Cotton mill child workers shuttled gently back to heaven

Today I was meant to see a client for healing but fate decreed that she postponed. This meant I could accompany my son and his new bride to Manchester Airport and wave them off on their honeymoon to Switzerland. As the return journey was another 2 1/2 hours, Mikey and I decided to stop off at a National Trust property named Quarry Bank (Cheshire) and walk our doggie round the beautiful grounds, whilst indulging in a little historical culture at the same time…

Some of you may have seen a recent Channel 4 series named The Mill: a period drama set in 1833 and based on real-life stories and people of the textile mill workers. We had not realised this drama had been filmed at this very Quarry Bank Mill! I for one was relieved to learn that the characters and events had only been loosely based on real life and events: To me, the huge mill with its working machinery and the most powerful watermill in Europe represented child labour and greedy mill owners, so I was relieved to find it wasn’t quite the dark satanic mill that had been portrayed on television.  (I had been unable to watch after the first broadcast as it was too emotive.)

However, serendipity decreed that  within minutes of arrival at the mill I had to answer a call of nature and found myself being swept along with a gaggle of young schoolgirls into the ladies! Safely ensconced in a cubicle I decided I’d just do a bit of fishing for any lost souls ~ and was immediately approached by another (spirit) gaggle of youngsters ~ 23 little girls who had perished during the early history of the mill and who ‘had not made it’ … Just as I moved this batch over to the other side, I had to laugh at the irony as a school mistress interrupted the noisy girls congregated around the wash basins with a loud voice: “GIRLS!!! (Deadly silence) If you are done here will you please leave NOW…”   (I like to think I was far more gentle with my girls LOL!)

I chuckled to see the living girls lined up quietly on the cobbles outside and as I passed them I wanted to stand in place of their school teacher and give them another important lesson in life:  Appreciate the life you have now, for the children who worked in the mill  died from terrible diseases like cancer of the mouth from sucking cotton through bobbins or the groin from oils rubbing against them, bent over from 70 hour working weeks, were ‘contracted’ to work from the age of 8 years, right up until they were 18 ~ so there was no way out for them.  The lasses who rushed to me in spirit form ‘had not made it’ into heaven and had haunted the mill with their bent up sick little spirits since the Victorian era.  It is through LOVE that I was able to reunite them with their families waiting on the other side.

Later, in a room showing the stages of cotton, from the plant to the spinning wheels and then to the fabric, I found one lone cotton picker, and Mike obligingly hid my madly spinning dowser from pubic view as I retrieved his soul. We climbed down some cold stone steps, well worn from years of little feet up and down them, and I came across a crouching spirit child retching in a corner, which led me to find another 8 hiding on these stairwells. At the Accounting House I found the energies too oppressive to enter and hovered in the doorway. From here I cleared a huddle of 13 ‘accountants and desk wallopers’ (!) from the Dickens-type space of musty dark wood document draws and desks ~ obviously a combination of hard working accountants and their Mr Gradgrind type bosses who kept the mill running like machinery. They were no doubt relieved to find themselves back in the healing, gentle and loving existence of the After Life!

A chance meeting with a 400 year old witch

My parents were up country for their grandson’s wedding so it was a great chance to take them to see my Uncle and Aunt in the nearby county of Leicestershire. We all had a wonderful reunion, after which eight of us descended on a quaint little pub for lunch. Although I was enjoying a rare break from checking for lost souls, enjoying the family camaraderie, it was inevitably time to pop to the Ladies and out of pure habit I whipped out my dowser to check ~ I can’t help myself!!

Wow! Within seconds, four lost souls had shot through the portal and into the Light…

The fifth, however, paused before following them to freedom:

“Witch hunt!…” she cried…”t’were a witch hunt!….’ung me in a gibbet!!!” My dowser flailed wildly as she was being pulled in the direction of the Light but struggled to make her voice heard;…”Me bairn! They snatched me bairn; ripped her from me bos’m!” When a soul is extremely distressed like this it is my duty to try and calm them down so that their passing will be as gentle as possible. I sympathised greatly with her, feeling the awful pain that only a mother can feel when something so terrible comes between her and her child.

“Evelyn Peasgood…” she said clearly, “Evelyn Peasgood; that’s me name…Forget me not!…” ~ then she passed serenely. I scribbled her details onto a scrap of paper in my back pocket and slipped it to my husband upon return to the table. Not all my extended family were aware of my other life as a ghost rescuer and it was easier to keep quiet about my encounter. However, there is a time and a season to every purpose under heaven as, only 10 minutes later, my father thrust one of my calling cards in front of my Uncle’s face. (Oh no! Such a lot of explaining to do and I’m sure he will be a sceptic…) To my amazement he was very interested in my work, so I took a chance and told him how I’d just met Evelyn Peasgood, who told me she had been hanged as a witch. He gazed into my eyes earnestly…

“Just 2 miles up the hill in that direction,” he said, “several witches were hung…” Perhaps Evelyn had given me her name so that I could look into history and complete her story? Once home I studied a map of the area and found that midway between Husbands Bosworth and Church Langton, where I found Evelyn in the pub, there is road named Gallow Field Road. Research into witchcraft in Leicestershire revealed that on July 18th 1616, alongside poor Evelyn, eight other woman were executed by hanging, their remains grotesquely hung in gibbets. Tragically, they were executed for their ‘supposed involvement in the alleged bewitchment of (a young lad named) John Smyth’ (recorded July 18th, 1618)…In this modern age we now know that John Smyth, far from being possessed of evil spirits, was suffering from epileptic fits.

It is recorded elsewhere that these poor women were made to chant incantations over the boy in a bid to retract their so called evil influences.

Why did Evelyn Peasgood insist I remember her name? When I found her details in that ledger (she directed me to the correct entry), it read: ‘Anon 269 is hanged as a witch on July 18th 1666 at Husbands Bosworth, Leicester’. To add insult to injury, she and all those innocent women were completely stripped of their identities. Just numbers in a Ledger! Mercifully, each had left their bodies after death but Evelyn could not bear to leave her young child motherless and had stayed by her side until she grew, and then left for the light after her natural death. Evelyn, however, was unable to leave the magnetic vibration of the earth and therefore remained in limbo for almost 400 years.

“All is not lost!” interjected Evelyn from the other side as I wrote: “We are all reunited in love and forgiveness of one another ~ hallelujah, Praise the Lord!” Now, thanks to that chance encounter in the pub, not only has the spirit of Evelyn been returned to her rightful place in heaven, but she has retrieved her rightful identity.

To honour those poor women wrongly hunted and murdered as witches, the other numbers registered in that Ledger are 301 (died while in custody in gaol), 300, 298, 297, 295, 294, 293 and 292 ~ is it not strange that Evelyn was numbered 269 and was the only soul to remain earthbound for the next 400 years? (In numerology, 2+6+9=17=8 ~ a symbol of everlasting life!)

Who needs a house sitter when you’ve got a few ghosts keeping an eye out?

Our neighbour recently went abroad for 2 weeks and we popped in twice a day to draw the curtains, feed the fish and generally keep an eye out for their home. On the third evening my husband was engrossed in a film and I offered to do the honours, nipping round to unlock their front door and retrieve the mail from the porch. After drawing the curtains in their front room I was moving to the back of the house when I felt several pairs of eyes watching me. Not in the physical sense, of course, but the eyes of lost souls who’d congregated in the house for one reason or another. As I walked into the new kitchen extension I suddenly realised there were no curtains to pull there.

“Don’t you be a peeking and a prying!” warned a stern but playful voice from one of the invisible people, taking me aback!

I laughed,‘don’t be so ridiculous…as if I WOULD!’ then took out my dowser, stopped half way up the stairs, and asked ‘would anyone like a lift home then?’ The uptake was immediate, and 16 swishes of my dowser later the visitors who had been attracted to the house on a like attracts like basis were once more free to continue their spiritual journey onwards and upwards. This included a Sierzant from the Polish Army and, just out of interest, I mentioned this to my neighbours upon their return. Apparently, somewhere in the house, there is some Polish military ephemera…proving once again that objects contain vibrational energy and any lost soul connected with that object during their lifetime is able to be located through the Law of Attraction. Simples!