'I saw an angel in my bedroom'

When she was six, the ghosts disappeared and Trudy's life went back to normal - until a startling encounter more that a quarter of a century later. Nick Morrison reports.

WITH her husband asleep before the next day's early shift, Trudy Ashplant was careful not to put the bathroom light on. She bent over the sink to wash her face before going to bed, and as she straightened up she looked in the mirror. But it wasn't her face looking back at her - it was the face of her grandfather, who had been dead for eight years.

"It's not what you're expecting," Trudy says, with considerable understatement. "It completely threw me, although I knew he wouldn't hurt me. What stuck in my mind was that my granddad had very pale blue eyes, and it was those eyes looking back at me. I blinked and looked back and he was gone. When I went to bed, I couldn't sleep."

The encounter must have been just after midnight, and the next day, when Trudy picked up the paper, she realised why that was significant. It was May 10 - it would have been her grandfather's birthday. It was several weeks before she could look in a mirror without a touch of apprehension.

Trudy, then 34, had been a civil servant for getting on for 20 years. It was an enjoyable and well-paid job, and she could look forward to a secure career leading up to a comfortable pension. But the apparition rekindled long-buried memories of her childhood.

When she was small, around five or six, she saw dead people in her bedroom. She used to watch, unafraid, as the figures moved around, with a child's acceptance of it as normal, even though her sister, who shared the bedroom, didn't see anything. But when the family moved house, the phantoms disappeared.

For the next 25 years or so, Trudy led a normal life, but after her grandfather appeared to her, she started to see bright, white balls of light on the walls in her bedroom.

"I used to ask in my mind who they were and what they wanted, and I would get answers back, and to start with, it was people I knew. You have got to make a conscious decision on whether you want this to be happening.

"To start with, I didn't tell anybody except my hubby. It worried me about why this was happening to me. I told my mum and she said 'Trudy, what have I given birth to?'," she laughs.

Her paranormal antennae reawakened, Trudy, of Crossgate Moor, Durham, started pursuing her interest. She had already done an astrology course, and followed this up with courses in reading Tarot cards, palmistry, and reading auras. For three years, this was combined with going part-time in her job, until she decided to pack her job in altogether.

"From being quite job-orientated, I went to total disinterest. It was me that had changed, but I just didn't fit in with my job anymore. I would sit and ask for guidance. Should I be working for myself, or should I still be in my job.

"One day, I saw an angel in my bedroom. It was massive, and it just stood there, this big blue light in the room. It was the brightest blue light you can ever imagine, and in the centre of the blue light there was an outline of an angel. So I jacked my job in."

Her husband David was aware she saw things, and accepted her decision to quit her job - "he doesn't think I've joined the funny farm, he just accepts it as part of me" - Trudy, now 45, says. She certainly seems level-headed, and, although some of what she says may sound far-fetched, she's clearly sincere. She started working for herself, and does readings at an alternative healing centre in Durham, as well as teaching Tarot and palmistry and holding workshops in the North-East.

She's careful to make the distinction between what she does and other practitioners in the field. She doesn't tell fortunes, nor does she heal, and she doesn't put people in touch with dead relatives, leaving that to the spiritualists. What she does is help to put people on the right pathway.

"You shouldn't ever tell people what to do with their lives. It is about self-empowerment and illuminating what is going on. I tell someone if they're in the wrong job, but it is up to them if they do anything about it," she says.

She's a member of the British Astrological and Psychic Society and her business cards describe her as a 'psychic consultant', but she says she is really a clairvoyant and clairsentient, meaning clear-seeing and clear-knowing.

"The best way I can describe clairsentience is I get words dropped into my head. I haven't heard them and I haven't seen them, but they're just there. If you close your eyes so you are cutting off your senses, you get symbols, and that is clairvoyance.

'Years ago, I went for a reading myself, and I said to this lady, 'When you say you know something, how do you know it?', and she said 'I can't describe it, it just gets into my head', and that's what it's like."

But she doesn't receive these pictures - or words - all the time. Instead, she 'attunes' herself before a reading. "If you're seeing things all the time, it's like having a kettle on all the time: you would burn the element out. You have to switch off."

Her abilities don't mean objects are always moving around the house, although Trudy and David have gone through a lot of electrical appliances, which have a tendency to blow up. Like many psychics, she believes in God, as a being who lives on a higher plane and who gave us our souls, although her Christianity is not of the conventional kind. To Trudy, Jesus, or Sananda, to give him his spiritual name, is an 'ascended master', as someone who has walked on Earth, resolved their Karma and learned what they needed to learn, before moving onto a higher plane.

She has also had to decide whether she works for the light or the dark side, a choice she says is faced by all psychics. She chose light, although she is reluctant to reveal the circumstances of her choice, and has no truck with ouija boards "If you're working for the light side, you are connecting with the divine spark within yourself, and that spark is from God."

She is unconcerned by those who doubt the existence of psychic powers, the most prominent of whom is probably James Randi, the American sceptic who has offered £1m to anyone who can prove such powers exist, and whose latest appearance was on Channel Four's Ultimate Psychic Challenge on Saturday. For Trudy, proof isn't everything.

"They can think it's trickery if they want. People will say something isn't real if it can't be scientifically proved. If you walk into a room and it has got a funny atmosphere, can you see it? Hear it? Touch it? No, but it's still there," she says.

However sincere she is, it will never be enough to convince the true sceptics, and, while there are almost certainly charlatans out there, preying on the vulnerable, it seems that Trudy believes in what she does. She may be wrong, but she believes it, and maybe that's what matters.

It's all a far cry from her previous life as a regular civil servant. Although the first few years were marked by doubts over what she was doing, now she cannot imagine doing anything else.

"I wouldn't swap it for the world, but to start with you think, 'I'm this normal person', and you have to go through this transition. You're trying to have a normal job, normal friends, but it just doesn't happen. When you go through life, you change anyway, but it doesn't have to be spirituality, it might be a major illness that gives you a different perspective. I thoroughly enjoy what I do, and I feel as if I'm doing something valuable. I feel as if I help people. Isn't that enough?"