‘Say hi to Grandad from me,” shouts Miranda, 16, as I head off out. My father died six years ago. He hasn’t been in touch since. Then again I’ve not expected him to be. But should I be doing more to encourage a posthumous relationship with someone who was such an important figure in my life, whom I loved and I still miss?
Some people do try to keep up with family members on “the other side”: the Spiritualists’ National Union estimates that around 100,000 Britons attend its 322 churches regularly, and it claims many of these people have intermittent, or even regular, communication with dead loved ones. All you need to do, it seems, is turn up and be “open to the moment”. So I’m off to the spiritualists’ HQ, a grand-looking 19th-century pile next door to Stansted airport, to find out whether they can raise my dad. Thankfully, explains Steven Upton, the SNU’s public relations person, the positioning of the runway means there’s no aircraft noise at all in the panelled drawing rooms, making it all the more peaceful for the mediums to be able to “tune in” to the voices from across humanity’s final frontier.
There are different ways of being “open” to a message from beyond the grave. You can book a private sitting, which was the preferred route of many of the bereaved widows and mothers of the first world war, in spiritualism’s heyday; or you can attend a public service, beloved of spiritualists such as the author Arthur Conan Doyle, at which one, two or more mediums will perform, fielding a variety of spirit callers and then trying to work out who the messages are for.
To maximise the chances of a chat with my dad, I’m going for both. So by early afternoon here I am, ensconced in a vast drawing room with Steven’s wife Stella Upton, a schoolmarmish 59-year-old who is happy to put out some feelers to see if anyone is there for me. Stella doesn’t want me to tell her anything before we start: the point about spiritualism, which started in 1848 when three American sisters called Leah, Margaret and Kate Fox claimed to be getting messages through a series of rapping noises, is that it’s all evidence-based.
The Fox sisters later admitted it was a hoax, but intriguingly that didn’t put the dampeners on it. Spiritualists believe the messages are their own proof: the idea is that the invisible visitors proffer information that only the recipient could possibly know about or understand.
As far as the Uptons are concerned, that moment in the Fox household was the equivalent of an Alexander Graham Bell or a Guglielmo Marconi eureka: a connection was made, a new form of communication was born and, in that instant, death was changed for ever. It’s the kind of breakthrough we get these days from mission control in Nasa; only instead of news from the stars, mediums get news from the heavens. So here I am waiting for Stella to wow me with the details and information she will soon be tuning into, like a living and breathing radio with an extra wavelength.
To limber up, Stella stares off into space. I’m prepared for a long wait but – no – the lines are crackling almost immediately. The caller, says Stella, is a gentleman. “Is your father in the spirit world?” she asks. He is: but how do I know it’s him? First things first: the evidence. “He’s a very softly spoken man,” ventures Stella. And he was.
“He died of an illness not an accident,” she goes on. He did, but so do most of us. She doesn’t think he was a religious person (he was a devout Catholic); she keeps seeing a garden and flowers (that means nothing to me) and when his illness dragged on, he was uncomfortable in his chest (my father had Parkinson’s disease, and eventually died of pneumonia). Before he got ill he was always relaxed and jovial (true, but so are lots of people).
There’s no stopping Stella now. My dad was numerical and intellectual (no, not especially); he dressed very smartly (not particularly, and no more so than others of his generation); he would always give people second chances (true but a fairly common trait); he was a man who liked “proper food” (as did most of his generation) and he was a good communicator (true, in the sense that he was a great raconteur).
Sometimes, disconcertingly, Stella seems to actually be talking as my dad. “I feel ready to go,” she says. “We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, and I’m sorry for that.”
It’s true that I wasn’t with my father when he died, but I have never felt we had anything we didn’t say to one another. Then comes a rather weird wideball. “I keep seeing snow,” says Stella. “Would you understand that?” And the funny thing is, I do: my parents lived in a hilltop Yorkshire village where virtually every year they were snowed up, sometimes for weeks on end. My dad thought that was a huge adventure.
So how does it feel to communicate with the dead? “It’s a mind-to-mind business,” says Stella. “I feel their emotions and I might feel symptoms of their illnesses.” But, she says, it’s also a bit like assembling a jigsaw; sometimes you get a piece of information and you’re not sure how it fits in. This explains why every other sentence Stella utters, when she’s in full flight with one of her spirit visitors, is: “Do you understand that?” It’s all to do, she says, with the interpretation of what she’s feeling and hearing – that’s why she has to keep asking the living end of the conversation whether what she’s saying makes sense.
Does a medium ever see a dead person? Sometimes, yes, says Stella. But not my dad; she didn’t actually see him. Now that the line seems to have gone down between her and him, I let her in on a secret: if my dad was to make contact, the person he would surely mention is my sister Clare, who died when we were children. Ah, says Stella. And lo and behold, here Clare is, quick as a flash. “I’m aware of a grave,” she says, which seems a pretty safe bet. “I don’t have a feeling for how she passed but I think it was quick. I don’t feel any illness; it feels she was here one minute and gone the next.”
Clare was run over, so she certainly did die quickly. But Stella is aware that’s not quite enough in the way of evidence; so there’s more. “She’s showing me a small toy, or it might be a blanket, that your mother always kept.” I’m not aware of anything, I tell her. Ask your mother, says Stella. Later, I do: she has nothing like that of Clare’s, although it might have been a reasonable guess to assume she would.
Stella is a trained and accredited medium through the SNU, but you can’t just learn to be a medium, she believes, you have to have a gift for it. As a child she was aware of a lot of visitors to her grandmother’s house. “They seemed very rude because they never talked to me and one day I mentioned them to my grandmother who said, describe these friends. So I did, and she said: they’ve all passed.” (Spiritualists don’t talk about death; they always talk about “passing”.)
Stella has been practising as a commercial medium for the last 27 years and, as well as relaying messages to people who have lost someone, she occasionally gets involved in solving a mystery. Like the time when the mother of a missing youth came to her. “I had to be honest with her. I said, I think he’s in the spirit world. But he helped me draw a map and I gave it to her; she gave it to the police and it led them to a place where there was a body.”
In fact, says Stella, the body wasn’t that of the missing boy, but a few months later, his remains were found. “I felt bad when I told her he was probably dead,” she says. “But you have to go with what you’re feeling, even if it’s painful.”
On the other hand, she admits she sometimes suppresses some of the most distressing information if a spirit communicates with her about the details of a difficult passing. “But the thing is that the spirit doesn’t want their relative upset anyway.”
The spiritualist industry does seem deeply syrupy: all the messages seem to be positive, as though everyone who has “passed” has gone through some kind of Disneyesque transformation and moved on to a happy-ever-after in which all the trials and tribulations of their earlier lives can be wiped clean.
In the evening, the on-site church is packed for the service: it’s all big windows and bright stained glass, with the ambience of a crematorium where someone has forgotten to deliver the body.
The messages, relayed by Stella and her fellow medium, Eileen Davies, come through thick and fast, and every one is laced with an almost desperate, dogged reassurance that all is well. “Your father wasn’t a man who said things easily, but he wants you to know how proud he is of you”; “She wants you to know she didn’t suffer at the end”; “He wants you to know that, though his passing was so difficult for you, he is happy now”.
One of the saddest moments is when Stella says she’s tuning in to a young man who died in a car accident. Three hands go up in an instant to claim him: suddenly, I’m aware of how much pain and suffering is represented in this room. For some, perhaps a spiritualist church represents the one safe place where, in a society that has lost touch with death and prefers to keep it hidden, it can be talked about openly. Because the dead are not banished here, they are welcomed. Or at least, a sanitised, presentable manifestation of them is welcomed.
Then, towards the end of the service, there’s a shock. Stella tunes in to someone she describes as “a very thin woman ... she’s someone’s mother-in-law ... someone over there,” she says.
Yikes: she’s pointing straight at my section of the congregation and my mother-in-law was a bird-like figure who weighed seven stone on a good day. “She says you didn’t have a good relationship; she says she knows now that was unreasonable, that she thought no one could ever be good enough for her son.”
I’m sinking lower and lower into my chair when, mercifully, a hand goes up on the other side of the room, and the scratchy mother-in-law is claimed. “Funny, I was sure she was guiding me to that side of the room,” says Stella, giving my area a pointed glare. “Anyway, she says she wants you to know she’s sorry. She says she was never proud of you before but she has had more time to think about it since she’s been in the spirit world, and now she is proud of you.”
Then comes a line that sends a shiver up my spine: “She says she’s happy to be back in touch. She says to tell you she’ll be back another time.”
That’s it: I’m done with raising the dead. Let me rest in peace. My mother-in-law, I’m afraid, will have to find someone else to talk to.
