‘I’m all about heart, me’: Gaz Williams on mediumship and finding his place

By Anthony Larkin

When Gaz Williams sat down in my studio, he had someone with him.

‘I’m just gonna put our Pat down here,’ he said.

Pat was his mother-in-law. He had brought some of her ashes in a little bottle, something he takes with him to readings, church services and pub events. She was like a mum to him, he explained, and he felt she had come along to give him strength.

‘She had the fire in her belly.’

Sometimes he leaves her in the car, which earns him a telling-off from his wife, Paula: her mother will go mad with him. Even as he spoke about missing Pat, there was room for that familiar family humour.

Gaz is a spiritual medium and a fellow Barnsley lad. I’d already seen him work in front of an audience before inviting him onto the Anthony Larkin Podcast. I wanted to hear how someone who remembers being frightened by things he couldn’t explain as a child had reached the point of standing up in a church and giving messages to other people.

He was happy to have another Barnsley lad to talk to. He made it clear early on that he didn't talk posh. We weren’t likely to have a problem there then.

But being comfortable with each other didn’t make everything easy to discuss. Gaz spoke about childhood fear, his relationship with Paula and a mental health crisis that still affects him. At the time we spoke, he said he had been doing mediumship for about eighteen months. He was proud of how far he’d come, although accepting a compliment was another matter.

The boy in the airing cupboard

Gaz thinks he was around six when his family moved into a house in Wombwell. He remembers sitting in the car with his sister while their parents went inside, already feeling uneasy about the place.

In the back bedroom, he found an airing cupboard with comic books in it. It became somewhere he could shut the door and sit in the dark.

‘That’s where I felt comfortable,’ he said.

‘Bit like Harry Potter,’ I offered.

The bedroom itself was a different matter. Gaz recalls hearing breathing near his pillow and seeing shadows, lights and silhouettes on the wall. He would hide beneath his blanket, thinking that if he couldn’t see whatever was there, it couldn’t see him either.

One night, he says, he heard heavy breathing and initially thought his dad was trying to frighten him as a joke. Then he peered out from under the quilt and saw what he describes as two white eyes looking at him, with nothing else visible around them. He lay still, too frightened to move.

His mum told him it was his imagination.

‘I felt it, I saw it, and I didn’t imagine it.’

That is Gaz’s recollection. He now understands those experiences as encounters with spirit, but at the time he had no explanation that made him feel safe. And talking about them brought back more than the images themselves. He described it as going back over old wounds.

I recognised the fear he was describing. As a child, I had an experience of hearing my name spoken in my ear by someone nobody else could see. My mum called him an imaginary friend. I remembered running downstairs, terrified, only to be told I wanted an excuse to stay up.

‘Shitting myself, I’m gonna say it,’ was how I put it to Gaz. There wasn’t a more elegant version that would have been as accurate.

His sister later shared his bedroom, and Gaz says she witnessed some of the strange sights too. Among them was an image resembling a unicorn on the wall. He remembers wondering whether someone was shining something through the window. Another night, he says, they heard tapping and looked through the curtains to see three men with horses outside their upstairs window.

For Gaz, his sister saying she could see these things mattered. It gave him some reassurance that he wasn’t experiencing everything alone. These are his accounts of what they saw; we weren’t hearing his sister’s version alongside them.

There was also Henry, a figure he described in childhood as an imaginary friend. Unlike the things that frightened him, Henry made him feel protected. Looking back, Gaz thinks he may have been a spirit guide — someone he believes was there to offer support. He has tried to reconnect with Henry since, without success.

The fear affected school and his sense of belonging. His parents took him to be assessed when he was still at junior school. There were difficulties at home too: his parents’ relationship was breaking down, and he described physical punishment from his dad. His childhood distress can’t be separated from that wider situation.

At one point, he wondered whether what he had been going through had contributed to his parents’ marriage difficulties.

‘You can’t take that on yourself, Gaz, as a child,’ I told him.

By his teenage years, he was fighting, had been expelled from school and was spending time with people older than him. He didn’t want to be at home. He felt he had grown up quickly, without finding anywhere he quite fitted.

Someone who believed him

When Gaz talks about Paula, he calls her his ‘angel sent from above’.

They met as teenagers and, in his telling, the connection was immediate. But what he kept coming back to was being able to tell her about his childhood without feeling judged. Paula had experiences of her own that she understood as ghostly activity. She listened to his.

‘It were like someone finally believed me.’

I said it sounded as though, for the first time, he had felt he belonged.

‘A hundred per cent,’ he replied.

Life together didn’t put an end to the unusual experiences. In their first house in Wombwell, Gaz says they found a cooker ring switched on when neither had been cooking, saw unexplained smoke near the back door and found their child’s missing clothes folded in an upstairs cupboard where they hadn’t put them.

One evening, while Paula was bathing their child, he was sitting in the kitchen listening to a CD. He admitted he was enjoying not having to do bath duties. Then, he says, a little girl in a white dress walked beside him.

He ran upstairs to tell Paula he had seen a ghost. His worry was that whatever he had experienced as a boy had followed him.

The couple had the house blessed and eventually moved through a house swap. Gaz was clear that they thought things had calmed down before they exchanged homes. He says they later heard reports of similar disturbances from subsequent occupants.

Paula has remained his support through much more than frightening experiences in a house. He spoke about challenges that could have broken their relationship, and about being grateful that they were still together.

‘She’s been my rock.’

Finding a voice — and still needing help

In 2017, Gaz went through what he describes as a mental health breakdown. He said there had been serious family difficulties, that he had lost his sense of who he was and that he attempted to end his life.

He remembers asking God for help in very direct terms: ‘I need you to get me out of this shit.’

Gaz says he then heard a voice reassuring him that he would get through it. He believes that voice was God’s, although, when first describing it, he also said he didn’t know whether it was God’s voice. What he was certain about was the strength he felt it gave him to carry on.

He sees this as a turning point. It isn’t an account of everything involved in his recovery, and he didn’t describe what professional treatment or support he may have received. His spiritual understanding is the part he shared with me.

He was equally clear that he is still healing. He feels his confidence and his ability to get words out have changed since that period. Writing can come more easily than speaking, particularly when he is under pressure.

‘There’s no shame in admitting that you need help,’ he said.

Later, he disclosed that he had recently felt seriously low again, speaking about being ‘ready to go’. He had told Paula how he was feeling. I was concerned and told him that what he had described needed addressing.

That part of our conversation matters. Finding purpose in Spiritualism has not meant that his mental health difficulties simply disappeared.

He had been giving private readings in a pub, where music and people passing nearby made it difficult for him to concentrate. Even when people told him their readings had been good, he went away feeling he hadn’t given them what he should have. At the time of our interview, he had decided to pause those appointments while looking for a quieter venue.

The same concern about getting things wrong had been there when he first began attending open circles — gatherings where people can practise what they understand as mediumship.

He and Paula had been visiting Spiritualist churches, watching other mediums. Gaz says he would find himself with words or images he wanted to share with someone in the congregation, but couldn’t bring himself to stand up.

At one circle, a medium encouraged him to get to his feet and placed a hand on his back. He believes that helped him open up. He gave a few words to a woman there and, from her response, felt they had meant something to her.

Development classes and more circles followed. Gradually, the man who couldn’t get out of his chair became eager to get up. He began taking part in events and then organising some of his own. Not all of them went well. He didn’t pretend otherwise.

‘There’s no “you have passed”,’ he said of learning mediumship. There is no final box to tick that means you know everything.

When I asked how he receives what others can’t see or hear, he described sensing a presence or energy, alongside images and things arriving in his mind. That is how he understands the process of communicating with those who have died. His difficulty is often trusting himself enough to say what he gets.

Sometimes, apparently, he gets cats.

Gaz said he had never liked cats, yet now believes one of his spirit guides is a cat. He has also acquired a kitten called Daisy, who is making herself known by wrecking the blinds and scratching the furniture.

I suggested scratching posts. They already had those, along with toys. Daisy, it seemed, had her own ideas.

‘Stop calling it philosophy’

I’d seen Gaz give messages in front of an audience, and I told him how good I thought he was. He found it much easier to explain what he struggled with.

One particular hurdle was preparing a fifteen-minute philosophy talk for an assessment. In this setting, that means speaking about spiritual beliefs and how they relate to life. Gaz could write his thoughts down. Standing up and delivering them was different. Paula had timed a practice attempt, and he said he hadn’t even reached three minutes.

To me, putting the word ‘philosophy’ above it seemed to turn it into an exam. Yet he had been sitting with me talking about kindness, responsibility and treating people equally without needing that label.

‘You need to stop calling it philosophy,’ I said. You need to call it ‘I’m gonna talk to the audience.’

That was the alternative I suggested: choose what you want to talk about, then talk to the people in front of you.

For all his discomfort with assessments, he was delighted to have received distinctions for written work connected with his mediumship studies. He said he had no GCSEs and had never had a distinction before.

‘It’s not to say that I know everything, ’cause I certainly don’t.’

The result gave him something to hold on to when he doubted his ability to speak. It also mattered after hearing people tell him to learn to walk before he ran. He wanted his work to be recognised, even while insisting he was no better than anyone else.

I tried to explain something from my own amateur theatre experience. I can perform the same rehearsed scene on two nights and feel completely differently about it. One night feels awful; the next feels right. The audience may have no idea I am making that comparison inside my own head.

Gaz recognised that, but knowing it didn’t make the feeling disappear. He could still take a reading home with him and worry about it for days.

‘I’m all about heart, me.’

I told him I felt like putting him in armour to protect him. Paula tells him he needs a thicker skin. He isn’t sure he could have one.

When we returned to life after death, he described his belief that we continue beyond the body and reflect on the lives we have lived. He understands that reflection as an opportunity to learn, rather than a punishment. He still doesn’t have an explanation for everything he remembers seeing as a child.

And when he talks about what he wants to do now, he comes back to helping people. He described fundraising for churches and Macmillan, and wanting younger people to feel welcome in Spiritualist churches. For him, Spiritualism involves how you treat yourself and others as much as giving messages.

‘If I can get better than I was yesterday, I’m happy,’ he said. ‘Not better than anybody else.’

Before we finished, I put my regular final question to him: if he could leave one message with the world, from everything he had experienced spiritually, what would it be?

‘Don’t be afraid to reach out. There’s always an helping hand. That’s what I believe. Don’t be afraid to ask. Always reach out.’

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my interview with Gaz Williams on the Anthony Larkin Podcast. You can watch our full conversation here:

youtu.be/VX4M9nV5BqU?si=4XIAhkJFykV6PCyk 

If you’d like to join me for more conversations exploring consciousness, spirituality, the afterlife and unusual human experiences, you’re welcome to subscribe for future interviews and articles.