Exorcising rites

Mary Wakefield

'CLOSE your eyes, I'm going to put something in your hand,' said Mark, and bounded out of the room. He returned and gave me what felt like a metal stick. 'OK, now, say the first thing that comes into your head. Let your spiritual self tell you about the object.' said Mark.

The only word I could think of was 'stick'. After a while, the silence became disappointed. `Mmmmm,' said Mark. 'Actually, its a golf club. The last girl I gave it to said immediately, "I can see a short old man with grey hair." Amazing. This was my father's golf club and he was short and old with grey hair.'

'Never mind,' said Paul from the corner of Mark's living-room. As he spoke, the sun shone through a window behind him, making his ears glow red.

Paul and Mark are the Spirit Rescue Service, a partnership of ghostbusters dedicated to ridding houses of trapped, unhappy or malevolent spirits. The SRS website (www-,spiritrescue.co.uk) describes Paul as clairvoyant, clairaudient and clairsentient.

Things had been going well until the golf-club disappointment. 'I've been looking at your articles and I can see that you're on a spiritual path yourself,' Mark said, as we sped off from Ipswich station in his coffee-coloured convertible. 'That's why we said you could come.' I felt an unspiritual glow of smug. 'After we talk to you, we'd like to give you a meditation with reiki. You can meet your spirit guide, and maybe some deceased loved ones who want to get in touch.' My smugness turned to liquid fear. 'Great,' I said.

Both Paul and Mark started on their spiritual paths after discovering reiki — an ancient, natural-healing technique using lifeforce energy. In a former life, Paul was a surveyor, Mark taught engineering. 'I was a surveyor for 23 years,' said Paul, 'then, one week, when I was on holiday in Cornwall, I heard, or rather felt a voice coming from my solar plexus telling me that I was going to give up my work. Paul obeyed the voice, left his job and bought his own shop. A month later he met a woman who did spirit rescue. Paul wrapped his arms around himself as he talked. 'She told me that she dealt with dark forces and helped free them. The next day, the voice said to me, "You must offer your services to this woman." I tried to ignore it but it persisted. When I rang her she said that she'd been waiting for me to call.' The Spirit Rescue Service was born.

'It really is a bit like Ghostbtaters, but we don't have guns, we use unconditional love,' said Mark. He was in a crouching position on the floor of his living-room. In one hand he had a pint glass, in the other a piece of paper. As he spoke, he carefully lowered the glass on top of a fly, trapped it with the paper and walked over to the door to let it out. 'Often ghosts are dead people who have lost their way or are reluctant to leave the earth. We turn them around to the light, to where they should be. Sometimes,' continued Mark, beginning the process of trapping his fourth fly, `if an evil person has remained here in spirit form, the forces can be negative. But I know that Paul can draw so much energy and love into himself that he can overcome anything.' Paul is Yoda to Mark's Luke Skywalker.

'We were called out once to see a 15-yearold girl down in Kent,' said Paul. She had been dabbling in witchcraft, and some bad spirit had taken hold of her and her house. Dark smoke was filling the room and she was waking up every morning with scratches on her body. She couldn't speak and spent most of her time asleep as her spirit was trying to leave her body. When we arrived, I discovered two vortexes through to the spirit world. I meditated and was told that I had to spin a dowsing crystal anticlockwise over them so that they slowly closed. The girl recovered after that and is fine now.

'Another house — in Wales — was haunted by a very disturbed spirit of a man who had lived there 200 years ago.' Paul continued. The new owner was being tormented, his belongings would fly around the house and sometimes he woke up with stab wounds. He was trying to fight the spirit with anger and fear, but that only served to feed it. We taught him how to send out unconditional love and the activity died down.'

In between stories Mark laid out lunch: celery sticks, halloumi cheese, bread and homemade hummus. Paul looked suspicious. 'Paul is a meat-and-two veg-in-frontof-the-telly sort of man,' explained Mark. 'I love television,' agreed Paul.

'One of the most powerful souls in Britain, and he watches the auction-shopping channel for fun,' said Mark.

Paul told another story, this one pure Ghostbusters. 'A woman once telephoned from her new house, scared to go to the first floor. She told me that whenever she got to a certain point on the stairs, she felt this unfriendly presence. She had taken her dogs upstairs for company, but when they got to the same point they came running back, covered in gooey ectoplasm. They'd been slimed!'

Mark looked agitated. 'I don't really want to stress the negative side of it too much,' he said. As he spoke, a small, round, orange table-light flickered on and off behind his head. It had been doing this for the last hour.

'What's up with your light?' I asked.

'It's my spirit guide, just letting me know that he's here.'

'There are several practical things you can do if you feel a strange presence in your own home,' said Mark. 'You can sit down, close your eyes and ask your spirit guide and your angel for protection. It also helps to burn a fragrance and to blow smoke and clap your hands in the corners of a room, because that is where negative energy collects. But you can have amazing positive forces in a building as well. Very recently we came across a line of energy underneath a kitchen which made us laugh and laugh for no reason at all whenever we went near it. I think there must have been an underground well or lay-line there. I told the woman who owned the house to put her dining-room table over it because then the food would always taste wonderful and the conversation would be amazing.'

'What makes me angry.' said Paul, 'is when a pub or a castle trades on their ghosts, seeing them as a sort of pet tourist attraction. They're just prolonging the ghost's discomfort. If they call anyone, it will probably be a priest anyway, and they're not much use.'

'So The Exorcist lied to us?' I said, 'The problem with priests,' Paul explained, 'is that most of them are not psychic. They can't communicate with the ghosts and so they just sprinkle holy water over the walls and tell it to be gone. The ghost is unsettled and moves on somewhere else without being saved.'

The other problem with being a professional ghostbuster is that it's hard to put a value on the service. 'People almost resent paying us, as if we should be doing it for free,' said Mark.

'When we went to Wales we drove 500 miles in order to make £50 each,' said Paul dolefully. 'Still, the good thing about being in a spiritual line of work is that you just know that you'll never go hungry. You may be skint, but your angels make sure that you always have enough to eat,'