Coming Out: Memoir of a Psychic

By Raewyn Harlum

In 1950, author Raewyn Harlum was just three years old when she remembers having her first vision, a stranger visiting her bedside. In Coming Out, she shares the story of her spiritual awakening, recounting the visions, premonitions, and psychic experiences shes had throughout her lifetime.

In this memoir, Raewyn narrates a memoir of her journey from childhood to the present day to find the true person she is and to accept who she is. Raewyn tells that her husbands death was the catalyst for her to accept her psychic abilities, which she had kept secret her whole life. Although the happenings frightened her, she has learned to let go of fear and embrace whatever happens.

Coaxed by her spirit guides, Raewyn tells not only about her variety of psychic experiences, but also how she has come to terms with her spiritual happenings and deals with and embraces them today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jun 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781452529455

Raewyn Harlum

Raewyn Harlum grew up on Waiheke Island in New Zealand in the 1950s. She married an Australian and became an Australian citizen. Harlum is a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, writer, poet, artist, and gardener. She lives in the Noosa Hinterland, Queensland, with her cat Panda.

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Copyright © 2015 Raewyn Harlum.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Cover is a painting of author Raewyn.

Painting is by Queensland artist Leigh Hooker of Shoebox Gallery.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2944-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2945-5 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 06/26/2015

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1   Stranger at My Bedside

Chapter 2   Mumma, Please Don’t Go

Chapter 3   Doctor Davis

Chapter 4   I Can’t Sleep with That Angel

Chapter 5   With Love Comes Pain

Chapter 6   Minnie

Chapter 7   The Breaking of My Heart

Chapter 8   And Unto Her a Son Was Born

Chapter 9   The Judas Friend

Chapter 10 The Accident

Chapter 11 I Have a Thirteen-Year-Old Daughter

Chapter 12 The Visitor

Chapter 13 Wayside Chapel Wedding

Chapter 14 Dreams

Chapter 15 Cruel Winter

Chapter 16 Readings

Chapter 17 Visit to the Church

Chapter 18 Loss

Chapter 19 Grandmother Was a Medium

Chapter 20 Revelation

Chapter 21 The Meeting

Chapter 22 Crouching Tiger

Chapter 23 Book Club Day

Chapter 24 Come Out!

Chapter 25 Mustard

Chapter 26 The Pen Is Mightier than the Sword

Chapter 27 Flash of Damascus

Chapter 28 Steps and Stairs

Chapter 29 The Dahlia

Chapter 30 Spirit Will Push You

Chapter 31 Biripi Nation

Chapter 32 Damaris

Chapter 33 We Never Have Enough Time

Chapter 34 You Have Nothing to Fear

Chapter 35 Tasmania

Chapter 36 My Awakening

Chapter 37 My Journey Continues

Bibliography

This book is dedicated to my spirit guides and my human guides. You know who you are. Thank you for being in my life.

This memoir is the story of my spiritual awakening.

A big thank-you to all the wonderful people who work at Balboa Press. Thank you for helping me along my publishing journey with this book and my first book, I Was Only Nineteen.

Thank you to my wonderful family and friends. I am blessed.

Raewyn Harlum

INTRODUCTION

Visions and premonitions have been with me all of my life, but I have never talked about them to anyone. Sometimes they frighten me. I don’t know why I have these occurrences. Am I crazy? Or is it just a coincidence that I see spirits when something bad is about to occur in my life?

I wrote that paragraph years ago when I jotted down, in a journal, some of the happenings in my life.

On the last Sunday of February 2014, I decided to write about those strange occurrences.

I found the old journal in a box and saw that those were the first words I had written. One thing I have learned since I wrote those first sentences is that very strange things can happen to anyone, even me.

Recently I have met like-minded people, and I have been learning something new every day. I have never in the past studied or read about things that were happening to me. They just happened. I did not delve into the reason why. Now I am opening up; I want to find out all about these psychic experiences.

The death of my husband was the catalyst for my need to write. Once I finished my first book, I Was Only Nineteen, a memoir of my personal struggle of being forced to give up a baby for adoption, I felt the forces of my spirit guides driving me to delve into these unexplained visions and premonitions. This is how I came about coming out!

CHAPTER 1

STRANGER AT MY BEDSIDE

It is the year 1950. I am three years old, lying in my bed, in my room in our house on the hill at Onetangi, New Zealand. I have just recovered from whooping cough. My mother has kissed me goodnight and left my room, shutting the door. I don’t like the dark and wish she had left the door open.

Suddenly, I see a man standing beside my bed, looking down at me. He is not an ugly man, but good-looking, with golden hair and beard. Although my room is dark, I can see him clearly.

I can’t understand how the man standing beside my bed came into the room without opening the door. Later, after seeing him a few times, I start calling him the rubbery man, because I think he must flatten himself like a shadow and come under the small gap at the bottom of the door.

In the beginning I run into the bedroom belonging to my parents, and hop into bed with them. My father always carries me back to bed. I come to hate the night. I look under my bed and in my wardrobe to see if the rubbery man is hiding there.

When I am seven years old, he stops visiting me. Then, one night when I am thirteen, I wake and scream when I see him standing beside my bed. My father comes running. I tell him a man has been in my room. Dad runs through the house and outside, looking for the man.

When I am fourteen, I wake one night and think the rubbery man has touched me on the arm. I see him briefly, but he disappears when I scream. Again my poor father comes running.

What happened?

A man touched me on the arm.

My mother sits on the end of my bed and asks me if I am all right. Tell me exactly what happened.

I do not know how to tell her I think the man is a spirit. She does not like that sort of talk and does not believe in spirits. Dad comes in after searching the yard.

I think she just had a nightmare, Ned, my mother says.

It seemed so real, I tell them.

Do you think you can go back to sleep now? my mother asks.

Yes. I lie to get them out of my room. I cannot go back to sleep, because I am now old enough to question what is happening to me.

Who is this man? Why does he visit me? How could he disappear so fast? I do not know about spirit guides.

In addition to the rubbery man, I have known things would happen since I was child, but I do not realize what this means. The first time of any significance this knowing happens, I am about five years old.

My mother, father, brother, and I live in a rented house built on the side of a hill, with 360-degree views overlooking beautiful Onetangi Beach on Waiheke Island. The Pacific Ocean laps at the shoreline. The land is terraced to the bottom of our section. There is a shell path that wanders down the hill and then across the bottom of the property to end, on the eastern side, at a wooden gate, which is painted white.

My parents, Ned and Iris Davis, a young couple in their late twenties, had moved to the island of Waiheke in 1946, to escape what they called the rat race of city life. Onetangi is one of many seaside settlements on the island.

The year is 1952. It has been raining for three weeks. Our roof leaks in places, and there are always a few pots or buckets strategically placed in the house.

I wake early one morning.

Get out of the house, a woman says.

I sit up in my bed, feeling scared. It is not yet dawn and my room is dark. I strain my eyes, looking into the darkness to see who was talking. I cannot move. I am immobilized, too frightened to move or yell out.

Go now!

I hear the voice again and am puzzled because it is not my mother’s. It seems the voice is inside my head.

Get out of the house now.

Suddenly, I hear hurried footsteps and see torchlight. Wake up, Neville. We have to get out of the house now. After I hear my father waking my nine-year-old brother, I am able to move. I am already climbing out of bed when Dad comes in. Come on. We have to hurry. Don’t get dressed; there is not time. We are going to climb out of the bay window in the sitting room. The rain has caused a mud slip behind our house.

Up on vacant land behind our house and the neighbouring houses, six cows that belong to a neighbour roam in the daytime. They come home in the evening for milking. Sometimes Mr. Mallinson pays my brother a penny to milk the cows. There are grassless tracks worn into the hillside where the cows always walk.

The first track is just behind a stand of fifty-year-old macrocarpa trees that mark our back boundary. They were planted when the house was built. The second track is thirty metres up the hill from there, and the top track is another twenty metres higher. These tracks are deep gutters. When my brother and I play on the hill and walk in the tracks, the outside of the tracks measure to the tops of my legs.

It has been raining steadily, and the rain accumulated in these dirt tracks, making mini dams. Now the hillside has given way.

Our house is surrounded with mud and in danger of being pushed off the stumps. What saves our house is the row of trees and a concrete tank, which protects the outer back bathroom wall. The mud slides down and knocks out one of the trees with an eighteen-inch diameter. It then slithers forward through the gap, and the mud pushes the house forward four inches.

Come on, children. Hurry, says Dad, hustling us out of our rooms.

Don’t open the door. My sandy-haired brother bounds to the door and starts to open it. Dad is at his side in a flash, pushing the door shut. I have a brief glimpse of a sea of mud.

Mum puts my raincoat over my pyjamas, does the buttons up, and pulls the hood over my head. She hands my brother his coat to put on. Mum has her best coat on over her nightie. We do not have time to dress, but she is determined we would keep dry. Dad is the only one dressed.

Dad climbs out of the bay window. The ground is higher on that side of the house. Dad helps Mum out and then he helps Neville. I am left standing on the cushions of the window seat. Mum has recently covered them with a floral chintz material. I am not allowed to stand on furniture. I think I will be told off for dirtying the cushions. Dad reaches up to me and I climb into his arms.

There is a river of sludge running down the hill beside the house, but it is not as deep as it would have been if the concrete tank weren’t protecting that side.

Dad, barefoot, his trousers rolled up to his knees, carries me through the river of mud. He puts me down near the hedge that separates our house from our neighbour’s.

There is only a little mud trickling down near the higher ridge beside the hedge. We walk cautiously down the hill until the hedge is finished.

We climb through a wire fence while Dad holds two strands apart for us to squeeze through. Once through the fence, we are on Mr. Billington’s path. In the cold grey light just before dawn, we trudge down his shell-covered path.

The rain has ceased and the wind has dropped. In the still morning air, the noise of our crunch, crunch, crunch on the shell path carries. I think the neighbours will wake, hear us, and wonder what we are doing walking down their pathway.

Out through the wooden gate at the bottom of the hill we go and walk along the road to the house of family friends.

Dad knocks on their door. As Mrs. Farrant bustles us inside, the rain starts again. Mr. Farrant puts more fuel on the coal range and we are soon warm. The kettle is on the stove to boil. We sit on bench seats around the kitchen table, and for the first time in our lives, my brother and I eat boiled eggs.

Our father is not an egg eater. In fact, he dislikes the smell of cooked eggs, and so we do not have cooked eggs unless our father goes away on a fishing trip for the night. We then eat poached eggs on toast for our tea.

At first I am not sure how to eat the egg on my plate. Mum reaches over and slices the top off my egg. Neville is watching Mum and copies her.

We eat the eggs with thin fingers of toast, which Mrs. Farrant calls soldiers. Dad just eats toast and home-made plum jam.

We all sit, pleased to have escaped unhurt from the house, but when I glance at my father, he has a worried look on his face.

Two hours later, after daybreak, the rain vanishes and the sun shines. We walk along the road to look at the damage. We are anxious to see if the house is still intact.

As we stand at the bottom of the hill, I can see a vast expanse of mud covering our section. Gone is the path and our father’s vegetable beds. Gone are our mother’s flower beds—her carnations, hebes, and herbs.

The path leading up the hill to the house had been covered in pipi shells, scallop shells, and any sort of white shells we collected from the beach. When we first laid the shells on the path, they were whole. Eventually as we walked on them, they broke down into little pieces that crunched under our shoes whenever we walked on the path. The path has disappeared under a blanket of mud. The mud stopped its lavalike flow in the backyard of the flat section at the bottom of the hill.

My father and brother almost immediately begin the back-breaking job of cleaning up our property. Dad wants to get to work before the mud dries rock-hard.

The first thing Dad and Neville do is clear a pathway up to the house. Dad looks under the house to check the stumps and make sure it is safe to go in.

From the time of the slip until we move to our next home, there are always areas of clay where nothing will grow. The mud slip only came down behind our house.

Years later, along the end of our road, there is another slip. The lady who lives there manages to get out of her home, but runs back for her handbag. She is killed when her house collapses.

I start carrying a hidden guilt because I had been given a warning and had not acted on it. I start to think that it would have been my fault if we had all been killed.

I also have questions about the voice I heard. It was a well-spoken female voice, the voice of an older woman. Who was she? I am too young to have any answers. They will come with age.

CHAPTER 2

MUMMA, PLEASE DON’T GO

Another psychic incident occurred when I was eleven years old: I knew my mother was going to have an accident. I knew she was going to be hurt.

We lived on an island called Waiheke in the Hauraki Gulf. The city of Auckland was eleven miles by boat from our island home. The Maori name for the island was Te-Motu-Arai-Roa, meaning the Long Sheltering Island. The Maoris also called it Motu-nui or Great Land. We called it Waiheke. This name came from a stream at Onetangi, where seamen called in for fresh water. It means Cascading Waters.

My island, for I always thought of it as my island, was the fifth-largest island in the New Zealand archipelago.

Onetangi, where we lived, was a large bay that formed much of the north coast of Waiheke. Onetangi was the longest beach on the island, with the Pacific Ocean lapping its shores. The word Onetangi means Wailing Beach. The beach was called this after the Maori chief Hongi Heke killed most of the Maori inhabitants in a battle that was fought on Onetangi Beach.

My parents moved to Waiheke Island in 1946, before electricity was prevalent. Electricity