‘Grandma, great-grandma’s in the kitchen’: Corina Angela on a childhood of unusual experiences

By Anthony Larkin

Corina Angela was nine when she woke in her grandparents’ house and says she saw her great-grandmother walking towards the kitchen with her walker. She remembers the sparkle in her eyes. They spoke, and her great-grandmother told her she was hungry.

There was just one difficulty. Her great-grandmother had died about a month earlier.

But Corina says that wasn’t what went through her mind. She was excited. She ran into her grandparents’ bedroom and woke her grandmother.

‘Grandma, Grandma, you know, great-grandma’s in the kitchen. Come get up, get up.’

Her grandmother, coming out of a deep sleep, told her that great-grandmother was in heaven. Corina tried to explain that, no, she was in the kitchen. Eventually, her grandmother went back to sleep, leaving a very perplexed nine-year-old to return to her room.

When Corina and I spoke on the Anthony Larkin Podcast, I told her I thought I’d have had a heart attack seeing that as a child. For her, though, the confusion came afterwards. In the moment, she had simply recognised someone she loved.

Corina is based in Colorado, and her work explores intuition, healing, channelling and consciousness. I wanted to hear how that began for her, before getting into the books and the work she does today. Her answer took us back to her grandparents’ farm, a favourite jacket and a cow called Duchess.

A family willing to listen

At five, Corina had a new fluffy jacket, white with black spots. She loved it. One day, wearing it, she walked into the pasture while her grandfather was in the barn getting hay.

Duchess charged towards her.

Corina believes the cow mistook her for another animal. What she remembers most clearly is the size of the head coming towards her, followed by her grandfather’s voice telling her not to move. She froze. Then, she says, she went ‘up and out’ of her body.

Her grandfather shouted for Duchess to stop, and, in Corina’s account, the cow stopped in her tracks. Her grandmother came and took her away.

Fear, trust and the strange sense of watching what was happening all seemed to arrive together. Afterwards, her grandparents were willing to talk about it. They didn’t offer a detailed explanation, but they didn’t tell her she couldn’t have experienced it either.

‘It wasn’t shut down,’ she said. ‘It was openly talked about.’

A year later, she says, something happened that was harder to explain. Her grandfather went to help after they heard a crash nearby. Corina stayed at the window with her grandmother, waiting for him to return. While he was away, she says she could see what he was seeing: an injured woman and the damage to her arm.

When he came home and described the accident, Corina began finishing his sentences. She remembers describing the injury and watching him acknowledge what she said.

‘That sounds like something from a movie, isn’t it?’ I told her. I wondered how a six-year-old could begin to articulate that, and whether she had felt different from other children.

She hadn’t really thought about it that way. To her, these things were normal.

By seven, she was coming home from school and writing short stories, putting them in a large drawer her grandmother had given her in the den. By the end of the year, it was full. She still remembers the first story: The Puppy in the Pond.

She describes seeing the story in front of her as she wrote and sketched. Today, she understands that as channel writing: writing she feels she receives rather than consciously constructs. As a child, she didn’t have that terminology. It simply came easily.

The response to seeing her great-grandmother was more complicated. Her grandmother later allowed that Corina might have seen her, while explaining that she was no longer physically there. Corina also says she began getting into trouble at school over things she said she could see before they happened. She thinks her grandmother’s caution about discussing certain experiences was an attempt to protect her.

‘You don’t look the kind of person to get into any trouble,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

But she had. Her childhood wasn’t one uninterrupted run of wonderful experiences. Some were confusing, and some frightened her. What I pointed out was that her family hadn’t been quick to close down the possibility of what she was describing. They had left room for her to talk.

The hand in the bedroom

A few months after the experience with her great-grandmother, Corina says she woke to a feeling of intense love filling her room. She knew what loving her family and the animals felt like. This, she said, was different.

With her eyes open, she describes seeing an elongated hand appearing in front of her, its long fingers taking on what she called a ‘pixelised formation’. She reached towards it.

‘I missed you so much. I’m so happy you’re here,’ she remembers saying.

She now associates the encounter with beings she calls the Elohim, whom she understands as a soul family. That is her interpretation of the presence she felt; at the time, she describes a mixture of familiarity and bewilderment. She says her body began vibrating. For a moment, she pulled the covers over her eyes. When she looked again, she saw a flash of light towards the window, and then darkness.

This was where I interrupted, because the hand was familiar to me too.

I’ve had experiences I described to her as visions or dreams, in which a huge hand comes through my ceiling and I reach up towards it. I feel as though I’m taken somewhere, although I can’t remember where. Elsewhere in our conversation, I’d explained that I’m not sure whether some of my experiences are lucid dreaming or out-of-body experiences. I know how they feel to me; I don’t necessarily know what to call them.

Hearing her description brought that recognition straight back.

‘I’ve got no hair on my head,’ I told her. ‘But I’ve still got some hair on the back of my neck and it’s just stood up on end.’

Then my camera moved, and I had to stop and put it back. My reaction was quite honestly, ‘I am a bit freaked out right now.’ A moving camera doesn’t settle anything about the story, but that was what happened in the middle of us talking about it.

For Corina, the significant moment came at breakfast the next morning. She says she had brushed the night’s experience aside until her grandmother asked: ‘Darling, who were you talking to last night?’

She took that as validation that something had happened. Her grandmother’s question, as she recalls it, concerned hearing her speak; it didn’t establish who or what she had been speaking to. But it mattered enormously to Corina, who says the sense of connection continued over the years.

‘There’s much work to be done’

At fourteen, Corina says she was becoming reckless and putting herself in dangerous situations. One trip towards the Northern California coast brought that into sharp focus.

There were three of them in a car on a remote dirt road high above the beach. She says the driver tried to show off by spinning the car, lost control and started going over the edge.

Corina grabbed her best friend’s hand. They thought they were going to die.

She remembers feeling two tyres go over the cliff before the car stopped. When they opened their eyes, she says they could see a small tree trunk growing out of the cliff that was holding it. They climbed over the seat and escaped through the rear window.

Corina calls this her near-death experience. The account she shared was of a narrowly survived accident and what happened immediately afterwards; she did not describe a confirmed cardiac arrest or medical resuscitation.

Once outside, she sat in the road and cried. Her friends began walking away, trying to work out how they would get help. She says she then felt a familiar presence around her, a touch on her right shoulder and heard a woman’s voice.

‘There’s much work to be done.’

She understands that as her first encounter with her guardian angel. Two people subsequently came along and offered help, and she says a tow truck was arranged.

I asked whether she believed she had done the work that voice spoke about.

‘I think I’m still in the process of doing the work,’ she replied.

Whatever someone makes of the presence she describes, Corina identifies that day as a turning point. She began learning to meditate and says her approach to her life changed. Before it, she hadn’t been caring enough about the situations she was putting herself in. Afterwards, she felt she needed to do things differently.

From a drawer of stories to handwritten books

The writing that began in her grandmother’s house has remained part of Corina’s life. She still prefers pen and paper. Sitting at a keyboard, she says, doesn’t produce the same flow.

That prompted me to tell her about my own book, a fictional story about a superhero who is a healer. Sometimes I read a chapter back and wonder where the words came from. In the interview, I told her I believed something had been channelling through that process.

‘It’s too good for me, that,’ was how I put it.

For Corina, writing eventually became connected with experiences she attributes to particular people who have died. She says that in 2019, during deep meditation, a figure introduced himself as Edgar. She identifies him as the psychic Edgar Cayce.

She says she knew very little about him. Her response was hardly a grand spiritual declaration: ‘I think you’re a psychic or something.’

In her account, he asked her to write down their dialogue. A second presence, whom she identifies as Gladys Davis Turner, followed. She began writing, but also questioning what was happening.

‘Okay, well, I need some proof here.’

Corina describes being guided to read an article and finding information about Gladys that strengthened her confidence in the experience. She says the book took four months to write, with other manuscripts following in handwritten form.

I was fascinated by what she was telling me. The account made me want to read the book. But the connections she found were evidence to her; this conversation wasn’t an independent verification of the identities she attributes to those experiences.

She says a further presence, which she identifies as Nikola Tesla, arrived in 2020. This began at four in the morning while she was getting coffee. She heard a word, reached for a pen and grabbed the nearest Post-it note.

I had to stop her there.

‘What were your first reactions?’ I wanted to know. How does a person respond to what they understand as Nikola Tesla turning up?

She described the experience as unusually intense. Over time, she says, it produced hundreds of notebooks containing dated entries, sketches and material she believes she received. Some of it concerns spiritual subjects; some includes technical ideas. Those are descriptions of the material she records, rather than established scientific findings.

The sheer amount of writing brought us to a more everyday question: with all of this going on, how did she stay grounded?

Being able to say ‘come back later’

Corina’s answer included meditation, yoga and dancing. But I also wanted to know whether she could switch it off. Could she be out having a meal with her family and decide that this wasn’t the time?

She said she could. Now, she describes it as being like a light switch. It hadn’t always been that way.

As a child, she had surrounded herself with stuffed animals at bedtime because some of what she says she saw was frightening. Eventually, she asked for it to stop. Later, she approached opening up again with limits on what she was willing to experience.

There had also been pressure she placed on herself to keep working.

‘I have to do this, I have to do this,’ she recalled thinking. Over the years, she says, she learnt that she could go for a hike and return to the writing later.

She describes herself as a ‘noetic intelligence researcher’. When I asked what that meant to her, she spoke about observing her experiences, exploring dreams and trying to understand her consciousness. Her example was waking from a dream and examining its details, returning to how she felt in it and writing about what it might mean. She was describing her own practice of enquiry.

‘I’m a nerd. A fun nerd,’ she said.

She can spend a whole day on a dream, although she knows she needs a stopping point. Her interest is also in what people actually do with an experience afterwards. Does it affect how they live?

That led me to describe how I look back at things I’m not proud of and try to learn from them. Some people believe in a life review after death. I joked that I’d rather get mine done now, apply the learning here and arrive at that moment to be told: ‘Pass.’

Before we finished, I asked about scepticism. Some people would be fascinated by her account, as I was. Others would find it difficult to accept.

‘Honestly, I love it, and so you should be,’ she said.

She told me she had asked hard questions herself. She also said people were entitled to their opinions, and that what mattered to her was whether someone found the work helpful in their own life.

For my regular closing question, I asked what one message she would leave with the world, drawing on everything she had experienced. She returned to trusting her own experience, even when she hadn’t understood it at the time.

‘I would have to say trust yourself deeply from what you are receiving because it is your experience. You are unique and there’s nobody like you. No one will experience what you’re experiencing.’

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my interview with Corina Angela on the Anthony Larkin Podcast. Watch the full conversation to hear more about her experiences, her writing and how she approaches intuition in everyday life.