Yvonne Fielding

MEDIUMSHIP  /  GRIEF  /  THE UNSEEN WORLD

“The Lady by the Mushrooms Is My Wife”: Yvonne Fielding on a Lifetime of Seeing Spirit

From the twin sister she says remained beside her after death to a stranger’s late husband appearing beside the bananas, medium Yvonne Fielding has spent more than six decades trying to understand what she believes exists beyond physical life.

By Anthony Larkin  |  26 June 2026

Yvonne Fielding was standing in a supermarket looking at bananas when, according to her, somebody tapped her on the shoulder. That in itself would hardly make a story. Except Yvonne says the man who tapped her wasn’t alive. He pointed her towards a woman standing near the mushrooms.

“That’s my wife,” he told her. Then came the part that left Yvonne with a problem. The man wanted her to approach this complete stranger and give her a message. Her immediate reaction was probably the same one many of us would have. How on earth do you walk across a supermarket and tell somebody you’ve never met that her dead husband would like a word?

Yvonne protested. The man, she recalls, was having none of it. He told her his wife had already had a terrible morning. Her car had needed push-starting and, worse still, she had now left the lights on in the supermarket car park. If nobody told her, he said, she would return to a flat battery.

Yvonne needed a plan. Rather than opening with, “Excuse me, your husband in spirit has just sent me over,” she opted for something slightly less likely to get security involved. She approached the woman and told her she thought she had seen her arrive and believed she'd left her car lights on.

The woman dropped her basket and rushed outside. A few minutes later she returned, hugged Yvonne and thanked her. Then the conversation changed. She explained that she'd had a dreadful morning. Her car had indeed needed push-starting. And her husband had died only two weeks earlier.

He had been supposed to service the car. Yvonne says that after the woman walked away, the man she believed she'd been communicating with had one final question:

“Did it hurt you to say that?”

No. Then, according to Yvonne, came the punchline. He'd brought some friends. They needed messages delivering too.

“I've never been to the supermarket again,” she laughed. At least not that one. It is exactly the kind of story that makes interviewing somebody like Yvonne fascinating. I don't sit down with mediums because I already know what to believe. Quite the opposite. I'm interested in the experiences themselves: what happened, what somebody believes happened, how they interpreted it, and whether there are details that make us stop and wonder.

With Yvonne, there were plenty.

The sister she says never really left

Yvonne describes herself as an international medium, psychic, Reiki master, teacher and author. But in her telling, her relationship with what she calls spirit began long before any of those titles. It began with her twin sister, Wendy. Wendy died when the girls were only a few days old.

Yet Yvonne says that throughout her childhood she continued to see her. She remembers always having a sense that somebody was missing physically, while at the same time experiencing Wendy as very much present.

“I would see Wendy as my twin sister and we grew up together,” she told me. Her parents didn't share her belief in spirit and regarded many of Yvonne's experiences as the product of an extremely active imagination. There were other visitors too. One of her earliest memories involves a rocking horse in her bedroom.

Yvonne says that when she was around two years old, a gentleman would sit on the horse and rock backwards and forwards. Her parents would enter the room, see the horse moving and assume their daughter had climbed out of bed. Years later, at around 16, her grandmother produced an old family album.

Yvonne pointed to a particularly short man in one photograph and said she knew him. His name, she said, was Sunny. She also claimed he'd warned her never to bet on the horses when she grew up because she'd lose her money just as he had.

Her grandmother cried. According to Yvonne, the man was a deceased relative who had been a jockey. For Yvonne, moments like that weren't the beginning of belief. She says she had always believed. They were moments when the adults around her began to reconsider what they had dismissed.

When the experience became frightening

There is an important side to Yvonne's story that prevents it becoming a collection of comforting tales about loved ones saying hello. She also remembers being terrified. In her late teens she joined a spiritual healing circle. Yvonne says she had little understanding at the time of what spiritualists call “opening”, “closing” or psychic protection.

She describes the experience as leaving all her “energy centres” open. What followed, she says, were frightening experiences: sleepless nights, feeling pinched and disturbed and an overwhelming sense that she could no longer shut anything out. Those around her feared she was experiencing a mental-health breakdown.

Eventually, Yvonne's mother visited a clairvoyant who told her that her daughter needed help. Through that meeting Yvonne was introduced to the woman who became her mentor. Whatever interpretation somebody places on what Yvonne was experiencing, that relationship clearly mattered enormously to her. Her mentor taught her a framework for understanding the experiences and, crucially, techniques Yvonne believed allowed her to control when she engaged with them.

Her initial response?

“Take it away. I don't want to see. I don't want to hear.” Her mentor's reply was rather less accommodating. In essence: you've opened the door. Now learn how to deal with what's on the other side. Yvonne says it took practice, but eventually she learned what she describes as opening and closing herself to spirit.

Today she can joke about being able to connect almost at the click of her fingers. But that control matters to her. Because Yvonne is adamant that being a medium doesn't mean wanting to be a medium every minute of every day.

“I'm still a human being”

This became one of the more grounded moments of our conversation. People, Yvonne says, sometimes approach mediums as though they have permanent access to another world — an immediate answer to every question or a direct line to anybody who has died. She has to remind them:

“I'm still a person.” She still becomes upset. She still experiences difficult periods. And she still grieves. There is an assumption, she says, that a medium shouldn't experience bereavement in the same way as everybody else because they believe they'll be able to communicate with the person again.

Yvonne rejects that completely. Believing somebody continues in spirit is not the same as physically having them beside you. There is still the absence of a hug. A kiss. A conversation in the room. That distinction particularly interested me because conversations about the afterlife can sometimes skate too quickly over the reality of grief.

Whatever somebody believes happens after death, the person left behind is still living here. And loss is physical as well as philosophical.

The diagnosis that shook her faith

Yvonne's spiritual beliefs have also been tested by events within her own family. She cared for her mother for around five months while she was terminally ill with a brain tumour. After her mother died, Yvonne's husband, Martin, received a serious and potentially life-threatening diagnosis involving his heart and kidney.

Yvonne remembers being furious. She had spent her life talking about trust in spirit, but in that moment she didn't feel particularly trusting. She remembers effectively saying:

I've just lost my mum. Now you're going to take my husband too? Martin faced major surgery and, according to Yvonne, doctors gave the family an extremely poor outlook. During this period they were introduced to a healer and trance medium named Libby. In trance mediumship, the practitioner believes they allow a spirit communicator to speak through them. Yvonne says the communicator in this case identified himself as Dr James.

She and Martin were permitted to record one of these sessions. Yvonne says Dr James repeatedly insisted that Martin would survive the operation. Martin did survive. That doesn't establish that trance healing caused his recovery, of course, and Yvonne doesn't need me to turn her experience into scientific proof for it to be an important part of her story.

For her, it became another deeply personal piece of evidence. It also produced an unexpected instruction. Write your book. Yvonne had actually started a book several years earlier, written around a chapter and a half and abandoned it. She simply decided the time wasn't right.

Now, she says, she was being told to retrieve it and finish it. So she did. On a two-week holiday, the material poured out of her. The result became Can You Hear Me? Can You See Me?, her account of the unusual, funny, painful and spiritual experiences that have shaped her life.

From a broken back to full-time spiritual work

There had already been another point when Yvonne felt she'd made a bargain with the universe. Around nine years before our conversation, she came off a pushbike while on holiday and injured her back. The severity of the injury wasn't initially recognised. Months later she was told she required urgent surgery and that there was a risk of paralysis.

Yvonne remembers making a promise. If she came through it, she would devote herself fully to the spiritual work she believed she was being asked to do. The operation was successful. Then, several months later, something strange happened. A job she'd previously loved suddenly made her miserable.

She'd come home crying and ask Martin what had changed. His response was devastatingly simple. Hadn't she promised to work for spirit full-time? Eventually she resigned. Yvonne laughs now at the list of things she initially insisted she wouldn't do. She wasn't going to work in spiritualist churches.

She wasn't going to stand in front of audiences. She wasn't going to do shows. Naturally, she now does all of them. There is something wonderfully human about that. We make grand declarations about exactly what our lives will and won't become. Then life apparently doesn't read the memo.

What does “seeing spirit” actually mean?

One of the questions I've repeatedly asked mediums is surprisingly simple:

When you say you see somebody who has died, what does that actually mean? Is there a person standing in the room as solidly as I would see somebody alive? Is it an image in the mind? A memory? A feeling? For Yvonne, she describes it as being similar to the mind's eye, but more immediate.

She says communicators may present themselves visually, bring memories, communicate aspects of their personality or sometimes show her information connected to how they died. Different mediums, she stresses, work differently. Some claim to see. Others hear. Some smell particular scents. Others simply describe “knowing”. Yvonne believes her strongest abilities involve both seeing and hearing.

Importantly, she also believes mediumship carries responsibility. She objects strongly to practitioners frightening vulnerable people with predictions of death or disaster. There are things, she says, that simply shouldn't be announced to somebody — particularly in a public demonstration. For Yvonne, a message should help rather than terrify.

A father who was apparently too cold — then too hot

One of the lighter pieces of “evidence” Yvonne offered involved Martin's father. When she and Martin first met, he didn't really understand what she did. Then Yvonne says she saw his deceased father standing in the hallway. There were no photographs around for her to identify him from.

The message was peculiar. He was cold. Very cold. When Yvonne passed this on, Martin went into the porch and retrieved his father's urn. It was freezing. A couple of weeks later Dad apparently returned. This time he was far too warm. Martin had moved the urn into the airing cupboard.

Eventually, Yvonne says she saw him one final time making aeroplane gestures and giving a thumbs-up. Unknown to her, Martin had scattered his father's ashes at the RAF base where he had once been stationed after receiving permission to do so. Yvonne says she hasn't seen him since.

Apparently he'd finally approved of the accommodation.

When a “haunting” became somebody's story

Yvonne has also been asked to visit homes where people believe something unexplained is happening. One case involved furniture apparently moving in a room. Instead of describing the presence as simply evil or something to be expelled, Yvonne says she tried to understand why the man she believed was there was angry.

She describes sitting on the edge of a bed and refusing to leave until he spoke to her. Eventually, according to Yvonne, the story emerged. He had been a lonely man without close family or friends. The furniture in the room had belonged to his grandmother and carried enormous emotional significance.

The new occupant was planning to remove it. Yvonne says she asked him about somebody he'd loved. His grandfather. She then attempted to connect him with that grandfather and describes witnessing what, to her, resembled the transition scene in the film Ghost — although she was quick to add that the dramatic demons from the film are not part of her understanding.

The angry man, she says, left with his grandfather. The disturbances stopped. Whether someone sees this as a literal encounter with an earthbound spirit, a spiritual framework for resolving fear in a home, or something else entirely, I was struck by the way Yvonne approached it.

She listened first. Because in her understanding, even the frightening presence had a story.

Healing, illness and knowing the limits

Yvonne is also a Reiki master. Reiki is a Japanese-origin complementary practice in which practitioners use light touch or hands held near the body with the intention of supporting relaxation and wellbeing. Yvonne's interpretation of Reiki is strongly spiritual, and she describes occasionally receiving impressions while working with clients.

One story involved a woman who had previously been treated for breast cancer. During a Reiki session, Yvonne says she felt something wasn't right. More importantly, the woman herself said she could feel something too. Yvonne encouraged her to pursue it medically and to keep pushing for assessment.

The woman was subsequently diagnosed with aggressive cancer. That distinction is important. Reiki should not replace medical diagnosis or treatment, and nothing in this story changes that. But what Yvonne did in that moment was encourage somebody who felt something was wrong to return to medical professionals and advocate for herself.

For Yvonne, however, the experience reinforced her belief that spiritual practice and intuition can sometimes prompt people to pay attention.

When spirituality becomes service

Perhaps the most revealing part of Yvonne's life isn't the ghosts, the predictions or even the supermarket mushrooms. It's what she believes you're supposed to do with all of it. She is involved with a charity created in memory of a 16-year-old girl named Jordan, who died from cancer.

Jordan's father Wayne and his partner Sue established the organisation after experiencing the enormous practical and financial pressures that can accompany having a seriously ill child in hospital. Their original intention, Yvonne explained, was to help 16 people — one for every year of Jordan's life.

The project grew considerably beyond that. Yvonne became a patron and resident medium, helping with fundraising events. And that seems to sit at the centre of her philosophy. Spirituality, to Yvonne, isn't supposed to be about ego. It isn't supposed to make somebody feel more important than everybody else.

It is supposed to make you useful. She put it beautifully when talking about something far simpler than mediumship. Smile at somebody. It may be the only smile they've received all day. It costs nothing.

So what does Yvonne believe happens when we die?

Eventually I asked the question at the heart of so many of my conversations. From everything she believes she has seen, heard and experienced:

What happens when we die? Yvonne was careful to frame the answer as exactly that — her belief. She believes death is a transition rather than an ending. The physical body, in her understanding, is temporary. Consciousness or spirit continues, reunites with people who have gone before and continues learning.

She describes the body almost as an overcoat. Whatever condition that overcoat is in when it is discarded, she believes the person continues whole. It is a comforting idea. Whether it is literally true is the enormous question. And it's precisely why I keep having these conversations.

I don't think curiosity requires us to abandon discernment. We can listen to somebody's experience without immediately deciding we know exactly what caused it. We can be open without being unquestioning. And we can admit that death remains one of the greatest mysteries any of us will face.

Yvonne believes she's already been given glimpses of the answer.

“Love, trust, honesty”

I end my interviews by asking every guest the same question:

If you could leave one message with the world, from everything you've experienced spiritually, what would that message be? Yvonne didn't hesitate.

“Love, trust, honesty.”

She spoke about peace. About caring for the Earth. About the strange period during the pandemic when, amid enormous fear and tragedy, neighbours sometimes rediscovered one another. People checked on elderly residents. They talked over garden fences. They made time. Yvonne recalled an elderly woman saying that, in one sense, she missed that period — not the illness or death, but the fact that people seemed to notice each other.

And perhaps underneath all the extraordinary experiences, that's the simplest message Yvonne Fielding wanted to leave. You don't have to see spirit. You don't have to be a medium. You don't have to believe everything Yvonne believes. You can simply notice the person standing beside you.

Help when there is nothing in it for you. Listen. Smile. Love a little more. For all our questions about what might happen in the next life, perhaps there is still plenty of work to be done in this one.

Watch the full conversation

This article is based on my full interview with Yvonne Fielding on the Anthony Larkin Podcast. We talk in much more detail about her childhood experiences, mediumship, Reiki, her husband Martin, house clearances, her book Can You Hear Me? Can You See Me?, and what she believes happens when physical life ends.

Watch the complete interview here:

https://youtu.be/hQSD1pDlmWI?si=1Rzko__sdfRxAF02

If conversations about consciousness, spirituality, mediumship, near-death experiences and the possibility of life beyond death fascinate you too, subscribe to my Substack. I'm not here to tell you what to believe. I'm here to keep asking the questions.

— Anthony Larkin