Ruth Wilson is a flight attendant. She is also a psychic. And, like the child in the film Sixth Sense, she discovered her “gift” at a very young age when she found she could “see” dead people. Self-confessed cynic Liz van den Nieuwenhof found herself most unsettled when Wilson revealed things she really didn’t want to know.
For a psychic Ruth Wilson is a major disappointment. I had expected her to look like the creepy clairvoyant my mother and her dippy friends used to consult and thus set out with every intention of dismissing her as a fraud.
I’ve never been into all this claptrap. I’m rather proud of the fact that I have successfully negotiated my way through life without a psychic or aural reading, I haven’t done the Tarot bit and I don’t agonise over my stars. I would be hard-pressed to tell you which planets dominate my star sign or which may, in some arcane way, be responsible for this cynical, doubting streak of mine. But it has been there since my teenage years when I felt both angered and deeply embarrassed by my mother’s idolatrous pursuits.
I remember sulking in the car in protest while she hand her coterie of middle-aged friends were huddled in some drab room hoping to be shown the way out of their thwarted lives. They’d emerge like twittering canaries – buoyed by false promised and dubious signs. I found it depressing and pathetic, more so when I saw that odious so-called clairvoyant on the doorstep of her dingy suburban cottage waving them away with a wad of money scrunched in her fist and a carefully arranged smile. It was a smile I instinctively distrusted.
The smile that greets me at Ruth Wilson’s north Sydney apartment is nowhere near as disingenuous. Rather it’s sort of breezy, infectious smile you’d come to expect of a hostie as you board an aircraft bound for a foreign destination. And that’s precisely what Wilson does when she’s not dabbling in spiritual realms.
Wilson adopts a hostie pose as she ushers me into the flat she shares with her daughter Yvette. It’s sunny and welcoming with pictures of cherubic angels everywhere. We tentatively engage in small talk – the kind that shows the cynic to size up the psychic and vice versa. She’s tall, blonde and, at 42, still arrestingly attractive. Also, there’s no outward clue to her otherworldly powers. If she’s wearing amulets I don’t see them. She’s dressed surprisingly conservatively in a slim-line black skirt; powder blue knitted top and sensibly heeled court shoes. It’s only when she impales me with her extraordinary topaz eyes that I feel a twinge of unease.
I am made to believe they are all-seeing eyes. That they allow her to see what no one else can. And I’m told it’s this ability that has gained her a wide following with “clients” scattered across continents. She has also had her own talk-back radio show Above and Beyond on Sydney’s 2SM and has, over the years, presented and co-ordinated displays at Sydney’s Mind, Body and Spirit and Body Health and Harmony festivals which attract ever-growing crowds.
No doubt it’s on the strength of her reputation as a clairvoyant-medium that she was invited to appear as a psychic counsellor on Network Ten’s Scream Test, a seven-part “reality” television series in which contestants were required to spend nights in places with a documented history of paranormal activity. Wilson, together with fellow psychic Max Wright, was entrusted with doing psychic “sweeps” of all the locations, and channelling messages from spirits as well as counselling those unhinged by their experiences.
The show, which airs on February 21, has been cloaked in such secrecy that the only bit I was allowed to see was where Wilson had been taken to Monte Christo, a Victorian homestead in Junee, southern NSW, notorious for being the most haunted house in Australia. Her task was to pinpoint spiritual hot spots before the contestants were taken blindfold to the location. Wilson herself needed some soothing ministrations after she became distressed by what she saw in one of the elegantly furnished bedrooms.
“It was absolutely horrible,” shudders Wilson. “I saw the most unspeakable acts of child abuse perpetrated in that room .I walked in and then straight out of that room and then promptly burst into tears. I was in such a dreadful state. I couldn’t have spent the amount of time the contestants had in that room because of my degree of sensitivity. The energy was so heavy in there. It made me feel utterly sick.”
But the sceptic in me wants to know how someone blessed with prescient powers could be unprepared for what she was about to encounter on the night of filming. Wilson, with those impossibly luminous eyes, explains she had left herself too “psychically open” when she stepped into the room. “Normally I know how to protect myself. I can pick up on the energies, but part of what Max and I had to do was go in and get the full flood of information and psychically assesses the situation. To get tho whole lot”
As in the movie Sixth Sense, Wilson claims she was a mere whippersnapper when she first discovered she could see dead people. “A neighbour had passed over and I was observing the funeral procession from our house with my aunt and mother. They were getting quite emotional and I couldn’t understand why they were so upset and why they couldn’t see him walking behind the hearse. After that I felt I couldn’t really talk about it because I felt I was different. But as a child I always knew and saw things.”
Then at 13 she had some intimation she would some day be able to do something with this “gift” of hers. Her late grandfather, her spiritual guide, who she says is always by her side, took her to a spiritualist church back home in New Zealand. “I remember the light coming out of this medium who was doing what they call platform work. She was getting proof of survival to the congregation and it just shone from her. I was so in awe of her. I remember thinking and saying to myself that I really want to be able to do what she can do. To be able to bring that joy and light to people’s faces like she did.”
That night Wilson says she had a visitation from her entire spiritual community. She confesses it absolutely freaked her out. “At the time I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t understand it. I ran into my mother’s room and told her I had all these people in my bedroom. She told me I was being silly and to go back to sleep. What I really needed was a mother like myself then.”
Her own daughter has apparently been endowed with “the gift” and is already proving a natural medium, but Wilson is mindful Yvette be spared much of the anxiety she endured for being different during her own teenage years. “I encourage her in certain ways but I’m not pushing it,” she says gravely.
Wilson went out of her way to seem “normal” during her own formative years. She earned good grades at school and later, armed with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Victoria in Wellington, toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher. “But in the end I decided to first get some life experience and, to my mother’s horror, too a job in sales. A job with a car.” She guffaws.
Wilson did not feel confident enough to start honing her talents until she was in her early 20s. She began automatic writing, healing and channelling while also working her way up the corporate rungs of a cosmetics company in New Zealand and then later in Sydney. Her eventual move to working as an international flight attendant was motivated by a need for a career change and a desire to “go global”.
”Flying has allowed me to connect with lots of different people. I needed to go out into the world and help open people’s minds to all this… to bring a certain amount of understanding. It’s about getting the energy out there.”
It’s a job in which she’s constantly called upon to counsel and console passengers with her psychic abilities. ON a recent flight to London she was asked to attend to a passenger who was thought to have suffered a miscarriage. “She was terribly distressed,” recounts Wilson. “I told her what was going on from a spiritual point of view. I could see this little boy that she was pregnant with and that it was still undecided whether she was going to be able to have him. I told her he was with her grandfather who had passed over and that her son was going to come to her whether it was then or with another pregnancy. I tried to reassure her that she hadn’t lost him and she was consoled by that.”
But it’s not all-turbulent toil up in the skies. Occasionally Wilson can’t resist having a bit of fun with her prescient powers when pushing her trolley down the aisles. “I do get a couple of dumbfounded looks when I produce a gin and tonic or chicken dishes before being asked for them. It’s a bit naughty I know.”
Wilson explains to me how the “spirit” system works. That when we pass over (she never uses the word “die”) we’re given three days’ grace in which to say goodbye to our loved ones and then we’re met by our spiritual community. After that we go to people like Wilson when we feel the need to communicate. “I’m the telecommunications hub, if you like,” she adds earnestly.
I’m trying not to crack into an incredulous smirk but she’s on to me in a flash. She says she can see two people beside me. There’s a very tall, gaunt man with a guttural accent. A safe punt, I suspect, given my name. She can’t tell me who he is other than he was a close family friend. He’s not a good communicator for she has some difficulty in understanding him. She scrunches up her brown and points to the area above her right eye. “He says you’ve been terribly preoccupied… that you have a lot of worries and it’s all bunched together there. It’s causing you terrible problems. It’s all sitting in your head.”
There follows a long, unsettling silence. Then a little nod of acknowledgement. The other “person” seems to be concurring, says Wilson. She is described as a lovely “women in spirit” and possessed of a wonderful energy. There’s something about a name and I’m told she’s with me all the time – that she walks with me and that I am most like her in personality.
I work hard keeping my face blank to avoid giving subtle signals. But the detail is uncanny and her descriptions, it galls me to admit, are spot on. There’s this woman’s perfume, for instance. Wilson has trouble identifying it but tells me that she always wore it and that to this day it triggers a teary nostalgia in me. She persists. It’s soft and floral and this woman wore it for as long as I can remember. She’s also liked things to be perfect and it was always a palaver when I’d been invited for afternoon tea.
It’s making me feel uncomfortable and my flesh has broken out in goosebumps. Still, I remain deadpan. Then, unexpectedly, she mentions a diary. I look up startled. Somehow she has hit on an unresolved issue, something too private to reveal save to say it has caused my cynicism to shift a fraction.
The “lovely lady” was my beloved grandmother Elizabeth. A woman I was named after and who I always miss with a gut-wrenching intensity whenever I get a whiff of that perfume Wilson had trouble identifying. It’s Lily of the Valley. And the only time I had a terrible falling out with my grandmother was over a diary. Enough said.
Wilson studies me with an inscrutable smile. She has long grown used to having her powers questioned by cynics like me. No matter what proof she delivers to some it’s never enough. This, I gather, was certainly the case in her failed marriage to Yvette’s father.
”When we met I was this young, inexperienced psychic and now I’m a very experienced medium. My abilities and gifts have increased a thousandfold. So, really it creates problems in relationships. In fact a lot of men run in the opposite direction at very high speed,” she says. “Some of them are definitely spooked by what I do. I don’t always let on but I can look at someone and answer them. I can read thoughts. I don’t do it all the time, only when I tune in. So you see, it would take a very brave man. I mean you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. Men can’t lie to me but what astounds me is that they always try.”
Before we part she tells me to bear in mind there are always angels by my side willing to lend assistance. All I need do is ask. And perhaps have a little faith. As it is I’m running unforgivably late for my dental appointment and there’s Buckley’s chance of a parking spot within walking distance of the surgery. I start wheedling pathetically to those angels supposedly waiting to do good turns. And would you believe, for the first time in 12 years, I slip into a space right outside the dentist’s front door. sverige testosteron webbplats
Bah, pure coincidence.
[this article first appeared in Sunday magazine, 2001]
