In the August issue of this magazine I wrote an article about a ghost I thought I met near the village of Acebuchal beyond Frigiliana. One evening shortly after its publication I came home from an unpleasant dinner party during which several friends accused me of being mad because I believed in the paranormal.
When I opened the front door of my house I was surprised by the smell of roses. It was the sort of fragrance you get from burning perfumed candles which I hadn´t done since Christmas, and I was not in the habit of dousing myself with after shave.

Unsettled I checked out every room to make sure I hadn´t been visited by a female cat burglar, but found no one, nor sign of any disturbance. Then the phone rang. ‘I am Doña Amaranta Lopez Montero,’ a deep throated Spanish voice said. ‘I am a clairvoyant, a medium of great talent, and I have just visited your house by means of Astral Projection.’
‘Oh...’ said I, somewhat perplexed.
‘You smell the roses no ? In your hallway, you smell the roses ?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted cautiously ‘That was me. I wore the scent deliberately. You have a lovely home and a beautiful grand piano. Next time I visit you I come in person, or we meet somewhere for coffee. ‘ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Coffee somewhere would be preferable, ‘ I suggested.
‘Good. When ? ‘
’Why would be more to the point, ‘ I ventured bravely, if a trifle rudely.
‘Why ? You ask why? Because you are psychic, you see spirits. I read your piece in that Insight Magazine and you have insight ! We must meet and talk. There are not that many of us in the world and we must stick together and exchange views and experiences. ‘
’Really ? ‘ I said. Then more to get rid of her than anything else I suggested we meet at a suitable café in Nerja the next morning.
‘Good,’ said she, ‘I see you Mañana at eleven.’
‘How will I know you ?’ I asked.
‘By your faculties of perception, ‘ she answered, and hung up.
The next morning she was waiting for me at the café, I knew it was her immediately because she wore a mauve turban, mauve lipstick, mauve nail polish, a long mauve dress with shoes and handbag to match.
She removed her dark glasses on seeing me, stared at me with large penetrating brown eyes and smiled a smile of perfect white teeth.
‘Your sign is Sagittarius but you are not fond of dogs,.’ she pronounced as I bent down to kiss her on both her powdery cheeks, as one does on meeting any woman in this friendly country. ‘Now tell me what you know about me , ‘ she added.
‘I know absolutely nothing about you, ‘ I said sitting down.
‘Yes you do. If you just say what comes into your head you will realize you do. ‘
’You´re a Capricorn, you have seven cats one of which has only got one eye, and you are very fond of Tiramisu.’ I said to please her. She had a plate of the pudding in front of her.
She smiled. ‘Not bad. I have eight cats, two of which have lost an eye each, which adds up to seven pairs, so seven cats is good. I am a Capricorn, and you should not stoop to such obvious deductions as to what I eat, you are too developed a psychic for that. ‘
’I´m not psychic at all, ‘ I protested.
‘Look into my eyes, ‘ she said ‘ And tell me the name of my mother and the age at which she died. Don´t think about it, just say what comes into your head. ‘
’Esperanza ? Seventy two ? ’ I suggested jokingly.
‘You see ! Absolutely correct ! ’
‘Just a minute. I have absolutely no proof that what I am guessing is true.’
‘You are right,’ she agreed.’ So a little more trust must come into our relationship.
I was not sure what she was hoping to gain from all this but suspected she was some sort of charlatan after money who could easily have sprayed a rose scented perfume through the letter box with a can of aerosol and the grand piano could be seen through one of the front windows.
‘ I am not a charlatan, and I do not want your money. ‘she said reaching across the table and squeezing my hand. ‘I am simply a very astute medium seeking to develop similar powers in those who have potential. ‘
’You’re a mind reader as well ?’ I stuttered, embarrassed that she had penetrated my mind.
‘Of course. I come from a long line of mind readers. My mother was a curandera and her mother before her. You who have lived up in the white pueblos should remember the little rag dolls that hung on sticks on the roofs of witches,: My mother had one of those.’
I remembered the dolls. They looked like medieval warnings of evil but actually signified the house of a healer, a man or woman who would cure shingles and other skin diseases by slapping you with bunches of herbs, or mix you a potion to alleviate stress.

Doña Amaranta then went on to tell me that since I had seen a ghost, the chances of me being clairvoyant were sufficient for her to bother spending some time in educating me in the art of telepathy, telekinesis, psychokinesis, psychometry, clairaudience, precognition, astral projection, auras and so on, and she handed me a small booklet translated in several languages entitled ‘How to Develop Your Psychic Potential’, told me to read it and experiment with whatever interested me most.
She did not have a broomstick, but when she left it was a swift departure from the café table and across the square and, as she disappeared, I had the brief impression that she was floating a few inches above the ground in her flat, mauve shoes.
Once home, which still had the scent of roses, I sat down to read the little booklet and got really interested in the possibility of astrally projecting myself to her house and filling it with some pungent smell just to get my own back.
‘Astral Projection, ´I read, ‘turns the potential psychic into Superman. The areas where the astral body may travel is known as the astral plane which, in simple terms, is a plane on another dimension, another world as real to us in our waking state as a dream, To begin with, a mood of total relaxation should be induced on yourself as with any other psychic experiment , then :
1. Lie down naked on a bed in a darkened room.
2. Close your eyes and imagine yourself rising horizontally out of your body to a height of about a metre.
3. When you feel that you have space all around and beneath you and that you are floating you will have entered your astral body. Achieving this state takes time and practice.
4. Slide your astral body horizontally above your real self and pivot it so that it is standing at the foot of your bed.
5. Turn it round, open your eyes and you will see your physical body lying full length on the bed. This is confirmation that you are now occupying your astral body.
6 . Having achieved this state you should prepare yourself for the return journey. This should be done in reverse stages, slowly, calmly, turning round with your back to your physical body, sensing lift off, floating over your physical body, and gradually easing yourself down into your physical body.

When you have achieved these six stages several times and are confident that you can return when you wish, you can start moving your astral body out of the room, our of the house and go wherever you please, through closed doors, through walls, through anything, for it is only your astral mind that is travelling. There is no danger to your astral body. You will not cut it on jagged pieces of wood, or tear it on a nail, but if you act too quickly you will unsettle your metabolism and a violent return is dangerous, causing physical and mental trauma, which should be avoided.
Amazing, I thought to myself and immediately went up to my room, pulled down the blinds, stripped off, lay down on the bed, closed my eyes and went through the various stages suggested.
It took me about an hour of concentration before I stood at the foot of my bed in my astral body looking down at myself. The shock was not so much that I had done it but how old I had got. There were wrinkles on certain parts of my anatomy that I had not realized existed, the beautiful sun tan I thought I possessed was rather patchy, and my hair was certainly a lot greyer and thinner than I believed.
However, there I was ready to leave for the big adventure. I went through the wall with no trouble at all, then through the floor to the hallway and straight out of the front door. I blushed with embarrassment on seeing a neighbour come down the street, since I was nude, but she didn´t see me and I realized I was a veritable phantom.
I thought about going to the Balcon, and as soon as I thought about it I was there, quick as a flash ! Strangely I did not find it that easy to walk, it was as though I was dragging my feet through mud. Looking down I realized that I was actually walking ankle deep through the cobblestones leading down to the statue of Alfonso XIII. It was dark, there were no people about at all.. I went up to the statue and tweaked its nose. Worried suddenly that I might not get back I stepped up on the round podium of the Balcon, stood in the middle of the marble star, closed my astral eyes and thought hard about being back in my room.

Presto ! I had lift off, I was in space for a second or two, then felt myself falling and landing softly on my familiar mattress. I opened my eyes. I was safely back home.
Encouraged by the fact that I had been so successful so quickly, I picked up Doña Amaranta´s little book again, flicked through the pages and stopped at the chapter on Auric Sight.
‘ The Aura’ I read, ‘ is a luminosity radiating from our bodies like an energy cloud which can be seen by psychics as a colourful emanation following the contours of a human being or animal . The colouring varies from light blue hues to yellows, dark greens, and dull reds. Pale blues are interpreted as the given power of healing. Pink for pure love and affection.
Red for desire and anger. Green for intellect. Yellows for jealousy and envy Browns and greys signify illness.
The instructions on how to see ones own aura was simple, all I had to do was stand in front of a full length mirror with a pale grey backdrop behind me and stare for as long as it took to see my reflected silhouette surrounded by a faint light.
I set up a full length mirror in the guest room where the walls were dove grey, stood and stared at my reflection and after a rather tedious half hour suddenly saw a definite mauve aura surrounding my head, my shoulders, my thighs and down to my ankles. As I lifted my arms and put them down again, the mauve hues followed the movements in cloud like ripples of pulsating violet. It was impressive.
The booklet said nothing about mauve or violet auras, but just then, as luck would have it, the phone rang and it was Doña Amaranta asking me how I was getting on. Excitedly I told her how I had astrally projected myself to the Balcon and back and asked her what a mauve aura signified.
‘Is the mauve aura bright and pulsating ? ‘ she asked.
‘Yes, ‘ I said, ‘Bright and violet.’
‘And is it the same colour as the mauves and violets that I wear ?’
‘Yes !’ I said, surprised that I hadn´t thought of it.
‘Haii,’ she said through a deep Spanish sigh that did not augur well.
‘ It is unlikely that you astrally projected yourself to the Balcon in such a short time, it takes years and years of practice to even get out of your physical body. As to that sort of mauve it signifies imagination, a great deal of imagination, the type of uncontrollable imagination that precedes lunacy. Maybe you should read the chapter on clairaudience.´ And she hung up.
I grabbed the booklet, turned to the section on clairaudience.
‘Clairaudience,’ I read, ‘is the clear hearing of sounds and voices which others cannot hear, through psychical perception and the subconscious.’
And the phone rang again.
It was my own voice talking to me.
‘Maybe, ‘ I heard myself telling myself, ‘ Maybe it´s time you went to see a psycho analyst.’