Psychic medium, 60, recalls terrifying first encounter with the spirit world

The prospect of a spiritual world wasn’t an unusual one for Ronda Robertson, having grown up in a funeral parlour, but her first supernatural vision was frightening, and an experience she’s sure not to forget anytime soon.

From a young age, Ronda, now 60, was familiar with death and the idea of the afterlife, as the Melbourne-based medium spent her childhood performing dance routines in a chapel at the front of her family’s funeral home and sneaking into the closet to dress up in outfits that would soon be worn by the deceased.

However, despite being around dead bodies and grieving families from an early age, it wasn’t until she was 19 years old that she realised she had a gift for communicating with the deceased and, although it came as a shock at first, it’s something she says she’s learned to embrace.

Now Ronda has opened up to Starts at 60 about what she describes as the “big turning point” in her life, which came when she was driving home late one night after work.

“I was driving and all of a sudden I saw this guy in the backseat of my car,” she said. “My first thought was I’ll be attacked, I’ll be raped. I could see him sitting there and I could feel it at the same time.

“I thought sh**t do I pull over? Do I drive to the police station? In the end I thought I will fight, so I stopped the car. I turned around slowly to have a look in the backseat and there was no one there. I got out the car, I still didn’t believe it, I kept looking in the back, but there was nothing there.”

Though her mother didn’t think much of it, Ronda knew the experience was something more than just an odd occurrence. And the next day, it all started to make sense.

“My friend rang me and said ‘My father died last night, they found him in the backseat of a car, he had a heart attack’,” Ronda explained. “I asked her what time and she said 10.30 at night. It was the same time I had the vision.”

For years though Ronda focused on other aspects of her life, she worked as a singer, performing with the likes of Paul Kelly, and even enjoyed a career as a nurse, all while raising her own daughter. Then, when she was in her early-30s, she experienced another spiritual moment.

She was living in a shared house at the time and was searching for a new room mate. One day she received a call from someone claiming to be interested in renting the room when something strange occurred.

“When I answered the call he said ‘I’m ringing about the room’ or something like that, all of a sudden I could see my grandfather, he entered my aura and I just said [to the man on the phone] ‘it’s taken’. My hand went up and I put the receiver down slowly. We were still looking for someone to take the room at the time.”

Ronda wasn’t sure why her grandfather had encouraged her to hang up the phone or what it all meant, until weeks later when they received a call from a homicide detective. The police believed Ronda had been on the phone to Ashley Mervyn Coulston – the man responsible for the deaths of three young people who were at the time also looking for a new roommate.

It turned out they too had published an ad in the same newspaper. Ronda said still to this day she believes it could of been them who were targeted and killed if it wasn’t for her grandfather’s message.

It’s these moments that Ronda believes have helped lead her down the path of mediumship. After venturing down many career paths, she now does platform mediumship in churches across Melbourne.

She has been able to connect people to their loved ones and give them the guidance and support needed to carry on and embrace life. One of the most touching experiences was when she felt the presence of a young boy and heard the words ‘will you remember me?’.

“My daughter was home at the time and she was yelling out to me about something, but I could still hear him,” she said. “I heard his name. The next day I got up on platform and told them I had a boy in spirit come to me. When I looked over there was a couple crying, they had lost their son.”

Ronda recognises it’s a big responsibility to share messages between sprits and their loved ones on earth, and she has now compiled many of her experiences into a book titled Mystical which is due for release later this month.

“I am so excited to share these stories to enlighten and inform,” Ronda said. “I felt it was important before leaving this world for the next that I gave my experiences over to others so that they could hopefully learn from them.

“I hope it stirs up some thought: maybe that was part of my journey here so that others can know we are part of something greater, all of us intrinsically made of the same fabric. The potential we all share and how precious the gift of life is.”