Meet the kids who see dead people and terrify their parents
VADA Green was just five years old when a convict who had escaped from a local prison came into her family home and chased her up the stairs.
Now 19, Vada remembers the incident as clear as day - but she now knows that the man who tried to catch her was actually a ghost - and that she was the only one who could see him.
It might sound bizarre and far-fetched, but Vada is one of an estimated 18 million Brits who claim to have seen a ghost, and according to experts, seeing ghosts as a child is actually not as uncommon as people think.
Earlier this month, singer Robbie Williams claimed like just like young Cole Sear in the Sixth Sense, he used to happily chat to spirits as a child - and even penned his hit song “Angels” as a tribute to them.
He said: “When I was a kid I used to talk to dead people. I freaked my father out... they were people that had passed on.”
Psychic medium Blair Robertson claims children can see spirits because they don't have the limitations of life and belief systems installed fully like adults.
“They haven't been “taught” that “ghosts don't exist” so that limitation isn't there,” he explains.
“Our deceased loved ones are almost certainly watching over us. I'm absolutely convinced beyond a doubt that they exploit this 'opening' to visit young children in particular.”
Here, we speak to two people who - like Robbie - used to chat to dead people, and one mum whose three-year-old son had a spirit as a playmate...
'A dead prisoner with a ball and chain ran at me'
Vada Green, 19, a freelance social media executive from Surrey, has been seeing dead people since she was a toddler.
She says: “My mum used to get terrified when I was a toddler because I used to wave at an old woman my parents couldn’t see.
We’d be backing out of our driveway and I’d wave and tell them how she was standing there, watching us.
We’d just moved into a new house and my mum later found pictures in a drawer, which must have been left by the previous owners, and she said I pointed to an old lady in one of the pictures and said that was her.
Growing up, I saw many more ghosts.
We moved to an old Victorian terraced house in Norfolk when I was five or six and I remember waking up once in the middle of the night and a woman sitting right next to my bed.
On other occasions, I was in my bedroom playing with toy cars and two little girls would join me, about the same age, and we’d just chat and play cars.
I went downstairs and told my mum and she was quite shocked because my cousin on my dad's side had two little girls and one of them died of cancer around that age. She believed I saw my cousin who I’d never met.
Our house was also right next to an old prison and I remember going into my parents’ bedroom to get something one day and I saw a man standing there wearing striped prisoner uniform with a ball and chain round his ankles and he started to run towards me and I was petrified.
The ghosts did often make me feel scared.
My nan lived in a new-build house on old land and if I stayed in the spare bedroom when I was 10 or 11, I’d see things moving in the garden and would have to sleep in her bed.
She’d remarried someone whose father had owned the land.
I’d met him once when he was alive and he wasn’t a nice man.
After he died, he’d often just pop up in every room, menacing and threatening, and I hated the negative energy he brought to her house.
Then one day, he just disappeared which was a huge relief.
I stopped seeing people when I was in my teens, but I still have this extra sense or feeling about a place. Both my mum and nan believe in spirits or something “other” so they never ridiculed me and always believed me. I’m grateful for that."
My son, 3, told me a man 'comes to play'
Rachael Rogers, 40, a lawyer from Wokingham in Berkshire, has a 12 year-old son, Thomas, who had a spirit as a playmate.
She says: "I was putting Thomas to bed one night when he was three years old and he said: 'That man’s there, right now, standing right next to you. He’s the one that comes to play with me.'
I turned my head but could see nothing. 'Don’t be silly, love,' I said. 'There’s nothing there.'
But Thomas was adamant and even described how he was wearing glasses and was older and taller than me, but was very sad. It was so creepy.
He didn’t seem scared, but I said I’d take him out of the room with me into the hallway so he could sleep.
I was terrified and went downstairs and had a glass of wine to calm my nerves.
The next day I asked Thomas if he remembered the man and could draw him.
He grabbed the pencil and started scribbling a stick man wearing a pair of big, thick-rimmed glasses. I was baffled.
Over the next couple of months, Thomas kept seeing this man and 'playing' with him and I would routinely take him away at bedtime so he could sleep.
I tried to rationalise Thomas’s 'vision' and wondered if it was just an active imagination.
But after researching, I learnt that children were quite susceptible to seeing spirits and I started to open my mind to that possibility.
Around the same time, I started to research my family tree. My aunt had got hold of some old photos and she sent them to me.
I was looking at one of them - a picture of my nan on her wedding day – when Thomas walked in, glanced at it and said: 'That’s him! That’s the man who came to play with me.'
I felt the hairs prickle on the back of my neck. He was my nan’s second husband who I didn’t see that much growing up and died in his 80s, when I was 16.
Thomas didn’t have many other visions or ghostly playmates but I do believe he has some extra-sensory gift."
'The spirits I saw didn't realise they were dead'
Kenny Mammarella-D'Cruz, 54, from East London, is known as The Man Whisperer and helps men with their mental, emotional, social and spiritual health.
He says: "I didn't know there was anything I was seeing that others weren't until a friend of the family died when I was five and I didn't understand why my family were crying inside our lounge, rather than just letting him in through the glass doors.
He was as real to me as they were.
I used to see people who had left their bodies, although once I realised this it made me afraid and I asked them to stop showing themselves and to communicate with me in thoughts, feelings and pictures in my mind.
A lot of times these spirits were confused. It’s like they didn’t realise they were dead and were just stuck.
The ghost of a man who used to live in our home would come to me upstairs when there was no one else around and tell me that our family needed to leave the house.
He was a grumpy old man and he really used to scare me but then I mustered up some courage one day and told him that we live there now and he needs to move on... and then he left.
This would happen to me very often as a child, and the most active time with spirits was late at night after 11pm and before 3am.
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When I got older I spoke with a few people in spiritualist churches about what I could see, but they wanted me to go on stage and do demonstrations and things but I wasn't up for that."
So while Robbie's 'Angels' may have offered him a lot of love and protection, it seems others aren't quite so friendly...