From ghosts to visions: ‘How my traumatic past triggered my psychic abilities’

She’s built up one of the biggest networks of psychic readers in the southern hemisphere, but Australian woman Rose Smith has claimed she’s overcome some very personal and traumatic hurdles to finally embrace her own psychic abilities over the years.

The 60-year-old says she first realised she had the ability to predict not only the future, but also see past events, as a young child. She says those abilities developed as she got older to the point she began feeling others’ pain, seeing ghosts and even sensing when someone is close to death.

And now, opening up in an exclusive chat with Starts at 60, she has revealed how she finally came to terms with her unique life following a difficult past – and how visions can sometimes take over her mind to the point she can be left in agony when tapping into someone else’s pain.

“When I was a child I had a very abused childhood, very neglected. I’m not saying that to get sympathy, but the point is when you’re in a dangerous environment, you can get psychic real quick,” she claimed. “Anybody who’s involved in danger can often get a sixth sense. It’s because of the heightened state of awareness of your emotions. It opens you up to something greater than yourself.”

She added: “As a child I had it, but as a teenager I sort of turned away from it. But still in dangerous situations I’d still listen to it.” In fact, Rose claimed it was when she hit her twenties that her abilities really started to step up.

“When I was about 21 I started to get these dreams and visions, I didn’t really understand what was happening. It was a spiritual breakthrough but could have been misinterpreted as a breakdown,” she admitted. “I just didn’t understand initially. I knew I wasn’t imagining it…. Everything I was getting was correct.”

While Rose largely got the visions in the form of dreams before her twenties, she said while that still happens regularly, it changed from there and she can now get visions without warning in everyday life. In fact, some can be so powerful they completely take over her mind – playing almost like a movie in front of her eyes.

“I had to learn to trust it, it took me until I was 27 when I was remembering past lives and places I’ve never been before, I knew then what was happening,” she recalled. “It can be past, present or future.”

Rose claimed the dreams can sometimes be in more of a symbolic language, with one example being a recurring dream she had before starting her psychic network business Absolute Soul Secrets. In 2000, Rose recalled continuously dreaming of “Michael the Archangel writing the name ‘Soul Secrets’ in white light on my forehead.” It took her several months to connect the dots, and when she finally decided to launch the business, the dreams stopped.

As the years have gone by since her twenties, Rose said she’s taught herself how to turn her psychic abilities on and off. However, she claimed since going through menopause a few years ago, she’s lost some of that control and now can’t always predict it – which can be difficult to handle, especially when it causes her to feel another’s pain.

“Just recently I was doing a livestream reading on Facebook. People leave a word in the comment box with their name and I can read for them,” she explained. “Somebody had put something on about a health condition and I suddenly felt it myself. It was awful. It was in my abdomen and it took my breath away on the livestream, like a kick in the guts. Another time my arm was burning like crazy and the woman had some nerve damage and it felt like burning to her, so I felt what she was feeling.”

Rose has previously revealed while predicting someone’s death is rare, she can sometimes get the feeling they’re about to die when she sees a vision of the Grim Reaper for a few days. However, while she usually tries to warn them, she’s never managed to stop someone’s death.

And while it can be a controversial topic, Rose has also previously claimed she’s seen ghosts – with her first alleged encounter sticking in her mind to this day. Writing on her own blog, she explained she was travelling north of Deniliquin, NSW, when she was around 20 years old with her boyfriend – who would later become her husband.

All of a sudden, she claimed they both began feeling an odd sensation, almost like the hairs on the back of their neck were standing up. Confused, she said she looked out her window in the passenger seat of the car and “received a huge fright as an Aboriginal man just ‘appeared’ from nowhere”. She recalled: “I heard inside my head ‘You have no respect for the land’. He promptly disappeared, taking his anger with him.” Rose claimed she later found out there had been a massacre of local Aboriginals around 150 years ago in the area.

Psychic abilities can be hard for many people to understand or even believe – something Rose insisted she’s more than aware of. However, she hopes sharing her own story will help bust the myths to some extent.

“The more educated and the more intelligent you are, the harder it is to understand, because you’ve got these preconceived ideas and the programming and the thinking. I’ve been counselling and teaching ethics at university as a part-time tutor and it wasn’t my plan for my life, so here we are,” she said. “Nothing polarises people like psychic readings, but bottom line is that it’s an important part of me and so I felt I had to honour it.”

See more of Rose’s work, and that of the more than 80 clairvoyants, mediums, astrologers, crystal ball scryers, dream interpreters, tarot card readers and spiritual healers she engages the services of on her site Absolute Soul Secrets here.