Once upon a time if you wanted to boost your chances of selling a house, or cheer up the one you’d just moved into, then you’d simply give the place a lick of paint and buy a few pot plants.
Today, things have changed. Many home owners are taking a far more spiritual approach by calling in a house healer to cleanse it of negative energy.
Some estate agents, particularly in upmarket areas such as the Cotswolds, even have healers on their books that they recommend to clients.
Until I bought my house in Brighton in 2019, moving to the south coast after decades of living in London, I’d have dismissed such practices as new age hokum aimed at ditzy middle-class women with more money than sense.
I fell in love with my house, a Victorian villa, on first sight and was thrilled when my offer was accepted. Yet, within days of moving in, a dark gloom descended. Normally highly-efficient and organised, I couldn’t bear to unpack my things and I didn’t understand why. I felt anxious and restless but dismissed it as merely the stress of moving. Then things got even stranger.
Possessions started to go missing almost every day. My most expensive earrings, shoes, perfume and my favourite coffee mug just vanished, even though I knew exactly where I’d left them. A file of medical notes I had assembled and left on my kitchen table one evening, ready for my hospital appointment the next day, disappeared.
I turned the house upside down, and rummaged through the bins in case I had absent-mindedly chucked the folder out. Nothing.
It was an incident involving a sock that made me realise something peculiar was happening in my new home.
Claudia Connell turned to home healer Emma Loveheart to rid the property of negative energy
Despite never having believed in anything vaguely supernatural, I couldn’t escape this feeling that something or someone wanted me gone
While I was carrying a pile of dirty laundry downstairs to be washed I dropped a white sock on the stairs. I decided to carry on to the kitchen, deposit the pile and then return for the sock – but when I went to retrieve it, it wasn’t there. I had seen it clear as day on the middle step seconds earlier, where on earth could it have gone?
If this was just a case of me suddenly becoming the world’s most forgetful and chaotic person, wouldn’t the missing things eventually turn up? They never did.
Endless things going missing, while incredibly frustrating, was not exactly horror movie stuff, and it left me feeling bewildered rather than frightened. But the fright level was about to be dramatically dialled up.
After I’d been in the house a few months, something on the wall in the hallway caught my eye. Upon closer inspection I saw a series of hearts that looked as though they had been drawn with black pen had appeared overnight. I live alone and nobody else could have possibly done it.
There was simply no question that they’d been there all along. I’d scrubbed every surface of the house when I moved in. I’d got down on my hands and knees to clean skirting boards, I’d been on stepladders to dust picture rails, and those hearts were not there. I went from feeling bewildered to freaked out.
Despite never having believed in anything vaguely supernatural, I couldn’t escape this feeling that something or someone wanted me gone. By this stage, sick with nerves, I decided it simply wasn’t worth the stress – I’d put the house back on the market and leave. However, after making enquiries with estate agents, I learnt that wouldn’t be possible. It was mortgaged and there are strict rules about reselling properties in the first six months.
Instead, I went on holiday to Portugal for a week to escape the crushing feeling of being unsafe in my own home. When I returned things seemed calmer. Perhaps all I needed was a time away, some sunshine and a few nights of good sleep? Then came the red paintbrush incident.
I had been working in London and arrived home late at night. As soon as I put the key in the door, something felt ‘off’. You hear talk of being able to cut an atmosphere with a knife and that’s exactly how it was.
Emma said the property held a mass of negative vortexes that were sucking the positive energy out of the home
I entered my kitchen, jumping out of my skin when I saw a paintbrush dipped in blood red paint on my dining table. It wasn’t my brush and there was no red paint in the house.
In sheer panic I called an out-of-hours locksmith and got him to change all the locks. Somebody had to be letting themselves in. I paid him and then checked into a hotel for the night.
Yet the shiny new locks on doors and windows didn’t change anything. During the night I’d hear hammering on my front door but there was never anyone there. Next, puddles of water started to appear all over the house: on my bedroom dressing table, on top of the TV unit, in the hallway by the front door. There were no leaks and nothing was being spilled. I’d mop the liquid up before I went to bed and new pools would be there in the morning, this time in a slightly different location.
Following months of these incidents, I found myself doing something that, a year earlier, I’d have scoffed at: I started researching house healers, eventually stumbling upon Emma Loveheart’s website.
Emma looked so reassuringly normal in her pictures – and she didn’t speak in woo-woo language.
After lengthy phone chats she agreed to ‘heal’ my house.
Remotely, she tuned into the energy of my home and informed me the negativity was off the scale – you’re telling me!
The good news was that I didn’t have a poltergeist or ghost, but I did have an ‘entity’ living there. She described it as a ‘mischievous sprite.’
The sprite didn’t want to hurt me but was unhappy that someone had moved into the house and was making changes (the previous residents had lived there over 50 years).
Emma was able to connect with it and persuade it to move on and leave me be.
Seven years on, I realise how mad it still sounds, but no madder than disappearing socks, red paintbrushes and mysterious pools of water.
Emma also told me that the property held a mass of negative vortexes that were sucking the positive energy out of my home. She worked remotely to heal my house, as well as banish the sprite and restore positive energy.
Two weeks later, it felt like a different place. I was happy, my stomach didn’t lurch when I put the key in my front door and all the weird events ceased.
Friends told me that, although they didn’t want to say anything, they’d previously felt uncomfortable in my house and couldn’t wait to leave – now it felt warm and welcoming.
Today, Emma is still working as a healer and is busier than ever, having healed over 1,000 homes. When I catch up with her, she tells me that 90 per cent of her clients are women and many don’t tell their husbands they are contacting her. Yet, once her healing work is done, these women report that their husbands become different people. They’re nicer to be around, better tempered and suddenly prepared to take on all the odd jobs they’d been putting off.
Emma recently worked with a client whose beautiful, interior-designed house in a highly sought-after area just wasn’t selling leaving estate agents at a loss.
It was what healers refer to as a ‘divorce house’. The inhabitants had been through a bitter break-up and left an imprint of negative energy that was being sensed by others. If such houses aren’t healed, then very often the pattern of divorce among owners continues. Once Emma healed the home it sold instantly for over the asking price.
Emma is inundated with letters and emails from people who have experienced similar things in their houses. Like me, they are mostly previously sceptical professionals who can’t put their finger on what is ‘wrong’ with the vibe in their home.
Emma says: ‘Nearly every enquiry starts with “I know it sounds mad but . . .” I tell people that it’s OK to feel what they feel. Their instinct told them to contact me because something’s not right in their home and that’s reason enough, they shouldn’t need to justify it further.
‘We don’t have this sixth sense for no reason. We need to trust it,’ she adds. ‘Nobody who has ever come to me for a healing has ever regretted it.’
And that includes me.
Emma can be contacted at homehealer.co.uk
