Screen capture of Irene Block during a 1998 episode of her television show. An actual photograph of her spiritual family, the Morgans (Herbert, Annie and Myra), is superimposed
“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey”...Stephen R. Covey
A few months ago I started to correspond with Irene Block, a remarkable and talented English woman living in Wales, who has the ability to recognize and communicate with earthbound spirits as well as see events from the past and in the future. The reason we started to converse was not for a specific purpose but more likely part of an inevitable course. In the short time I have known Irene I better understand that those who once physically resided on this plane should be respected and allowed to reveal their personal history and current situation to us. Irene is also the founder of Spirit Rescue International, a non-profit spiritual, paranormal and supernatural guidance and support group that uses remote viewing and other complementary therapies.
“The paradox of reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye”...Shana Alexander
I could sit here and attempt to tell you about Irene but I will oblige her to do so in her own words. The following are excerpts from Irene's yet unedited and unpublished manuscript. This excerpt describes an episode when a paranormal television production crew filmed in Irene's home in Wales and Irene didn't tell the medium who she was or that she knew the spirits in the house:
"I received a phone call from a friend of mine, a well known Medium who herself had been contacted by a London production company asking her if she knew of any homes that were haunted for a television program they were wanting to shoot, could she suggest mine. I wasn’t too sure of this but said she could pass my telephone number on to them, so they could contact me, in the meantime I would think about it. Within 24 hours I received a phone call from their London office. The man who was on the other end of the phone introduced himself as the producer. He told me that the program was going to be about a celebrity medium who would come into the home, talk with the spirits and find out who they were and why they were there. Well my curiosity, I am ashamed to say, was getting the better of me, I decided not to tell them who or what I was, just to let them think I was a housewife living in a haunted house.
I discussed it with Brian and we decided to go ahead and do it, there was no money to be made by doing it. The only reward the producer said that we would get was the history of our house. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I already knew it. It was arranged for one of their interviewers to come out and talk to me about the program the following week. The week seemed to fly by and it was not long before a car with two young men in it pulled up on my drive. Going out to meet them I was introduced to a lad called Marty who was the interviewer and the other lad was Tom. Tom was a cameraman. Marty was very good at his job and soon put me at ease. He was clever with his questioning about the house, before I realised it I had told them all they needed to know about the house and it's spirits. So here we were talking about a television programme about a house and a haunting and the fact that the idea of the show was that the celebrity medium would come in and by being in touch with the spirits, sort out who they were, why they are here and solve the haunting....but wait, I have already given them all the information they needed.
As I said there was no money in this for us, our reward was to have the history of the house which I had already given to them. The only money that would change hands was one pound coin which had to be paid to us to seal the contract we signed. Funny thing is they must have forgot to give even that to us. As we waited for the day to come when they would all arrive from London, more and more I had the feeling I didn’t want this to happen and nearly called the production company many times to cancel it. On several occasions I would ask my guides what should I do and the answer always returned the same “out of this will come three.” I had no idea what they meant but decided in the end they knew best. The film people wanted anyone there that had seen things happening in the house so my mother and sister and nieces came down from London. The day of the shoot was soon upon us and the crew turned up in droves. Special lights and cameras were rigged up in the house and garden it looked like something off of a movie set...God only knows what the villagers thought was going on. I know there was a lot of curtain twitching.
The first days shooting was taken up with interviews being shot. They wanted to know all the things that had happened in the house, like doors slamming, things being moved, the coins that were found piled up in neat little stacks in the kitchen even the Black shape that I call an astral critter that travelled across the ceiling that both I and Brian had witnessed and much more. They even had a child actress to re-enact part of the apparition of Annie that I saw that first day standing looking out of the bedroom window. A child because someone on the team made a mistake and didn’t book an adult. They filmed the child at the bedroom window, she had been dressed in Edwardian clothes for the filming and looked beautiful. Then they filmed her sneaking into the kitchen and stacking up the coins. They tied fishing wire to places to cause special effects like on the under stairs cupboard door to make the door fly open as it did on the night of the storm and had me and mum shuffling out there in the dark acting out the part of the power cut that day when trying to find candles. Someone had to pull the wire at the right exact moment, at least 12 takes of this was filmed and my elderly mum was getting tired doing the same thing over and over. Retake after retake was shot all day until the producer was satisfied with what they had filmed. All this time they had no idea who I was and what I did, that’s the way I wanted to keep it.
That night a very tall man arrived, who was the parapsychologist and he put a camera into my bedroom which was to stay there all night in order to see what it could capture. He asked us not to sleep in that room that night and if we could just before settling down to sleep go in there and switch it on. With this, after a busy day, the crew all left to go to their hotel for the night.
Myself and my family stood around talking for a while about what had happened and what would be happening the next day before retiring to bed. Brian and I had already decided as the camera was in our bedroom that we would sleep downstairs in the sitting room with the dogs to keep them quiet. My sister, Mum and my nieces went upstairs to the guest rooms and on the way one of them went into my room and switched on the camera as asked. Besides Mum getting up in the middle of the night to go to the loo all remained quiet.
The second day, the team arrived early and again started to set up cameras and lighting. They took shots of the house and surrounding area, done some more filming indoors with us and as the evening drew near they started taking night shots in all the rooms and the outside of the house. About 7PM a 'flash car' drew up in the drive, it was a Porsche. This was the medium arriving. He was brought into the house and introduced to us. I recognised him straight away from other television paranormal programmes. He was young and quite good looking and I watched my nieces faces as they went into swoon mode...I could tell they thought he was fit.
Time was now getting on and they decided to shoot the main part of the show that involved the medium coming up with all his stuff and exorcising the house. I had already made it clear to them that in no way were they going to be exorcising my spirit family and had been assured that he wouldn’t. He would only get rid of anything that was negative in the house. I had to giggle at that one, knowing that there was nothing negative in my house. I was looking forward to how they were going to get over that bit. Still they had no idea about me and when I had shaken hands with the young medium I had got nothing from him where as I would normally do if someone had a strong gift. The medium started his walk about the house feeling for energy as he said. Well I knew there was high energy about I could feel that my spirit family was not impressed with all this going on. As the cameras were following us about we went from one room to the other and he was sensing someone here and someone there although I knew he was on the wrong track and the rooms he was entering had nothing in them at all. I just went along with it.
Then I followed him as we went up the stairs. A cameraman was filming from the top and another was filming us going up. The first room he went into was what would have been the nursery in the old days. As he stood by the bed he told us a child had died in there under strange circumstances. I felt nothing coming from that room, in fact it was the one room that never has any paranormal happenings. Into the next room and again he felt a spirit. Nothing was there and by now I was feeling sad for him. Obviously all this crap he was coming out with was for effects for the show. As I stood there watching I felt a presence coming from the room next door, my room. So I said, “I think there could be something in the next room I think I heard something” we all followed him into my bedroom. As I entered the room I was hit by the energy of one of my spirit family and it was not nice, I felt anger. The medium stood by the bed and told us someone had died in it, the first thing that went through my head was if that is so it’s going back. It was a brand new bed and I had even helped Brian take the wrapping off of it when it arrived. He must have realised at that moment and saw the look of amusement on my face then tried to say that someone had died in that very position that the bed was in. Pity the lights were out or he would have seen above my wardrobe an old fashioned light pull cord attached to the ceiling. This is where the bed, in those days, would have been placed. It was me that did not want the bed in that position when we moved in and had it put up against an entirely different wall facing a different way. Next he said while someone was dying a lot of prayers were being said in this room. I should think so, after all my spirit family had been very religious and I had already told Marty that day of the first interview that Herbert was a deacon at the chapel. Only one person had, in fact, died in that room and that was Gladys the second wife and step mother to Myra. So maybe he was picking up on that well in my head I gave him 2 out 10 for that one.
As he continued to ramble on I felt someone come close to me and tried my hardest to push it away but it was too late. Suddenly I began to trance, it was Gladys “what are you doing in my house” she said with a broad Welsh accent. She was in a very distressed mood and I was told later by one of the cameraman that he could see through the camera lens my face morphing and it had shaken him up. They certainly had not expected that and after I wasn’t too pleased either as I had previously told them to behave themselves. The young medium came running around the bed, he had now realised what was happening and was concerned because he thought I was just a housewife who had become possessed. He grabbed my head and held it to his chest. I had already come out of it by now but he kept saying to me “come forward Irene, come forward.” Now I was fully out of it but decided to stay where I was as long as I could, I told my sister this later and said to her “you would do the same if you had your head stuck in the muscular chest of a young man” she laughed and called me something I can’t repeat on here.
The producer was beside himself with pleasure having actually caught a paranormal moment on camera and kept asking me to do it again to which I just laughed thinking to myself you silly man. I think the medium was a bit put out but I had not done it on purpose. I had felt the energy in the house building up for a couple of days now...even spirits have to let it out somewhere. It was decided by the producer to do a Ouija board session; my little sister looked concerned about this as we, as kids had always been told by Dad not to play around with these sorts of things. “Dad wouldn’t like it” she said, “Dad won’t allow it.” I replied to her, then facing the producer I told him that would never work in this house, and I was right...it wouldn’t.
Then the medium asked us all to hold hands for a séance and just before we started the producer asked me if it could be me that channelled the spirits. This concerned my little sister again and as I looked over in her direction, there was my father from spirit standing between her and my niece. At this point I let go of the hand of the medium and that of Brian and told them I wanted to go to the loo. Actually I wanted to go upstairs to the bathroom to have a chat with my guides. I told the sound man to turn off his earphones as I was wired to sound and didn’t want him hear me. I went upstairs and one of the camera people followed me up with a camera just in case she was able to capture something paranormal again.
Sitting on the side of the bath I tuned into my guides and asked what I should do and the reply was to go with it...they would lead me. With that I went back downstairs to be met by a young guy with a big grin on his face. There had been two sound men upstairs and their sound had not been turned off. I must have blushed from head to foot. We all settled down again at the table and held hands. Within seconds the medium dropped his head to the table as if starting to trance. A voice that he described later as a negative spirit came out although I knew he was not channelling anything and that the voice was actually him, but I never let on. He's still under this supposed trance and started arguing with this so called spirit. It would say one thing and he would say something else, then those magic words came out of his mouth “get out get out of this house.” How I stopped myself from laughing I will never know. My sister on the other side of the table was barely able to restrain herself from laughing as well. With that the medium then came out of his so called trance and looked at me and said, “It’s no good” he won’t go.
At this point we all took a break and went into the kitchen. The medium and producer went off into another room and I know they were talking about me. On their return they looked at me and said they had a problem. The medium said, “we want you to channel the spirits as we think you have an affinity to them and we think they may talk through you.” Yea, I thought to myself, and don’t you know it". As we again took our places at the table and the cameras were running the young medium said, that he had channelled a spirit by the name of Michael who had gotten into this house. Michael had done something really wrong in his lifetime and had been a farmhand on the farm over the back. He had been jealous of his wife and hit her in the face with a hot iron disfiguring her for life. Nice one, I thought, and made a mental note to check that story out knowing if it was true, someone in this small village would know the story. Also I knew that the farm had been in the same family for a couple of hundred years and if anyone would know of this legend it would be them. The producer had come up with the idea that if I channelled this spirit Michael that the young medium could then take control and exorcise it from me. What a laugh!
We proceeded again and all eyes were on me. At first nothing was happening but after a short while I felt my breathing start to get heavier and began to channel again only this time it was Annie the first wife. Annie, again in a welsh accent, began to ask why we were here and that she could see us. Someone asked her where Myra was, to which she answered “in bed where do you think a young child would be this time of night” after a brief spell of silence I began to come out of trance.
Now this is where it gets interesting. The producer was nagging me to try and channel this negative Michael but I already knew you can't channel something that doesn't exist. I mentally asked for the help of my guides. I wanted to know what to do. The answer came “relax Irene, reach out and you will find a lost soul that needs to be sent across.” I did as I was told and tried to relax. I could hear them talking at the table but the conversation seemed to be in the background. Next thing I knew a pillar candle flew off of my mantelpiece and across the room. With that, the chair one of my niece’s was sitting on jumped and was pulled back hitting a cameraman in the leg. "Keep filming" they said, I could feel the atmosphere in the house had thickened and the room was very cold. As I concentrated I felt an energy moving around the table towards me, it felt angry and confused. As it approached I thought to myself, "OK here we go, I am trusting you lot up there to get rid of this", meaning my guides. The next thing was this entity through me was arguing with the young medium who was telling it to leave this house. The banter went back and forth for some time and my breathing was so heavy it was surprising my chest did not burst (I know this from watching the program when it went out on the television). Then as quick as a flash this entity left my body and I knew it had been sent over by the spirit world. As I started to come around the young medium dived up from his chair and placed one hand in front of my chest and one to the back all the time yelling at the entity to leave my body. I remember thinking to myself you're too late mate, it’s already gone. So that was his great exorcism, was it. Certainly not my way of doing things.
With the show in the can they all packed up and were gone from the house in less then an hour. It felt nice to get my home back but before I could sit and relax with my family I had something else to do. I went upstairs and thanked my spirit family and apologised for what had happened. Next I thanked my guides for the help and protection they had given and most importantly I reinforced the protection around my house and all who was in it, with this, the house settled down nicely.
It was around two months later when it went out on the television and we sat there impatiently waiting to see the finished show. We had already been told they would send us a copy of the show on DVD but not until it had been shown on television. Maybe they were worried that if we had seen it before hand we would have had some complaints about it. So much had been cut from the show and it was made to look as if the young medium was the hero of the day, still that’s what it was all about really he was the celebrity after all. The house was described as a Victorian villa when I had already told them it was Edwardian even to the year it was completed in. They said that the locked off camera upstairs that night had picked up the sound of footsteps walking through the room. It had indeed but these weren’t any phantom footsteps they were my mother's walking along the landing the time she went to the loo. My mother being of an age where she shuffles along and we all recognised her steps as we heard them on the TV...still, it gave us a good laugh. They also said that during the night when the cameras were left in the house running (of which there was only one a video camera in my bedroom) that we all had been sent away to a hotel for the night so nothing would contaminate the recording. Wish I had known that it was jolly uncomfortable sleeping in my sitting room with six dogs. One thing I will say the special effects re-enactment of my little astral critter could not have been done any better...it was so like the very night it happened.
All in all I know these shows are for entertainment only but they must have made some big money out of it as it was repeated and repeated over here and also was shown abroad and in the States, so I was told. Brian, well he must have been out of pocket by over a thousand pounds in loss of wages and travelling the 440 miles back and forth from London what with petrol and that. My dining room table was scratched all over from the weight and movement of the cameras that were not on tripods that was £1300 pound down the drain. But wait we all still had the one pound for signing the contract or did we...no, that’s right, not one of us received it.
Weeks went by and I was still not able to understand my spirit guides words “out of this will come three” until one day I was contacted by a man named John whose family home had also appeared in one of the episodes of the show. He explained to me that he had been having problems for years but after they had been filmed for the show it had escalated to such a pitch that it was becoming unbearable to live in. He had been in touch with the production team who put him on to the medium from the show but very little help was given except the medium sent him a couple of crystals. Everywhere he and his wife went after the show had aired they were recognised and people would come up to them in the street and talk about it. It was whilst out shopping one day that they met two women who claimed to be mediums. The conversation got round to the program and finding out that the family were still having problems the Mediums offered to help. Now things for me started to fall into place. This is why I had also had to do the show."
Irene Block ©
NOTE: Tomorrow, I will post the 2nd part of this post. Irene receives guests in the house, some who are skeptical of the 'spirit family.' Videos and screen captures included...Lon
The ghost of Herbert Morgan looking out an upstairs window of the villa
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Among the Spirits - Part I
