Before We Begin
A Note From Paula:
I have been thinking about how to write this for a long time.
Not because the stories are difficult to remember. If anything they are among the most vivid and most precisely detailed memories I carry. The kind that do not fade the way ordinary memories fade, that do not blur at the edges or lose their colour over time, but that remain as sharp and as immediate as the moment they happened, as though some part of me understood even then that they mattered. That they were worth keeping intact.
The reason I have taken so long is simpler than that. I was not sure the world was ready to hear them.
Or perhaps more honestly, I was not sure I was ready to say them. Out loud. In writing. In a form that anyone could find and read and form an opinion about. There is a particular kind of vulnerability in telling true stories about the things you have seen and experienced when those things exist outside the boundaries of what most people consider ordinary.
When the experiences you are describing are the ones that made you different from the people around you before you were old enough to understand what different meant. I have been different since before I could walk.
I do not say that with any pride or any performance of specialness. I say it because it is simply and plainly true, and because this series of stories, these true accounts of things that actually happened to me across the course of my life, will not make any sense at all unless you understand that the sensitivity I carry, the ability to see and feel and know things that exist beyond ordinary perception, did not arrive one day as a gift or an awakening or a dramatic spiritual event.
It was always there. From the very beginning. Before I had language for it. Before I had context for it. Before I had anyone around me who could look at what I was experiencing and say yes, I understand, that is real, you are not imagining it. Long before any of that, the experiences were already happening. Quietly and consistently and with complete indifference to whether I was ready for them or not.
This series is the account of those experiences.
All of them are true.
I have not embellished them for effect or softened them to make them more palatable or arranged them into a tidier narrative than the one that actually unfolded. What you are about to read is simply what happened. The places I lived and the things I saw there. The people I encountered who were not, in the conventional sense, people at all. The moments that shaped my understanding of what this world actually is and what lies alongside it and sometimes within it that most of us are never quite taught to acknowledge.
I grew up in a time when these things were not spoken about.
Certainly not in the kind of household I came from, where practicality was valued and the unseen was not a category that received much serious attention. My mother was a good woman and a loving one who did the best she could with everything she had. But she was not equipped to hear what her eldest child was trying to tell her, and so very early in my life I learned the lesson that so many people like me learn.
Keep it to yourself.
Smile and nod and agree that it was probably just your imagination and then carry the reality of what you experienced in the private interior of yourself where it can neither be dismissed nor taken from you. I kept that silence for a very long time. This series is the breaking of it.
I am writing these stories now because I believe it is time. Because I have spent decades working with people who are navigating their own sensitivity and their own spiritual experiences and their own lifelong sense of being somehow different from the world around them, and I know from that work that one of the most healing and most validating things a person can encounter is the simple knowledge that they are not alone. That someone else saw what they saw. That someone else felt what they felt. That the thing they have been quietly and privately carrying for years is not a sign of something wrong with them but a sign of something very specific and very real about who they are and what they are here for.
If you are reading this and something in you already knows what I mean before I have even told you the stories, then this series was written with you in mind.
If you are reading this out of curiosity, or scepticism, or simply because the human experiences described here interest you regardless of what you believe about their nature, then you are equally welcome. I have never needed anyone to believe what I experienced in order to know that it was real. Belief was never the point.
The truth was always the point.
And here, finally, is some of it.
My name is Paula Wratten.
I am a spiritual technician, a healer, a writer, and a person who has been navigating the space between the seen and the unseen world since before I could fully form sentences.
This is where it all began.
Part One — How It All Started
Part One of My True Story
I want to tell you something that I have never fully put into words until now.
Not because I was ashamed of it. Not because I doubted what I experienced. But because for most of my life the people closest to me were not ready to hear it. And so I learned, very early, to keep the most significant parts of myself quietly to myself. This is the story of how it all began.
The Flat Above the Grocery Store
I was one year old when my family moved into a flat above a grocery store, and four years old when we moved.
We did not have much money. In those days you took what was available, and you made it work, and so my parents did exactly that. The flat was small. Modest in the way that only genuine necessity produces. It had one bedroom and very little else to speak of, and my father, being the practical and resourceful man he was, placed my cot on the landing just outside the bedroom door.
The landing faced a window.
And beneath that window sat an old heated vent. A large, round, slightly imposing thing made of metal with a shape that, to a small child lying in a cot in the dark, looked remarkably like a Dalek. I know that sounds almost funny now. But on the nights when the moon was full, and its light came streaming through that window at just the right angle, the shadow that vent threw across the hallway walls was enormous and strange and alive in the way that only shadows in the dark of childhood can be. I was frightened of it for a long time.
The way a one year old is frightened, which is entirely and with the whole body, without the comfort of understanding that there are rational explanations for the shapes the dark creates. I could not have articulated what I was afraid of. I knew that the shadow moved, or seemed to move, and that the walls of the landing held something at night that they did not hold in the day.
Eventually, I grew accustomed to it, as children do. The familiar becomes manageable. The manageable becomes ordinary. And the Dalek shadow became simply a part of where I slept, unremarkable in the way that all regular things become unremarkable over time. But then, after about a year of living there, other things began to happen.
Things that were considerably harder to explain away.
The Nightly Visitors
It started with an old man.
I could not have told you where he came from or how he arrived. One moment the landing was empty and the next he was simply there, standing beside my cot in the dark with a presence so solid and so real that even now, decades later, I can still feel the particular quality of those nights. He never spoke. He never smiled. He would reach out and shake the sides of my cot, firmly enough to wake me, firmly enough to make me cry, and then he would be gone.
I have thought about that old man many times over the years. I have wondered who he was, why he came, what he wanted from a sleeping baby in a landing cot in the middle of the night. I do not have all of those answers even now. But I know what I experienced. And I know that what I experienced was real.
On other nights it was a woman. An elderly lady, gentle and unhurried, who would lean over the side of the cot and speak to me softly. I cannot tell you what she said in words. But the feeling of her was entirely different from the old man. Where he felt demanding and unsettled, she felt warm. Careful. Like someone checking on something precious. I told my mother. Of course I told my mother. I was a small child, and these were the things happening to me in the night, and she was my mother, and she was supposed to make sense of the world. I described what I had seen as best a young child can describe anything, with great sincerity and the complete absence of any filter between experience and expression. She told me I had a vivid imagination. And then she told me she did not want to hear about it anymore.
I remember the particular quality of that moment very clearly. Not with bitterness. My mother was a practical woman living a practical life, and the things I was describing did not fit inside the world she understood. I do not blame her for that. But I learned something in that moment that would shape the way I moved through the world for many years to come. I learned to be quiet about the things I saw. And so I kept my nightly visitors to myself. They continued to come. I continued to see them. And the space between what I experienced and what I was allowed to speak about began its long and significant existence in my life.
The House in Surrey
When I was four years old, we moved.
A two-up, two-down house in Surrey that was in what my parents diplomatically described as vital need of renovation. It had the particular atmosphere of a place that had held many lives within its walls. A weight to the air. A quality of presence in the corners and the quieter rooms that I recognised even then, though I had no language for it yet. My brother was a baby at this point, spending most of his days in a gleaming Silver Cross pram that sat in the downstairs rooms like a small ship at anchor. He was quiet and good natured and required the gentle attentions that babies require. I, on the other hand, was neither quiet nor particularly good natured on the day in question.
I was four years old, and I was making my feelings known about something, the specifics of which have long since been lost to history, though the energy of it remains clear. I was noisy. I was boisterous. I was, by any reasonable measure, being what my mother would have called a handful. And so she sent me upstairs to her bedroom.
It was the kind of punishment that only amplifies what it is trying to correct. The room was cold and musty, with the particular chill of a space that has not been properly heated in some time, and I was furious. I stood in the middle of it, and I did what four year olds do when they are furious in cold, musty rooms. I shouted. I screamed. I expressed my considerable feelings about the injustice of my situation with complete and uninhibited conviction.
And then she walked in. I stopped immediately.
Not because I had remembered my manners or thought better of my behaviour. But because the woman standing in the doorway of my mother's bedroom was not my mother.
She was tall and upright and dressed entirely in black, a long dark dress with a crisp white apron tied over it and a small hat pinned neatly to her hair. She looked stern in the way that some people look stern, not from cruelty but from an absolute and unshakeable conviction about how things ought to be done. She looked at me with the kind of authority that requires no raising of the voice to communicate its full weight. Children, she said, should be seen and not heard.
Her voice was firm and measured and entirely certain of itself. She told me her name was Maria. She told me she was the governess of the house. She was dressed in the manner of the Puritans, that spare and serious style that speaks of a different century entirely, and she carried herself with the bearing of someone who had spent a lifetime in the management of children and households and the particular variety of chaos that the two together can produce. I stopped screaming completely. I stood very still and looked at her, and she looked at me, and something passed between us in that moment that I could not have named at four years old but that I understand much better now. She was real.
She was present in that room as fully and as certainly as I was present in it.
Over the months that followed, Maria came back often. She never appeared when my parents were in the room. She never made herself known to anyone but me. But I would see her standing quietly in the corner of the hallway, or at the foot of the stairs, and most often I would find her beside my brother's pram. Standing watch over him with the particular focused attention of someone who has appointed themselves a protector and takes the role seriously.
I never felt frightened of Maria. Not once.
Whatever else she was, whatever the nature of her presence in that house, she was not there to cause harm. She was there in the way that some beings are simply there, because the place holds them, because their connection to it has not yet been fully released, because there is still something in those walls and those rooms that means something to them. I did not tell my mother about Maria. I had already learned the cost of that particular conversation. And so I watched. And I listened. And I kept my own counsel about the woman in the black dress who watched over my brother's pram and told me that children should be seen and not heard.
She was the second teacher I ever had. In many ways, she was the most memorable.
Come back next week for Part Two, where the story continues, and the experiences that would shape my entire life begin to deepen in ways I could not yet have imagined.