John Bland has been aware of his psychic abilities since he was a child, but now he is using his powers over the Internet. Peter Tennick reports.

FROM an early age John Bland realised that he had an ability that most people would probably fear - he could see ghosts. He grew up to be a practising clairvoyant and says he has since learned that what he was seeing were the spirits of people who have died and passed over to the other side.

In one of his latest ventures he has turned his psychic abilities to the Internet, where he has become the superhighway advisor on the supernatural. In partnership with The Northern Echo's sister publication thisisthenortheast.co.uk, John has become the spiritual advisor to people across the globe.

Through email he offers advice on psychic or paranormal experiences or even strange dreams and he has had queries from most parts of Britain, Europe and North-America. He has become the middle man for hundreds of people who have lost loved ones and want to know if they are happy on the other side.

Whether you believe in what he does or not, it is easier to understand how a connection can be made when someone is sitting right in front of you. So how does John speak to the loved ones of people he has never met, and knows only through email?

"I link in with my spirit guide and then my guide will link in with the person who has sent the email," he says. "My guide will then know the question that is on that person's mind, and he will feed me the information that the person is looking for and provide me with the answer to their question."

According to John, everyone has a spirit guide - they are the spirits of people who have passed on and who then watch over you. He believes that these guides can see into the past and the future and they know everything.

John says he can bring our world and the spirit world together and he can communicate freely with our dearly departed.

"Years ago you would see fortune tellers at holiday resorts with their crystal balls, saying 'you're going to be rich' or 'you're going to meet a tall dark handsome stranger'. This isn't the way that I work. The way I work is to give people proof that life goes on and that family and friends who have passed on to the spirit world are all right."

But John says that turning his abilities to the Internet isn't easy.

"When I've got a person sitting in front of me, I can link directly to their spirit, but over the Internet I rely on my spirit guide to do all of the work for me and that takes a lot more energy."

John first discovered he was different when he was about five years old. "I used to see things around the bedroom," he says. "My parents wanted to refer me to a child psychologist. The only person who ever believed in me was my grandmother, who is now in the spirit world herself."

John convinced his grandmother of his abilities after he described to her what his dead grandfather looked like, even down to the clothing he wore. "At the time I hadn't seen a picture of him," he says.

Since then, John has developed his ability and he is now a full time clairvoyant and spiritual healer. He is also a member of Healer Practitioner Association International.

John became an active participant in spiritualism at the age of 14 when he visited his local spiritual church. "I was playing truant from school and the gentleman who did the service asked why wasn't I at school. I told him that it burned down last week and he replied: 'You can lie to me but you can't lie to them, they know everything'."

"He then went on, saying: 'One day you will be up there and you will be well known. By the time you are in your fifties, you will be known across the world.'

"The strange thing here is that I've just been invited to travel to America to do a service there."