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.
How It All Started
Part Two — The House That Breathed
There is something peculiar about being a sensitive child in a haunted house.
Instead of worrying about monsters under the bed like other children, you’re troubled by hallway shadows, creaking stairs, and the feeling of being watched. You learn very quickly that not everyone experiences the world in the same way.
It’s a fear that goes beyond simply being afraid of the dark or what our minds might create in the shadows. Something that sits in an entirely different category from the ghost stories children tell each other at sleepovers, safe in the knowledge that nothing they are describing is actually real.
For those of us with a heightened sensitivity, where the veil between our reality and the beyond is particularly thin, the word ‘haunted’ carries significant weight. It is not a word that carries the pleasurable chill of fiction. It is simply the most accurate description available for the experience of living in a space that is inhabited by more than its official residents. I was seven years old. And the house in Surrey was very definitely haunted.
The House That Looked Like Any Other
From the outside, it was completely unremarkable.
This is a typical terraced house, one of many found on ordinary town streets, with nothing about its exterior to hint at the quiet, predictable life inside. Narrow. Practical. Built for the straightforward business of housing families, nothing more.
From the outside, you would have walked past it without a second glance.
From the inside it was an entirely different matter.
I soon learned to recognise a distinct quality in the house, an atmosphere suggesting a past richer than its walls officially conveyed. A weight to certain rooms. A quality of presence in the corners and the stairwell and the landing at night that belonged to something older than the current occupants. Something that had not left when it perhaps should have. Something that had decided, for reasons of its own, that it still had business in those rooms.
We were not the only family living in that house.
We were simply the only ones who were visible.
Maria and the Children
Maria was introduced to you in Part One. The governess in the black dress and the white apron who had appeared in my mother’s bedroom when I was four years old with the firm instruction that children should be seen and not heard. The woman who carried herself with the absolute authority of someone who had managed households and children across a different century entirely, and who had clearly decided that her connection to this particular house was not yet complete.
She continued to appear throughout our years in that house.
Always purposeful. Always watchful. Particularly watchful over my brother, who was still very small and who received Maria’s attentions with the complete equanimity of a baby who had not yet been taught that the things he was seeing were supposed to be impossible.
But Maria was not the only presence. There were children. Children from a bygone era, dressed in the manner of a time long before our own, who appeared in the way that the energies of the young tend to appear, with a quality of liveliness and a complete absence of the sombre weight that some presences carry. They would materialise and laugh, and the sound of their laughter would ring through the walls of that house like something entirely ordinary. Like the sound of children playing in the next room. Except that the next room was empty. My mother heard them.
I know this now with certainty, though it took years and a particular conversation to confirm it. At the time she did not indicate that she heard anything at all. She had developed a remarkable talent, as many adults who are sensitive but unwilling to acknowledge it do, for the art of determined not noticing. For moving through an experience that every part of her registered fully while maintaining an outward composure that suggested nothing unusual was occurring.
She heard the children laugh and she chose, each time, to act as though she had not.
I did not have that option.
I was seven years old, and I had not yet learned the adult skill of choosing what to acknowledge. What I experienced, I experienced completely and without the buffer of a lifetime of practised not noticing. And what I experienced in that house was considerable.
The Nights
The days were manageable.
There is something about daylight, ordinary activity, and the noise and movement of a family going about its business that keeps the more unsettling aspects of a haunted house at a certain distance. The presences did not disappear during the day. But they existed in the background of it in a way that was liveable. A shadow at the edge of the vision. A drop in temperature in a particular room. The sound of something that could almost be explained by the house settling or the pipes doing what pipes do.
The nights were different. At night, the house changed. There is no more precise way to describe it than that. The quality of the atmosphere shifted when darkness came. What had been a background presence moved into the foreground. What had been liveable became something I would not wish on any seven year old child, however resilient, however accustomed to the unusual, however earnestly trying to be brave.
I would wake in the dark to find people standing over me.
Not always the same people. Not always figures I recognised from the daytime appearances of Maria and the children. Sometimes they were strangers. Sometimes just a shape. But always present with that particular quality of solidity that the genuinely other worldly carry, which is entirely distinct from the half formed imaginings of a tired mind. These were not dreams. I knew the difference even then. I would scream.
I would pull the blankets over my head with the absolute conviction of childhood that fabric, somehow, constitutes a barrier against the unknown. I would lie underneath them with my heart hammering and my breath coming too fast, waiting for the quality of the room to change, for the particular density of presence to thin and dissipate and leave behind the ordinary darkness of an ordinary small bedroom in an ordinary terraced house in Surrey.
Sometimes it took a long time. Those were the longest nights of my childhood.
The Piano Music
And then there was the night of the piano music.
I have thought about that night many times across the decades since it happened. It has the quality that some memories have of being so precisely detailed in the recollection that time seems to have done nothing to its edges. I can still feel the specific quality of that night. The particular stillness of the house when everyone else was asleep. The way sound carries differently in a sleeping house than in a waking one.
I was lying in my bed when I heard it.
Piano music. Coming from downstairs. Not faint. Not the kind of sound that might be dismissed as the acoustics of an old house playing tricks or a distant radio bleeding through from a neighbour’s wall. Clear and definite and musical in a way that left no room for the more comfortable explanations. Someone was playing a piano in the room below me. Except that we did not own a piano. And everyone in the house was asleep. I got out of bed.
I am not entirely sure what combination of curiosity and something braver than I had any business being at seven years old got me out from under those blankets and onto the landing. But there I stood, in the dark of the upper floor, and the music was clearer there. Entirely real. Entirely present. A melody I did not recognise played by hands I could not see on an instrument that had no business being there.
I stood at the top of the stairs, and I listened. And then I began to walk down. Step by careful step in the dark of that narrow staircase, following the music that became clearer with each step I took toward it. My heart was beating so loudly I could feel it in my throat. My hand was on the wall beside me, the plaster cool and solid under my fingers, the most ordinary thing available to me in a moment that was entirely extraordinary.
I was three steps from the bottom when it stopped. Complete silence.
The sudden absence of sound after the clear presence of it is its own kind of shock. The music did not fade. It did not trail away in the manner of music naturally ending. It simply stopped. As though whatever was playing it had become aware of my approach and chosen, in that moment, to withdraw.
I stood there in the dark at the bottom of the stairs with my heart hammering in my chest and the silence ringing around me where the music had been.
And then I turned, and I went back up those stairs faster than I had ever moved in my life.
The Bible
The next morning I told my mother about the music.
I had learned by this point to be selective about what I shared with her regarding the experiences in that house. The wall she put up when the subject arose was swift and total, and I had no desire to encounter it more than necessary. But this felt different. This felt like something she needed to know. I framed it carefully, practically, the way I had learned to frame things to make them more palatable to adult ears. I asked whether she had perhaps left a radio on somewhere. Whether there was some ordinary explanation I had missed.
She was quiet for a moment longer than felt comfortable. And then, that evening, she handed me a Bible.
Keep it beside your bed, she said. That was all. No discussion. No acknowledgement of what I had described or what it might mean. Simply a Bible placed in my hands with an instruction and the particular expression of someone who is communicating something significant while simultaneously maintaining the appearance of communicating nothing at all. This was, as I have said, deeply unusual for her.
My mother was not a religious woman in the practising sense. The Bible was not a familiar object in our household. The handing of it to a seven year old child with an instruction to keep it beside the bed was so entirely out of character that I remember feeling, alongside the comfort of having been given something protective, a particular quality of unease at what its necessity implied.
It was only years later, in a conversation that arrived long after I had left that house, that I learned the full truth.
She had heard the piano music herself.
Not just that night. Other nights too. And she had been frightened. More frightened than she had ever allowed any of us to see. Frightened enough that she had quietly placed religious objects around the house, in doorways and corners and the spaces where the presence felt strongest, in the private hope that they might offer some protection she did not know how else to ask for.
My practical, rational, not given to discussing such things mother, had been quietly managing her own fear of that house for as long as we had lived in it. She had never told me. And so we had each carried it separately. Her in her adult way, with the determined composure of someone who has decided that acknowledging a thing gives it too much power. Me in my child’s way, with the blankets pulled over my head and the long nights and the heart beating too fast in the dark. We had been alone together in the same haunted house. The Bible stayed beside my bed.
What I Know Now
The activity in that house did not stop.
The religious items my mother placed around the rooms slowed certain things and shifted the atmosphere in ways I noticed even then without fully understanding what had changed. But the presences remained. Maria continued her watchful rounds. The children continued their laughter in the walls. And the nights continued to carry a quality that daylight never quite erased.
What I know now, looking back across everything I have learned and experienced and come to understand across the decades since that house, is that what we were living alongside was not malevolent. Not in the truest sense. The presences in that house were not there to harm. They were simply there. Residual. Habitual. Existing in the spaces they had always occupied without any particular awareness of or interest in the family that now moved through those same rooms.
Maria, least of all, was not there to harm. Whatever her reasons for remaining, they were rooted in something older and more connected to the house itself than to any of us. She was the guardian of that place in her own way. Stern and purposeful and entirely committed to whatever she understood her role to still be.
And the children.
The children were simply children. Playing in the only way available to them. Entirely uninterested in the fright they caused the living girl who could hear their laughter coming through the walls.
But understanding all of this came later.
At seven years old, lying in the dark of that bedroom with the Bible on the bedside table and the long night ahead, what I had was simply the experience itself. Unmediated. Unfiltered. Completely real.
And the quiet growing knowledge that whatever I was, I was not like most people.
That the world I could perceive was wider than the world most people around me were willing to acknowledge.
And that I was going to have to learn, somehow, to live inside that width.
The next series of events I believe were something beyond residual haunting entirely.
I believe they were a spiritual intervention.
And I will tell you about them in Part Three.
Come back next week for Part Three, where everything changes.