Meet SA’s ghost hunters and psychics – and find out what makes them get into the spirit
More and more people are turning to psychics, mediums and paranormal investigators. We meet five intrepid South Australians who aren’t afraid of things that go bump in the night.
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Growing up in East London, England, Barry Gray was surrounded by others. The only thing was, they weren’t actually there – well, not in the physical sense anyway.
As a child, Cheryl Rae would sit up at night looking between the bedroom door and window for people coming in – people she could sense but not see.
Both pushed aside their experiences in their teens before finally opening themselves up to the psychic world in their 20s. For Rae, it happened after a serious car accident, when hypnotherapy turned her on to meditation.
“That really was when it all started to come out very consciously,” she says. “From hypnotherapy I went to a metaphysical studies centre and thought, ‘If I learn to meditate, it will help me physically but also help this spiritual/psychic aspect that was waking up’.”
For Gray, it came after the breakdown of his marriage. “I went to a spiritualist centre in the UK and didn’t know what to expect,” he recalls. “The medium actually came to me with my grandfather who came through and told me I’d be doing this myself and doing it overseas. I got told off because I laughed: I didn’t know then what it was about.”
Fast forward two decades and Gray indeed found himself plying his trade abroad, moving to Australia in 2005. Today, after 15 years Down Under, he is recognised as one of the country’s most-respected physics and mediums, winner of the SA Psychic of the Year Award in 2013 and selling out shows at last year’s Fringe.
“It’s the first time I did Fringe and I believe it’s the first time this type of show had ever been done at Fringe,” the 58-year-old says. “It was really popular – I had five-star reviews, which was awesome.”
So what attracts people to come to his shows? “Some come out of curiosity, some to say it’s a load of rubbish but often people come because they want to know what it’s about and with the hope of getting a message from their loved ones,” he says. Even the cynics are welcomed. “I like sceptics too because they keep us honest,” Gray says. “I’m not there to convince anyone: it’s about doing what I do and leaving them to decide for themselves. If they don’t believe, that’s fine.”
Rae, 60, is also unconcerned with those who doubt her psychic and mediumship gifts. “This is my truth because it’s my experience and it’s happened so much,” she says. “People have their own perspective which will change from year to year and as they get older and different life experiences, so I would never say someone is wrong. I would not belittle their perception or belief or try to denigrate it – as long as they don’t try to denigrate or belittle me.”
Rae’s clients range from every age and walk of life, including business people and politicians. Some clients are seeking reassurance they’re making the right decision. For others, it’s about reconnecting with loved ones. It can be an emotional journey for both Rae and her clients – but there are lighter moments.
“My previous mentor and I used to do big groups in people’s homes,” Rae recalls. “One elderly lady – she was about 80 – sat there and said, ‘OK, when am I going to get my leg over?’ I just cracked up laughing, thinking, ‘Go, lovie!’. We had picked up on this man who was coming into her life and going to be a partner. Later, she came for an individual reading and said, ‘This guy’s OK but he’s never really included me in his family; I want real love’. She was thinking of ditching him because she thought she could do better and I just thought, ‘Wow, what a courageous lady’. And there was a better man coming.”
As well as working with clients, both Gray and Rae are active participants in bringing the powers of others to the fore. Gray, whose services include mediumship, psychic, flower, psychometry and photo readings, runs regular workshops, while Rae is director of the Adelaide Mystery School, which offers tutoring in psychic and mediumship development and the esoteric arts.
And the classes are open to everyone, not just those who have tapped into their spiritual or psychic self. Rae attests that everyone has psychic abilities: it’s just that not everyone knows how to access them. “Our spirit, our higher self or whatever you want to call it, is communicating with us all the time,” she says. “Every day we receive signs and dreams. A lot of the communication from Spirit comes through symbols – a symbolic meaning, a dream, a tarot deck. So everyone is getting information every day – it’s just we’re normally running around and not paying attention.”
THERE’S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE
In South Australia, things that go bump in the night and ghostly apparitions are causing angst for more people than you might expect, leading them to call in any number of paranormal investigators who work across the state.
For others who feel they want more, not less, of the paranormal in their lives, ghost tours are proving increasingly popular for people of all ages.
The founder of Paranormal Field Investigations and Adelaide’s Haunted Horizons Ghost Tours, Alison Oborn, 57, can relate to both categories of people.
“I was born into a haunted house in England,” Oborn says. “I was terrified and I used to sleep with my lights on right up until I met my husband when I was 26. I went into research not to prove it exists. I was quite happy to find natural explanations – I just wanted know what it was.”
In 1989, her explorations began in earnest, leading Oborn and her paranormal investigation team to the old Adelaide Gaol. Her experiences at the almost 180-year-old jail were the genesis for her ghost tours. “We were here eight to 10 years in research before Haunted Horizons even existed,” she says. “We could come in when we wanted and we could stay the whole night.”
Oborn’s research has also been of a historical nature, aiming to educate as well as thrill. “I love history and you can’t have ghosts without the history of who’s behind it,” she says.
She hires guides who are “not sceptics but not believers”, although even sceptical guides have had perspective-changing encounters, from unexplained voices to noises, apparitions and the touch of ghostly fingers.
Oborn’s team uses a range of technology, including electromagnetic field meters, infra-red cameras, voice recorders and thermal imaging. “I’ve invested about $30,000 on equipment over the years – I haven’t caught a ghost (yet),” she says.
Anomalies have been detected. Oborn says: “I had a couple come from Queensland. We were in here (the induction room). It was the middle of July and our temperature gauge started to fluctuate all over the place.”
Trying to calm her guests, Oborn tried to call her husband on the two-way but the device failed. “Then we started to hear footsteps ... but there was no one there,” she says. “If it had been my research team I would have said, ‘Suck it up sunshine, that’s what we are here for’ but the tourists were about to panic.” She led them from the darkened room but wonders “what if”.
She and her husband investigate ghostly places everywhere: “We go around the world and just hire places like penitentiaries. Who doesn’t want to sleep in a dark, creepy old prison in America?”
Oborn no longer conducts paranormal investigations in people’s homes, although she will chat with people on the phone. She would first look for natural causes, including high electromagnetic fields, or explaining odd noises in a new house. If no explanation is obvious, the team will take a closer look. “We do try to get the fear levels down. If you really believe you’ve got a ghost, give it a name, because you’ll humanise it and it makes it less scary,” she advises. “All I can say is science hasn’t explained everything, yet. We don’t know (how it works). It’s hard enough to prove this stuff exists.”
The co-founders of Ghost Crime Tours and GCT Paranormal Investigators also spend a fair bit of time at the old Adelaide Gaol, running ghost tours there and in other SA locations.
They brought their natural curiosity and experiences in the military and security industries to bear when setting up their business in 2011. “I served time in the army and some of the bases would have a lot of history to them,” Darren Bacchus says.
“I found I was checking out the history, and just doing basic investigations without even realising it. Dave (Hogg) had a similar background: he was a restraint officer in a mental facility and they are renownedly haunted.” The pair tends to accept hauntings and ghosts as a part of the natural world and have linked crime and ghost tours because “wherever there’s a historic murder, there’s always a good ghost story”.
They also offer free paranormal investigations, using equipment to either debunk a phenomena or show something else is at work. “Neither of us claim to be psychics or mediums, so we bring in technologies – EMF meters, recorders, video recorders, everything like that,” Hogg says. “Often, what people want us to do is just validate what they are experiencing is something real.”
Bacchus adds: “Or looking into more logical reasons as to why you hear noise, like something’s happening or a breeze or those sorts of things.”
FOOTSTEPS IN THE NIGHT
On a hot January night, we are standing on the metal steps of a shadowy and, hopefully, deserted cell block in Adelaide Gaol, talking with tour guide Alison Oborn about her close encounter with the ghost of “Sir”, a prison guard attired in a uniform familiar in the late 1800s, who had made himself known to others in the jail long after it closed down in 1988, clearly announcing that he would prefer to be addressed as “sir”.
“My biggest memory and one I can never, ever rationalise is when I had two documentary makers come in who didn’t believe in ghosts at all, but they knew it was a popular subject with the public,” she says.
“That night it was my job to take them around, we weren’t filming although I wish we had been. In here, I’m standing on the second or third step of the stairs where I usually stand ... and I started talking about Sir. As I started talking, we heard footsteps on the top gantry. You could hear the click of the heel and the squeak of fresh leather. It came to the top of the stairs, there was nothing to see.
“What I didn’t expect was ... the sound of boots came down the stairs. It came between us, we couldn’t see anything, we could just hear it. The two documentary makers just stepped aside ... then we listened to it going all the way (up the wing) and out the door at the end.
“I have never been as mind-blown as I was that night. Didn’t have time to be scared (but) the hair on my arms stood up as it came through.
“When it was a working jail, they knew they had a problem with this building. A couple of them wouldn’t even do night duty in here.”
Then comes an echoing thump in the night. “Well that wasn’t us,” says Oborn, as we peer carefully into the dark.