booked into a hotel for the night.
We eventually arrived at the hotel and with most of the day stretching out in front of us and nothing else to do we decided that after lunch we would take a walk along Oxford Street. However, this was not the Oxford Street we were used to! Most of the shops and restaurants were closed. Because the whole of the transport system had been suspended and taxis were virtually impossible to get, people had left work early to walk home – some of them facing a trek of miles on foot.
Gwen and I wandered aimlessly along, glad to be out of the confines of our hotel. The only people around seemed to be hurrying along with resigned expressions on the faces, no doubt on the way to their homes, and groups of bewildered tourists standing at the barricaded entrances to Oxford Circus and Marble Arch tube stations. Police vehicles rushed by in enormous numbers and there was the incessant sound of sirens screaming.
After a while we turned around and headed back in the direction of our hotel. Turning into a small side street, we noticed that a small coffee shop was still open for business. I ordered coffee for both of us and we sat outside on the almost deserted pavement.
A well-dressed man who looked to be in his thirties was sitting at one of the tables smoking a cigarette with an empty coffee cup in front of him. After a while he picked up his briefcase and began to walk away. After a few paces he hesitated, turned around and approached the table at which Gwen and I were sitting.
‘I’m so terribly sorry to bother you, but are you Derek Acorah?’ he asked.
I told him that I was.
‘I hope you don’t mind me speaking to you,’ he continued, ‘but may I introduce myself and could I ask you a question?’
‘Certainly,’ I told him.
He pulled out a chair and sat down. I could see that he looked rather upset and decided that I would let him speak without interruption.
The man told me that his name was Craig. He worked in the city and usually travelled via the train and underground system each day. The previous evening he had begun worrying about his journey to work the following day. He had not been able 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
