Follow the Spark: How Grief Led a Children’s Nurse Towards Mediumship

After losing her father as a child and her sister in adulthood, Allison Michaela left a senior nursing career to become the Authentic Medium — carrying with her a conviction that spiritual work should heal, never frighten.

A young woman walked past Allison Michaela’s bell tent at a festival several times before finally stopping.

The day’s appointments had officially finished, but Allison could sense that something was troubling her. Instead of offering a paid reading, she invited the woman to sit down and talk. What emerged was not simply curiosity about mediumship, but a fear she had been carrying for ten years.

At a clairvoyance evening in a pub, a reader had told her that she was going to die young.

Medical investigations had found nothing wrong, yet the prediction had taken hold. For a decade, she had struggled to sleep properly because she feared she might die during the night. She wanted to feel close to her grandmother, but she was also terrified that another reader might tell her the end was near.

Allison spent around two hours talking with her. The following evening, she gave her a reading in which, Allison believes, the woman’s grandmother came through. There were tears, love and, perhaps most importantly, the beginning of relief.

“We were able to undo just a little bit of that damage that had been done all those years before,” Allison said.

Whatever you believe about mediumship, one part of this story requires no leap of faith: words have power. A prediction offered carelessly can become a prison. For Allison, the encounter captured what spiritual work should — and should never — be. It should not be about theatrical claims, fear or making the medium look impressive. It should be about compassion, responsibility and helping someone move forwards.

That belief did not come from spiritual development alone. It was shaped by childhood bereavement, years beside seriously ill children and their families, the sudden death of her sister, and a period in which her own beliefs were placed under an unforgiving public microscope.

A childhood in which spirit never felt far away

Allison, who lives in North Devon, now works full-time as an evidential medium, spiritual healer and mentor under the name the Authentic Medium. An evidential medium aims to communicate details — personality traits, memories or recognisable objects — that the recipient feels identify a particular person who has died. Practitioners regard those details as evidence that consciousness continues after physical death.

That remains a spiritual claim rather than something I can present as established scientific fact. Yet it is a claim Allison holds with complete confidence, rooted in experiences that began long before mediumship became her profession.

Her family was open to spiritual ideas. She remembers her father telling her stories about fairies and encouraging a sense that reality might be larger and stranger than it first appeared. Then, when Allison was only six or seven, he died.

She does not romanticise childhood bereavement. She describes it as complex, difficult and challenging. At the same time, she says she has always felt her father with her and has never doubted that some part of us continues after the body dies.

When she was about ten, Allison’s sister suffered a serious accident while the family was on holiday. A medium who was with them introduced Allison to healing. As a teenager, tarot cards, oracle cards and crystals became part of her world, although largely in the exploratory way they do for many young people. She read for friends and remained fascinated, but ordinary life gradually took over.

She trained as a children’s nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital and built a career of which she remains fiercely proud. She worked in safeguarding, paediatric palliative care and child-death services, eventually becoming a nursing leader. Spirituality moved closer and then further away, often returning at moments of loss, “knocking on the shoulder”, as she describes it.

Then, in 2019, her sister died unexpectedly.

“It was a massive wake-up call and a reflection on my life, on Spiritualism, on what I believed in and what I was supposed to be doing.”

The death did not create Allison’s beliefs, but it changed her relationship with them. What had previously existed quietly alongside her professional life now demanded to be acknowledged.

“If my sister hadn’t have died, would I have done it? I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t know if I would have done.”

The nurse and the medium

For years, Allison kept her mediumship hidden from professional colleagues. She occupied a senior role in a field where boundaries, evidence and public trust matter deeply. Her personal beliefs had to remain separate from her responsibilities as a nurse, and she is clear that maintaining that professional integrity was essential.

Yet nursing and mediumship were not, in her mind, opposing lives. Both were expressions of the same instinct: to help people at their most vulnerable.

“You can’t be with families, with people as they pass, and not be touched by that,” she said. “If you get to the point where that doesn’t touch you, you’re in the wrong job.”

There is something in that which will be familiar to anyone who has accompanied another person through death or grief. You cannot remove the pain or rewrite the ending. Sometimes all you can do is walk beside them, hold a light and help make an impossible moment as gentle and meaningful as it can be.

Allison believes her work now continues that same healing purpose in a different form. Where nursing required her to support families through physical illness and death, mediumship allows her to offer what she sees as reassurance that the relationship has not entirely ended.

Her professional name, the Authentic Medium, is not intended as a claim that everyone else is inauthentic. It marks her own decision to stop hiding.

When she eventually told former colleagues, many were less shocked than she had expected. Their response was often some version of: of course you are.

The greater challenge had been the judgement within herself — the fear of being seen, misunderstood or dismissed. Becoming authentic meant accepting that some people would step away and that others would never agree with what she does.

It also meant leaving a secure career. For the past three years, mediumship, healing and teaching have been her full-time work. The decision was not financially motivated; she readily admits she earned far more in nursing. She has a family to support and cannot pretend the practical pressures disappear simply because a path feels spiritually meaningful. Her answer has been to treat payment as an exchange while retaining an element of service, including offering healing for free through her local Spiritualist church.

“It’s no place for your ego,” she said of evidential mediumship. “It’s not something to do to look good; it’s something to do to serve.”

What does it feel like to receive a message?

Allison describes mediumistic information as arriving through the ordinary senses in unusual ways. She may see an image in her mind, hear an inward word, taste something such as lemon, feel a physical sensation or simply experience a strong knowing. The difficulty is that it can resemble her own thoughts and arrive in her own internal voice.

Her discipline, she says, is to pass on the simplest version of what she receives without inventing a story around it. Her mentor uses a phrase that made me laugh: “We’re not the Amazon delivery driver. It’s not our story.”

In other words, the medium may receive the image of a watering can without understanding why it matters. The recipient, however, might connect it with a precise memory of their grandfather. Allison’s job is not to decorate the image until it sounds profound, but to offer it plainly and allow the other person to decide whether it means anything.

She says people may also present different “facets” of themselves depending on who is receiving the message. A friend, spouse, child and colleague can all know the same person differently. The recognisable part, therefore, may be the particular facet that belonged to that relationship.

How does she know it is not simply imagination? Ultimately, Allison’s answer is trust — trust developed through practice, feedback and a willingness to be wrong. I cannot independently verify her interpretations, but the distinction she makes is important: certainty should not excuse carelessness. For her, surrendering to a message also means resisting the temptation to force it, embellish it or turn it into a performance.

Some of her most personal moments have been quiet ones. During an extremely anxious period, she was driving to a difficult meeting when she experienced seeing her father sitting in the passenger seat. She then entered the room and felt an unexpected calm come over her, allowing her to say what needed to be said.

On the way to her first church service as a medium, four songs that held special meaning for her played consecutively on the radio, without interruption from the presenter. Someone else might call that coincidence. Allison experienced it as reassurance from the spiritual team she believes accompanies her.

The point is not that a sequence of songs can prove an afterlife. It cannot. The point is what such moments become within a life: a source of courage, meaning and the feeling that we are not facing the hardest things entirely alone.

The ethics of hope

Allison is not interested in pretending that every message must be cheerful. Life contains illness, loss and difficulty; offering nothing but promises of happiness would be another form of dishonesty. Her concern is how challenging information is framed.

She returns repeatedly to free will. A reading, in her view, should not sentence somebody to an unavoidable future. It can offer a warning, invite reflection or remind a person of their strength, but it should never strip them of agency.

That is why the woman who had been told she would die young stayed with her. The prediction had not empowered her; it had colonised her imagination. Allison is equally wary of readers who introduce the idea of curses, entities or malicious energies and then charge large sums to remove them. If the same person sells both the fear and the solution, she advises people to question the balance of that exchange.

This is one of the most grounded and valuable parts of Allison’s philosophy. She may speak in spiritual language about energy, guides and the universe, but she also recognises the extraordinary power of the human mind. Repeatedly feeding a frightening belief can shape the way a person interprets every setback. Whether we call that manifestation, anxiety or confirmation bias, the lived consequences can be very real.

Her message is not that painful events can always be thought away. Allison’s nursing career taught her the opposite: terrible things do happen to good people. It is that one moment, mistake or prediction need not become the whole story.

“Every day is a new page,” she said. “We can make it whatever we want it to be.”

Standing under judgement

Allison’s belief in authenticity was tested most severely during court proceedings concerning the future of a child in her family. She cannot share the full circumstances, and it is right to respect that boundary. What she did reveal was that her mediumship became part of the scrutiny around her suitability to parent.

The judgement cut deeply. Allison had spent years working in safeguarding and protecting children. She had also endured the loss of several sets of twins and had not given birth to any of her three children, yet she was adamant about the truth of her life: “I am a mum. I’m just a mum in a different way.”

Being questioned by social workers and in legal proceedings made her doubt herself. She felt stripped down, like a plant losing its leaves, before slowly discovering what could grow back. The experience did not give her an impenetrable skin — criticism still hurts — but it deepened her resolve to stand openly beside her beliefs.

In the midst of that painful story came a moment of unexpected humour and tenderness. Arriving at court without realising she would have to pass through airport-style security, Allison had what she called “crystalled up big time”. She had tucked stones all over herself for strength and then had to retrieve them one by one into a tray.

The security officer had been handling a tense morning with a brusque energy. Yet when he saw the crystals, his manner changed. He carried the tray gently through the scanner and personally ensured that each stone arrived safely on the other side. As Allison left court later that day, he caught her arm and asked, “They worked, didn’t they?”

“Yes, they did,” she replied.

We cannot know precisely what passed between them in that moment. Perhaps it was shared intuition; perhaps it was simply one human being recognising that another needed kindness. Either way, it reflects the thread running through Allison’s story. Beneath all the language of spirit, the most immediate form of healing is often profoundly human: a softer voice, a hand extended, a willingness to sit beside somebody without judgement.

Beautifully imperfect

Allison now teaches and mentors others who want to explore mediumship or spiritual development. She does not present it as a lightning strike that instantly transforms someone into a polished professional. She compares it to learning an instrument: some people take to it naturally, while others need to work harder, but everyone requires practice.

She urges beginners to find a safe, supportive space, remain open and resist comparing their progress with somebody else’s. More importantly, she believes practitioners should continue learning even after they begin working professionally. Training, critique and accountability are safeguards against ego and harmful habits.

Her wider philosophy is gentler. Human beings, she says, are supposed to make mistakes, feel deeply and live through the whole spectrum of emotion. Tears are not failures. Joy is not frivolous. Spirituality should not become another performance in which we say positive words without actually feeling anything.

Her phrase for this is “beautifully imperfect”. Mine, as regular listeners will know, is “ask the universe”. When I shared it with her, the two ideas seemed to meet naturally. Ask for help, perhaps, but do not wait to become flawless before living. Pay attention to whatever creates that flicker of curiosity, energy or courage within you.

At the end of every interview, I ask my guest what single message they would leave with the world from everything they have experienced spiritually.

Allison did not hesitate.

“Trust, believe, surrender and follow the spark. With no doubt, spirit have got you.”

You do not have to share every part of Allison’s certainty to recognise the beauty of that image. A spark is not a complete map. It does not reveal the whole road or guarantee that the journey will be easy. It is only a small light asking us to take the next honest step.

For Allison, that step led from childhood grief to nursing, from nursing to mediumship, and from hiding to standing openly in her own life. For the rest of us, the destination may look entirely different.

But perhaps the question is the same: what might happen if, just once, we stopped demanding absolute certainty and followed the spark?

Watch the complete conversation

Watch Medium Saw Spirit After Her Sister Died | Allison’s Evidential Mediumship Journey — Follow the Spark on the Anthony Larkin Podcast: Watch on YouTube

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