A spirited performance? (From Bournemouth Echo)

A spirited performance?

7:00pm Friday 17th October 2008

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TV’s Star Psychic Sally Morgan has “seen” some scary things.

She claims to have predicted Princess Diana’s death months before the Paris road crash, had a premonition about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and even watched as London gangster Reggie Kray buried a man alive.

Let’s put it this way. If what she says is true, you really wouldn’t want to be inside her head.

Yet chatting to this amiable 57-year-old you get little sense of the strange or the supernatural.

Sally Morgan is more like a jolly aunt who has just popped round for tea than a prophet of doom.

It’s actually quite hard to imagine, as she natters nineteen to the dozen about how much life has changed since she was a girl in Fulham back in the 1950s and ’60s, that this is a woman who reckons she can communicate with the dead, see the future and sometimes the hidden secrets of the past.

Her more alarming predictions are, of course, prominently catalogued in her best-selling new book My Psychic Life, which is currently flying off the shelves at a bookstore near you (no poltergeist required).

They include gruesome visions of a royal corpse being frantically pulled from the wreckage of a car, images of towers falling in a huge city and a man being forced to dig his own grave before dying horribly beneath shovel-loads of dirt while begging Reggie Kray for his life.

“You seem to have seen some terrible things,” I say. “Phew,” replies Auntie Sal. “You wouldn’t believe it. The stuff in the book is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Happily, it’s not all bad stuff, as the huge audiences that flock to see her best-selling shows already know.

Many go to see Sally because they genuinely believe she can bring messages and comfort from beyond the grave. Whether she really can, I don’t know. I remain decidedly sceptical.

But one thing you can be certain of is that the bereaved and the broken-hearted will be well represented when Sally Morgan brings her An Audience With... production to the Bournemouth Pavilion tomorrow night.

A significant number will probably leave believing they have made contact with a lost loved-one.

“I like bringing comfort,” says Sally. It’s hard to argue with that.

Sally Morgan originally found fame as Princess Diana’s spirit medium and went on to be psychic of choice for a number of high-profile celebrities, Uma Thurman, George Michael and Scary Spice among others.

But it was Princess Di who really pushed her into the spotlight. She gave readings at Kensington Palace for four years and was in almost daily contact.

She describes Diana as a vulnerable person who was “in a bad place” and “needed direction and comfort and hope in her life”.

She won’t discuss details but says she is pleased she was able to console the princess and “throw light on some things that concerned her”.

It was during this time that she saw images of a royal death in a road crash. At the time, she says, she thought it was the Queen. A year later Diana – Queen of Hearts – lay dying in the Alma Tunnel in Paris.

Sally is convinced it wasn’t an accident but says we will never know the truth about what actually happened.

The 9/11 premonition had come many months before the terrorist attacks in New York.

During a reading, Sally had described seeing a city on an island, two planes and two huge buildings standing side by side, collapsing.

It didn’t mean much at the time – it was just one of the many jumbled images that can come into her head. But as the emergency sirens screamed around Lower Manhattan on that terrible day in 2001, she received a phone call. Her words had been preserved on tape.

Whether she actually saw the future is hard to say. It’s easy to fit past observations to present events.

Sally is also convinced, however, that whatever she might see, she has no power to change the future. Any action taken is, she believes, pre-destined.

It’s spooky and sometimes bafflling stuff but I, for one, remain resolutely unconvinced.

As for Sally? She says she has no problems with that. “I welcome genuine sceptics,” she says. “Nothing should be accepted on face value. It’s always good to question things but I do get tired of people constantly wanting to test me.”

She believes the gift of being able to communicate with the spirit world may be an ancient skill that has been largely lost.

“I see it like a sort of valve that is switched off in some people’s brains but open in others.” An intriguinging thought indeed!

• An Audience with Sally Morgan plays the Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth tomorrow while the book, My Psychic Life, is published by Penguin, £6.99. Meanwhile her Star Psychic show is ITV1 on Tuesday nights.

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