My life with the dead

Ben Bentley meets a well-connected woman whose calling puts her into contact with all manner of the dear departed.

There's the Beverly before the dream, and there's the Beverly after the dream.

"All I am is like a telephone line," says the Beverly after the dream. "Spirits tell me things and I tell you as I'm told it."

It's a concept the Beverly before the dream would have run a mile from. That one was Beverly Williams, the God-fearing Anglican conformist who held down a job as a credit manager.

The Beverly after the dream – a calling from her dead grandfather to go immediately to a spiritualist church – is a reverend and a medium who speaks to spirits and does funerals for people who don't believe in death but, like her, believe in everlasting life.

Some change. More like a leap of faith.

As much as anything else, though, the 51-year-old mum, who lives high in the hills above Welshpool, is thoroughly contented and fulfilled by her new role in life in passing on messages to living people from 'dead' people through public mediumship events.

"I'm so much happier now," she says. "My life has changed so much. I don't have to conform to society, I can be who I am and know that I have got more peace inside me than I've ever had in my life.

"Knowing that I'm not going to die, I can face the challenge of life with the spirit world and I can choose how to experience what I experience."

It should be pointed out that Beverly is an ordained minister with the United Spiritualist Church of London and is not an Anglican vicar. But she can conduct funerals and christening services just the same.

Her life-changing dream happened eight years ago. Days after her dead grandfather had contacted her, a chance meeting with a spiritualist stranger in the street led her to a spiritualist church.

"I was terrified about going because I thought there would be spirits flying around and I could not even watch a horror film," says Beverly.

"But it was nothing like that. There were hymns, prayers and a service, and three-quarters of an hour of clairvoyancy."

Through the clairvoyant, her grandfather spoke to her again and to her shock she was told by that she was a medium with powers to speak with the spirit world.

"It's like you are on another level," says Beverly of the sensation of being contacted by a spirit.

"It's not like you are living a normal life. It's like hearing or seeing in a different way – like there's lots of people behind you and they have come to see you."

During our talk Beverly informs me that someone from the other side has come to see me. Turns out it's my old dad who died nine years ago almost to the day.

There follows a series of messages passed from him to me through Beverly's "telephone link", many of which relate to recent family events and are uncanny in their accuracy: that he was a mechanic who now worried about my car, which was always the case; about how he remarks upon the tie I am wearing which was his and the jacket I am wearing because it was similar to his, and much more.

It is thoroughly disarming. Is it for real or is it a trick? At this point I don't believe that it is or that it isn't. I'll find out when I'm dead, I suppose.

I figure that if I don't die, straight after my funeral I'll be on the blower to Beverly to let you all know.

But there is a great deal of scepticism surrounding the existence of everlasting life.

"Sceptics say I'm 'reading' people but I could not read you to that extent," Beverly says. "You might have an aura that people can read but with spirits it's a connection."

But Beverly's belief is so strong that she followed a path which in October 2007 led her to being ordained as a reverend in the United Spiritualist Church in London.

She explains: "I wanted to prove that mediumship was real. I wanted to join an organisation that validated that."

Now she is in demand for spiritualist funerals.

"People want a funeral in a spiritual way," Beverly says. "There was a lady dying of cancer and she wanted me to do her funeral because she believed there was no death.

"The funeral, which was at a crematorium between Oswestry and Wrexham, was carried out like she was still here. People go to their own funerals in the spirit world."

And just as with regular funerals, as well as tears there were a few laughs too.

"At one funeral the woman who had died told her daughter she had wanted two cars not one," laughs Beverly.

Her belief that life is everlasting means when we die we go to the spirit world. Those spirits can come back to live new lives in new bodies, if they choose. They can also choose not to.

"I'm not scared to die because I will just go home," she says. "I believe this life is an experience and it's how you deal with this life that moves us into the next.

"You don't die, you have a transition. You are born, you physically die and come back as someone else.

"I have been back in many lives. I know I was here in the 16th century on a galleon. I was a boy who worked on a ship.

"In another life I died in 1947 as an old lady and I was met by my mother in that life and my son in this life – that's hard to figure!"

"I don't want to come back again – I'm quite happy in the spirit world if I can be," adds the Beverly after the dream.

And there's no going back now. Not unless she comes back as the Beverly before the dream. Which, of course, she would choose not to.

• For more information about Beverly Williams and her public appearances visit www.beverlywilliams.co.uk