Derek Acorah’s Amazing Psychic Stories. Derek Acorah

to dismiss these unaccustomed feelings of unease and foreboding, and had even mentioned them to his wife. She had dismissed his worries as being due to pressure of work and the fact that he had an important meeting to attend the following morning.

      After a restless night Craig climbed into his car as usual to drive the mile or so to the station. Although his car was not an old one by any means, it had refused to start. Frustrated at the thought of being late for his meeting, Craig ran back into the house and telephoned for a taxi to take him to the station. The taxi duly arrived, but because of unusually heavy traffic the journey took 10 minutes longer than it ought to have done. Craig arrived at the station just in time to see the train he regularly caught disappearing out of the station on its way to London.

      ‘The point is, Derek,’ he said, ‘had I caught that train I would have been involved in the bombings. I would have been on the very train that was blown up. I might have been in one of the carriages that were so badly affected. I might even have been killed!’

      Craig continued by explaining that he had never really considered the reality of the spirit world or the fact that we have people looking after us in another dimension. He told me that although he had watched Most Haunted from time to time he had found it merely an entertaining programme and had not dreamed for one moment that the events that took place were real.

      ‘My wife believes everything that happens in the programme, but I’ve always told her that it’s a load of nonsense,’ he said, looking more than a little embarrassed. ‘Today, however, I’ve had to seriously consider that there may well be somebody up there looking after me. I cannot explain the feelings I experienced last night and the urge to call into work to say that I wouldn’t be coming in today. I’m not the sort of person who would do that, so I overcame my feelings. Then there was the business with the car not starting and, even stranger, the taxi taking so long to get to the station. It’s just unknown. I was so angry when I missed that train. Of course when I arrived at the point where I would pick up the tube and found everything was cancelled, the light began to dawn, especially when I heard talk of bombings. Could it be that my guardian angel was trying to get a message to me and I ignored it, so he made sure that I wouldn’t be harmed?’

      ‘I think you’ve answered your own question,’ I told Craig. ‘It was indeed your guardian angel or, as I call them, your spirit guide impressing you with the fact that all was not well and that you were in danger. It is not on your life’s pathway to suffer great physical harm and it is certainly not your time to pass to the world of spirit. Every obstacle possible was put in your way to prevent you from boarding that train this morning.’

      ‘Thank you, Derek,’ Craig said as he stood up to take his leave. ‘Maybe I’ll watch your work in future through newly enlightened eyes,’ he added with a smile.

      Numerous people have related similar stories to me concerning times when the intervention of somebody not of this world has been evident during a time of potential danger.

      Linda wrote to tell me about her experience. She has a daughter, Becky. After Becky was born, Linda developed a strange fear of the staircase leading down from the front door of her apartment to the exterior door. Every time she passed the stairs with her baby in her arms she felt that someone or something was pulling her towards it. It reached a point where if Linda was carrying Becky in the area of the stairs she would walk so that her back was literally rubbing against the opposite wall. If Becky was not with her, nothing would happen and she could quite easily walk by or up and down the stairs without any problem whatsoever.

      As Becky grew and began to be more mobile her parents purchased a baby walker. (These baby walkers are now no longer manufactured because they caused so many accidents.) They also positioned a baby gate across the top of the stairs in order to prevent Becky from going anywhere near them.

      One day Linda’s husband had gone downstairs and unfortunately not locked the baby gate correctly. Linda was in the kitchen. Suddenly she had an overwhelming feeling of fear and dread. She rushed to the stairway in time to see Becky heading downstairs in her walker. What should have happened is that she should have tumbled over and over head over heels many times. Linda was incredulous when she saw her sliding down the stairs instead, still seated securely in her baby walker whilst remaining upright with little more than a gentle bump as she hit each stair.

      ‘It was as though an invisible hand was holding her upright until she reached the bottom of the stairs, where they turned a corner at a 90-degree angle,’ she told me.

      The baby walker with Becky still in it came to a halt at the bottom of that first set of stairs. During that brief period, Linda managed to reach her daughter and pull her out of the walker before it tumbled down the remaining few steps. Although Becky was screaming with fright, she appeared to be unharmed by her experience.

      As a matter of caution Linda and her husband rushed their baby to hospital, where she was X-rayed a number of times. No injuries could be found other than a slight bruise on her forehead.

      ‘Was she just very lucky or was there divine help?’ Linda asked me. ‘Was it Becky’s guardian angel warning me about those stairs when she was a tiny baby, and was she somehow saved from major injury?’

      I have to agree with Linda that it is very likely that someone in the world of spirit was looking out for the little girl that day. Somebody intervened to prevent her from being seriously hurt. It is my opinion that it would be a member of Linda’s family who had passed to the world of spirit who was impressing Linda with feelings of dread and fear every time she went close to the staircase with her baby in her arms. That person could see what would happen at some point in the future and was determined that Linda would be alert to the possibility of a disaster involving her child and the staircase.

      * * *

      Catherine is a well-travelled lady who has had numerous experiences where spiritual intervention has prevented her from suffering as a consequence of major riots and bombs. She believes that the number of times this has happened is far too many for it to be purely coincidence.

      Once she was travelling to South Africa with her grandparents. A few moments after they left Cape Town serious riots broke out and many people were hurt.

      Another time Catherine attempted to book a holiday to Erie in Pennsylvania. She intended to fly on 1 September and return on 11 September, but the travel agent told her that she could only fly via New York City. Again, this trip was to be taken with her grandparents. One had a heart condition and the other was disabled. Catherine demanded that they fly via Pittsburgh and the only flight available was on 10 September. When she and her family arrived back in the UK on 11 September 2001, suicide bombers had attacked America. If she had not been influenced to change the date of their journey, she would have been stranded in New York City with her grandparents.

      When in Spain on the Costa del Sol, Catherine intended going to Marbella for the day but then just did not feel right about it. She decided to go to the local market instead and travel to Marbella later in the day. About an hour later, she heard what she thought was a car backfiring. The news came through that a bomb had gone off in the bus station in Marbella, right next to the bus that Catherine would have been on.

      Catherine tells me that there have been many, many more instances when she has felt that she is being watched over from the world of spirit. I can do nothing other than agree wholeheartedly that this is definitely the case!

      Mandy’s mother has a theory that Mandy’s friend who passed on to the spirit world in November 1998 saved Mandy’s life. Her father, however, is convinced that she is just the luckiest person on Earth.

      Mandy’s story begins when she was a 16-year-old student at Tooele High School. She was always involved in various events and during the school holidays was required to attend practice for the drill team at 6 a.m. each morning. She lived approximately seven miles from the high school and her journey involved passing the Tooele Army Depot main entrance.

      As well as being part of the drill team, Mandy was also performing in a musical called The Benson Gristmill Pageant. On the final night of the pageant, she stayed out