| JANE HAMILTON-PARKER MEDIUM |

Fiona Griffiths talks to Jane Hamilton-Parker from Southampton about her life as a medium and what affect it has on her

First published on Saturday 23 June 2001 Southern Evening Echo Southampton:

STANDING in Marks & Spencer Southampton, trying to decide what make-up to buy, Jane Hamilton-Parker didn't particularly want to be bothered by a two-year-old requesting to contact her `mummy'.

"There was a lady there looking at make-up and she was about six months pregnant, and all of a sudden I saw a child appear in front of her and saw all these autumn leaves going towards this child," recalls Jane from Southampton, who is more than used to being contacted by spirits at all times of the day and night - and in all sorts of places.

"I don't go looking for it, it just happens," says Jane.

"The child said `can you tell my mummy it was not her fault, and I don't want mummy and daddy breaking up because I'm looking forward to my new baby brother that's coming?' So I said to the lady `I hope you don't mind, but have you lost a child?' She said yes I have and I've come over from America to get over my bereavement.

"So I brought her back home and gave her a reading, and it turned out that her two-year-old daughter got killed in the autumn when she ran out into the road and got hit by a lorry."

While some may view Jane as strange, or `a charlatan', everything about her appears starkly normal - and she's certainly not a Mystic Meg-type character.

She lives in a `normal' detached house on a `normal', suburban Southampton/Eastleigh Hampshire estate.

She wears `normal' clothes, her home is decorated in a `normal' style with soft yellows and creams (the room where she does her readings is bright yellow - an "awareness colour" in the Chinese system of feng shui), and if you were to see her walking down Southampton high-street, she would give you no reason to think she was any different to everyone else.

But of course Jane isn't quite like everyone else - if she were to see you walking down the street, she may notice a little more than just the colour of your hair or clothes.

"As a child I used to see auras around people's heads. I had no idea I was different at that stage because when you see people's auras as a child, you just take it for granted that everybody can see them.

"An aura is the energy field that's round a person's physical body, but I don't see auras around everyone because it depends how emotional somebody is," explains Jane.

"If I see blue around somebody's aura I know they are very much in need of healing. If somebody has come for a reading and they've lost a child, you're going to see blues and also pink, which means they're in need of love."

Jane relaxes on the white sofa in the lounge of her Bishopstoke home, as she explains how she first realised she had been blessed - or cursed, depending on how you feel about constantly being contacted by `the other side' - with a sixth sense.

"I had a wonderful grandmother and when I was 11 I actually saw somebody standing at the top of her stairs in her house, in an old nurse's uniform.

"I described the woman to my grandmother and she explained that it was her sister who got killed in the war. Then my grandmother said `I will sit you down and explain that you are different from most people, but you must not tell anybody else because they might think you're strange and put you away'.

"She said `you can actually see people in that world and you mustn't be frightened because they won't hurt you - it's only the living to be frightened of."

When she explains, in her soft, soothing voice, that her grandmother died when Jane was 13, she describes her as "passing into the spirit world".

Jane believes, as her grandmother - who was also a medium - told her, that everyone who dies simply passes from this life into `another spiritual plane'.

The knowledge is a comfort to Jane - and to the other hundreds of people who have communicated with loved ones through her in the 35 years she has been a professional medium.

She trained to be a nurse, married, and brought up her three children and a stepdaughter - one of whom (although she won't tell me which) has inherited her psychic powers - but throughout that time she continued to help bereaved parents contact their dead children. "When I was a nurse I noticed that just before somebody dies and crosses over, they can actually see their loved ones who come for them.

"People would sit up on their deathbed and say `there's my father there', and I could actually see it, while none of the other nurses could. It was so beautiful.

"If everybody could see it they would not be afraid of death," says 50-year-old Jane, who went through a near-death experience herself during the birth of her 12-year-old daughter.

"I had a tumour on my fallopian tube and the doctors thought I would die. I crossed over and I actually saw my grandmother come for me. I didn't go down a tunnel of light, I saw my grandmother standing in the most beautiful garden, with beautiful colours and people standing there.

"It was so peaceful and there was a beautiful crystal stream. Then I heard my grandmother saying `go back, go back, it's not your time'."

In 1994 Jane and her husband Craig, also a medium, were the resident psychics on Channel Four's The Big Breakfast, when they achieved an 85 per cent accuracy rate predicting the next week's news.

Their success and popularity led to other TV and radio work, but today Jane prefers to concentrate on helping bereaved people at her home, as well as doing readings for the odd celebrity - none of whom she wants to identify.

>>MORE

Appointments with Jane