“There Is No Death”: Elaine Hakin on Mediumship, Grief and the Stories She Calls Proof

Elaine Hakin had already finished the reading when, as she tells it, the young man came back.

She had been giving a message to his sister. His birth month — February — had already come through. Then Elaine says she suddenly became aware of something much more specific: a gold man’s ring with a blue stone.

The reaction was immediate.

“Nobody knows,” the sister told her. “I mean nobody.”

Elaine asked what she meant. The woman explained that her brother had been badly burned in an accident and had been identified by his dentures and that ring. She had the ring herself.

But for Elaine, the important part wasn’t simply the detail of the jewellery. She says the young man then gave a message for his mother.

“When this body’s no good, we are pure love energy,” Elaine recalled him saying. His mother was to think of him at a particular age and, when her own time came, he would know which age she had chosen and meet her that way.

Elaine called it “a beautiful, beautiful message”. 

I wasn’t there when that original reading happened, and I can’t independently verify what took place. But sitting opposite Elaine in my studio, I could understand why the experience had stayed with her.

This is what Elaine means when she talks about “proof”.

Not a philosophical argument. Not simply saying she believes in an afterlife. Stories. Names. Objects. Reactions. Moments which, in her interpretation, contain information she shouldn’t otherwise have known.

And Elaine has accumulated a lot of them.

A storyteller from Pontefract

Elaine Hakin is 73, from Pontefract in Yorkshire, and describes herself as a spiritual medium, healer, spiritual teacher, author and — a word I think suits her particularly well — a storyteller.

Her latest book is called Real Life Spiritual Experiences Proving Afterlife.

She arrived at the studio with no shortage of material.

Within minutes of us starting, I jokingly told her I felt as though I had somebody famous sitting with me.

“No, don’t say that,” she immediately replied. “We can’t have ego.”

That was Elaine.

We had barely begun and I was already being corrected.

She told me that at the age of 12 she couldn’t even read aloud in class without stammering and losing sleep beforehand. Now she regularly stands in front of audiences doing mediumship.

“You just have to find the real you,” she said, “and what you’re meant to be in life and what you’re meant to do.” 

Her own spiritual story, she says, began much earlier than adulthood.

As a child, Elaine remembers what she calls “spirit friends” in her bedroom. She would talk and play with them, sometimes to the irritation of her parents, who could hear their daughter chatting away when she was supposed to be asleep.

It wasn’t until she was around 18 that she discovered a Spiritualist church in her village.

“I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t wait to go.”

At the end of her first service, a woman named Annette Stead — who would become Elaine’s first teacher — approached her and invited her to a development class.

Elaine remembers Annette telling her: “I don’t know why, I don’t know you, but we’re starting one, and I’ve been told I have to invite you along.”

Elaine interpreted that as divine intervention.

Later, she says, another medium brought through her paternal grandmother and told Elaine that her grandmother had read tea leaves. Her family had never mentioned it to her.

For Elaine, the pieces were beginning to fit together. 

“It’s just normal to me”

One thing that became obvious during our conversation was just how ordinary all of this feels to Elaine.

At one point I asked what continued to drive her to do the work.

“It’s just normal to me,” she said. “It’s just normal.”

She talked about learning psychometry when she was younger — taking an object belonging to somebody she didn’t know and seeing what impressions came from it — and developing a personal language of colours and symbols.

Some of those symbols are more serious than others.

One of her guides, she says, communicates with her using camels.

A camel with one hump and a lady’s hat can indicate a woman who has “got the hump” with somebody. Apparently double-humped camels signify that things have become rather more serious.

Nobody could accuse Elaine’s spirit world of lacking a sense of humour.

She is also quite firm about boundaries. Elaine says she deliberately “closes down” when she isn’t working.

She once decided to experiment and remain spiritually open all day. Later, at church, a medium gave her a message asking her to please close herself down because, apparently, those in spirit were fed up with watching football all day.

Her husband had been watching it.

Whether you interpret that spiritually or otherwise, it is a very Elaine story.

The woman in the hospice shop

Then there are stories with a completely different emotional weight.

Elaine told me about being in a hospice shop when a woman began talking to her about her son.

The woman hoped to attend an event with another medium and desperately wanted her son to come through.

Elaine says she could see the pain in her face.

Although she wasn’t there to work as a medium, Elaine says she became aware of a young man with thick black hair, smiling. She described him to the woman, who recognised him as her son.

Then Elaine says she saw him holding a baby girl dressed in pink.

The woman told her that her son had twin daughters and one of the babies had died.

Elaine reassured her according to her own belief that they were together and at peace.

As she walked away, there was one more thing.

“Just tell her May.”

Elaine turned back.

“I’ve just got to give you May.”

And this is one of the details I particularly liked because Elaine admits what her own brain did next. She immediately tried to make sense of it herself.

“I’m thinking, I bet they were born in May.”

They weren’t.

According to Elaine, the woman told her that May was the middle name of both girls.

When Elaine saw her again later, the woman told her she was sleeping better. 

Elaine regards that as evidential mediumship.

A sceptic may interpret the encounter differently, and the conversation doesn’t provide independent evidence allowing me to establish what happened beyond Elaine’s account. But I think it is important not to lose sight of the person in the story.

Whatever conclusion you reach about mediumship, there was a grieving mother in that shop.

And Elaine’s understanding of what she experienced brought that woman some comfort.

The kiss on the forehead

The most emotional part of our conversation, for me, involved Elaine’s first husband.

They had been together for 37 years.

Towards the end of his life, Elaine slept in a chair beside him in a private hospital room. Staff apparently couldn’t understand why he was continuing to hang on.

Elaine believed his spirit was moving in and out of his body.

She had been singing his favourite song to him each night — a Barry White song — and devised a very simple way of communicating. She asked him to move his fingers slightly for yes and leave them still for no.

She asked whether he was hanging on because he wanted to go home.

She says he moved his fingers.

Elaine became determined to get him home.

She recalled being warned that he might die in the ambulance.

“I don’t care,” she said. “It’s his last wish.”

He did make it home.

That night, Elaine says she heard him calling her despite not having heard his voice for weeks. She went into his room and asked whether he wanted her to sing again.

She sang.

As she did, Elaine says she saw his mother.

“I said, ‘Right, you’re going with your mother. You must go now.’ And I gave him a kiss on the forehead and I felt him go.”

Later, at Hemsworth Spiritualist Church, Elaine received a reading from another medium.

The medium told her she had Elaine’s husband with her.

“He wants to thank you for the kiss on the forehead.”

That got me.

“That’s bringing me to tears, I’ll be honest,” I told her. “That’s a beautiful story.” 

I still don’t know what happened in a metaphysical sense. But I know what happened in the room while Elaine told me: a woman spoke about the death of the man she had loved for nearly four decades, and the memory still mattered.

That part doesn’t require any belief in mediumship.

Proof, doubt and learning to trust yourself

Perhaps because I spend so much time speaking to mediums, healers and people who describe unusual experiences, our conversation eventually turned towards my own curiosity.

I asked Elaine something I hadn’t planned.

“I want to become a medium. But is that ego wanting a skill?”

That is genuinely something I wrestle with.

I’m a nurse. I practise Reiki. I’m comfortable with the idea of helping people. I’ve had moments in my own life that have made me curious about intuition and consciousness.

What makes me hesitate is the possibility of sitting opposite somebody and giving them information that I’ve simply made up in my own head.

Elaine’s answer was practical.

Go to a development group.

Practise with other people and get direct feedback.

For her, that is how you learn the difference.

She uses terms such as clairvoyance, clairaudience and claircognisance for different ways information may be experienced — through images, sounds or simply “knowing” something without understanding why.

I told her that doing these interviews has actually given me more confidence to explore that part of myself.

“I’m not quite there yet,” I said.

And I’m still not.

Curiosity is enough for now. 

Ken, past lives and an old recording

Elaine’s current husband, Ken, features heavily in both her life and her spiritual stories.

When they first met, he took her to a Mind Body Spirit event and underwent a past-life regression with a practitioner Elaine names as Peter Wall.

Ken apparently wasn’t particularly impressed by the regression at the time.

A recording was made and then more or less forgotten about among Elaine’s years of journals.

In that regression, Ken had described himself as a medicine man and had been given a particular name.

Years later, Elaine says Ken experienced his deceased father during meditation accompanied by another figure, who told Ken he would teach him to make drums.

Ken subsequently began making shamanic-style drums — hundreds of them, according to Elaine.

When Elaine later retrieved the old regression recording while working on her book, she says she discovered that the name from the regression matched the name associated with the figure Ken believed had taught him to make the drums.

“It was him in a past life,” Elaine concluded.

Again, that is Elaine’s interpretation of the sequence of events, not something the interview independently establishes. But she had kept the old recording, and for her the later connection was significant. 

At this point our conversation wandered into quantum entanglement, energy and science.

I think this is where it is particularly important to separate different kinds of claims.

Elaine sees concepts from physics as compatible with her spiritual worldview. That is her interpretation. Conservation of energy and quantum entanglement are genuine scientific concepts, but they do not by themselves provide scientific evidence for mediumship or survival after death.

The spiritual question remains a different one.

A faith that isn’t quite religion

Towards the end, Elaine told me something else that interested me.

She feels comfortable in churches of different denominations but doesn’t consider herself conventionally religious.

She was brought up Methodist, married a Catholic, has spent much of her life around Spiritualist churches and eventually married Ken in one.

She is openly critical of organised religion and believes human beings have altered religious teachings over time.

At the same time, she has a deep affection for the teachings attributed within Spiritualism to Silver Birch.

And Jesus remains important to her.

Elaine refers to him as “the Nazarene” and sees him primarily as an extraordinary spiritual healer rather than through the traditional theology she associates with organised Christianity.

She was careful to mark that as her own position.

“That’s my belief,” she said. 

That distinction matters.

Throughout the interview, Elaine spoke with certainty about what she believes she has experienced. My role isn’t to turn that certainty into a fact for somebody else.

It is to listen to the story.

“We still grieve”

At the end of every interview I ask the same question.

If you could leave one message with the world, from everything you’ve experienced spiritually, what would that message be?

Elaine began by talking about the importance of creating a future in your mind rather than stagnating.

Then came the sentence that probably sums up her entire book, her mediumship and much of our conversation:

“Death is the biggest lie ever told. There is no death.”

That is Elaine’s conviction.

But what she said immediately afterwards was just as important.

Believing that somebody continues, she told me, doesn’t mean you stop grieving.

“We still grieve.”

Elaine had grieved for her first husband while he was still alive and seriously ill. She described Ken now as her rock and said that, if she loses him first, she knows the loss will floor her.

Her belief that he will still somehow be around does not remove the human pain of losing him.

And perhaps that is the most grounded place to leave Elaine’s story: not with the suggestion that grief disappears if you believe strongly enough, but with a woman who believes absolutely in an afterlife and still knows that love hurts when somebody is no longer physically beside you. 

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my full conversation with Elaine Hakin on the Anthony Larkin Podcast, where we explore her childhood experiences, mediumship, grief, spirit communication, healing, past lives and the stories behind her book Real Life Spiritual Experiences Proving Afterlife.

If you enjoy conversations exploring consciousness, spirituality, the afterlife and unusual human experiences with curiosity and an open mind, you can subscribe to receive future interviews and articles.