Who will you call?

LIKE the child in the hit film Sixth Sense, Trevor Weller claims he used to “see dead people” when he was growing up. From the headless rail worker who wandered along the railway line in Darlington searching for his head, to ghostly armies of soldiers marching across the fields behind the Cummins factory, he was constantly haunted by spirits.

But, being brought up on Firthmoor, in Darlington, he says he started to deny what he was seeing, eventually managing to block them out, fearing that his peers would think him “soft”.

“When I was growing up I could sense things around me and see things,” says Trevor, who now lives in Trimdon Station, County Durham.

“When I met my wife, Anne, she asked me to go along to a psychic fair with her. I had grown up in Firthmoor and wasn’t into things like that – I had blocked it all out. But I decided to go along anyway.”

At the fair, Trevor met a man who changed his life. “I thought it was a lot of rubbish, but this guy just caught my eye. There was something about him, so I went over and this guy gave me a psychic reading which was amazing.

He was not just giving me people’s names, he was practically giving me their addresses.

“He said to me to go out, get yourself some tarot cards, get developed (as a medium).”

Trevor left the fair, not knowing what to think, but he couldn’t forget the man he had met. A few weeks later he went along to the same fair, in another town.

“It was the same group, so I went along to pick this guy’s brains some more. When we turned up all the readers were the same, all the organisers were the same, but no one had a clue who had done this reading. No one knew him or recognised him when I described him, which was really strange. To this day I don’t know who he is – but he inspired me to go ahead and start developing myself as a psychic.”

Now Trevor runs a business, Cleveland Paranormal Investigators, which offers “Most Haunted”-style spiritual investigations, house cleansings, psychic fairs and tarot parties.

Trevor wears a fleece jacket with the company logo on it – which is similar to that of the Ghostbusters film. When his phone rings, it is with a Ghostbusters’ ringtone.

Two years ago, he and his wife set up a shop in the Parkway Centre, Coulby Newham, near Middlesbrough, selling crystals, incense and other spiritual items, and they also offered tarot readings. They moved the shop to Redcar, east Cleveland, about 18 months ago.

He says: “That is where the paranormal side came in. People started asking us to do mediumship at spiritual fairs, so we decided to set up a company to deal with that side of things.

“Then we got people phoning us up at midnight, saying the kids couldn’t sleep and no one could settle because of something in their house, and they’d ask us to go and investigate.”

TREVOR offers investigations of private houses and spiritual clearings if necessary – but he doesn’t have proton packs or particle accelerators to capture rogue spirits like the Ghostbusters. Instead, he investigates using a camera, electro-magnetic field readings, a thermometer for temperature readings, and incense for “cleansing” the house.

He recalls one incident where an unquiet spirit was causing problems in a family home.

“They called us out because the kids weren’t settling and they were sensing and hearing things. The team went in, took pictures and readings, and I went in and was picking things up on a spiritual level.

“There was a male malevolent spirit there who wanted to cause trouble, and he thrived off the stress and anxiety he was causing in the house. The more he did it, the more negativity built up and he was feeding on that.

“We used salt water, incense and crystals to drive him out. We forced him further and further up in the house because he was keeping as far away from us as possible.

“It takes three or four days for things to calm down, but the kids were much happier afterwards, and the atmosphere of the whole house improved, including the ill health and stress.”

There are two types of spiritual disturbances in homes, explains Trevor. The first is residual haunting, where events from history are replayed.

“We can’t do much about that, it’s just one of those things,” says Trevor. “But the second type, visitations, are something different.

That is active haunting. We will carry out cleansings of the house, which a priest would call an exorcism. We will let the people know who is there, and why they are there, and let the homeowner decide whether they want us to rid the house of the spirit or not.”

But Trevor doesn’t charge through the nose for this service. “I don’t want to make money out of that kind of thing,” he says. “So, we just ask for our costs to be covered.”

The main thrust of the business is in paranormal investigations of public haunted sites – similar to the investigations in hit cable TV show Most Haunted. He is also organising events next month at the North-East Aircraft Museum, in Sunderland, and the Heugh Gun Battery, in Hartlepool, in April.

At the end of last year, he worked with Middlesbrough Council and children at the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum to carry out an investigation there, teaching children history through the paranormal.

He says: “When we do investigations with adults we have table tipping, glass moving, ouija boards, and so on, but obviously we can’t do seances with children, so we let them use the equipment and they took loads of pictures and took readings. They were fascinated.”

For now, Trevor is concentrating on building up the business and also doing a course in native US beliefs. His “spirit guide” – who puts him in touch with spirits on the other side – is the Squaw of a native American chief. Even as a child he was drawn to that culture and hopes that by finding out more about them he can improve his psychic abilities.

However, he admits he does still have to block himself from seeing spirits all the time.

For more information, go to clevelandpara normalinvestigators.co.uk