and psychic clairvoyant. She has written four books and now hosts her own YouTube channel ‘nn7ghosthost’ giving advice and recalling her ghost hunting years, and she hopes to inspire other disabled people to start their own writing or video projects.

“I wanted to help people”

Hana Carter was burning out from her journalism job at a national newspaper, and turned to the spiritual practices she’d been raised on. She discovered she had a gift for Reiki healing, which felt like a reawakening and led her to becoming a Reiki practitioner so she could help others.

Find your calling

It was 1am in March 2020 and I was curled up in a ball on the floor, letting heavy sobs leave my exhausted body. I’d just finished a nine-hour shift for a national newspaper where I’d been reporting on nothing but the pandemic. This was going to be my life for the next year and a half, where I would spend days drowning in negative news as we went from lockdown to lockdown. As a news journalist I was used to covering pretty grizzly topics, but the pandemic was like nothing I’d worked with before. I eventually hit a wall with my career. I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news anymore – I wanted to offer help and support instead.

As I spent my evenings working out my options, I found I was turning more to natural therapies and relying on yoga to keep my wellbeing in check. I’d grown up with a mum who had an essential oil or herbal tea for everything. My pockets have always clicked with crystals and I’ve had countless energy healing sessions and tarot readings throughout my life. So it wasn’t long before I began exploring potential careers within the spiritual world.

Discover your soul purpose

I was particularly drawn to Reiki, and knowing that several family members are Reiki masters and practitioners, I decided it might be something I’d be good at. Curious and wanting to learn more about the Japanese method, I booked myself onto a highly recommended Reiki 1 course.

Nothing could have prepared me for how truly magical Reiki is. Embarking on that course, which then led to me taking Reiki 2 to become a qualified practitioner, was one of the best life choices I’ve ever made. I soon realised it wasn’t a case of being “good” at it, it was purely about reawakening something inside me that I had forgotten.

My Reiki training taught me how to reconnect with the Reiki (or life force) energy we all have flowing through our bodies. I still remember so clearly the profound moment I was attuned. As I sat in meditation, I had a vision of what I can only describe as a prison door hatch suddenly dropping open. The iron flap made such a noise in my mind that my whole body jolted.

Reawaken your senses

A few days after the Reiki course I felt remarkably different in myself. My confidence levels had been boosted, things just felt easier and the familiar feeling of being overwhelmed was nowhere to be found.

Since my training, I have taken on clients, as well as friends and family, each person offering extraordinary feedback. My best friend, who is a self-confessed sceptic, had the most profound reaction of them all. She told me she could feel energy flowing through her body and that it felt like a “wave of pressure” rolling from her feet all the way to her head. Others saw colours dancing around their minds, some felt weight on parts of their body where I wasn’t touching and some cried.

I’ve found that it’s helped people feel soothed and their minds feel less clouded. So for me, the best part of being a Reiki practitioner is helping people and offering a moment of calm in these uncertain times.

Hana Carter is a journalist and producer for many national publications. To follow Hana’s journey, you can find her on Instagram @hanamaycarter

“I was inspired to make art”

David Ditchfield was inspired by a near-death experience to paint art and compose music. The confidence he found from the NDE helped him to work with musicians and produce sell out concerts and write his
own memoir.

Meet beings of light

My name is David Ditchfield and in 2006 I had a freak accident. My coat got trapped in the doors of a departing train and I was dragged under the wheels as the train left the station. Miraculously, I survived. As the hospital surgeons fought to save me, I had a profound near-death experience (NDE) and journeyed to the Afterlife, the place I believe we go to when we die. I found myself floating among the stars, surrounded by beautiful beings of light. At my feet, a brilliant tunnel of white light appeared, radiating pure love. That was when I knew I was in the presence of Divine Spirit itself. But it obviously wasn’t my time to die and I was sent back to this world a changed man.

When I woke up in hospital, to my surprise I had acquired new gifts. The first was an ability to produce paintings with skill that went far beyond any previous ability I had. Even more surprising was the second gift – the ability to compose classical music, even though, to this day,
I can’t read or write musical notation.

Find inner inspiration

When I was younger and left school, I moved to London. With no qualifications or skills, I ended up working as a manual labourer, barely making enough money to cover my rent. That was when I felt at a real low point, lost and directionless.

But after the NDE, everything felt different. I now knew that angels and guides are with us, always, watching over us and sending us love as we face life’s toughest challenges. I held onto that love as my new-found gifts forced me to face up to my greatest fears. Painting was the easier gift to start with. Once I started, inspiration took hold and I’ve now completed over 40 paintings and commissioned art pieces, some depicting what I saw during my NDE.

Be amazed

The real test came with my second gift. After completing my first classical symphony and finding out that tickets for the premiere concert had sold out, I faced up to my fear of not being good enough in front of highly educated, confident people. After all, for an uneducated former manual labourer to be suddenly confronted by an orchestra of middle class musicians, it was intimidating to say the least.

But at the first rehearsal, I realised just how much the NDE had changed me. I was able to speak to the musicians from the heart, from my true authentic self and find a confident voice that I’d never had before, and to my amazement they listened. Even more remarkably, my debut NDE-inspired symphony, The Divine Light, received a standing ovation at the premiere concert. Since then, I have been lucky enough to be commissioned to write further orchestral pieces, which have also premiered to sell-out performances.

One of the first times I received a musical idea from Spirit, some words came into my mind at the same time as a melody. The words were, “Shine on, you keep shining on.” I had no idea what they meant at the time, but I loved the phrase and when I was looking for a title for my NDE book, the title Shine On seemed to fit perfectly. I felt like everything had come full circle.

As I look back, I never thought my life would turn out like this. I never thought I’d find a way to do something with my life that has meaning and purpose. After starting life with so little confidence in myself, I feel very blessed that it has.

David Ditchfield is the author of Shine On: The Remarkable Story of How I Fell Under a Moving Train, Journeyed to the Afterlife, and the Astonishing Proof I Brought Back with Me (£13.99, O-Books) amazon.co.uk. For more about David, visit shineonthestory.com