| Posted: November 08, 2013
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Psychic medium Lucy Bilton believes she has a gift that can bring hope to families with missing relatives. Debbie Hall meets the Cottingham woman who is attempting to solve murder mysteries in Florida and Tenerife.
You won’t find psychic medium Lucy Bilton sporting a headscarf, hoop earrings and staring into a crystal ball. What you will find is a gently spoken, smartly dressed individual wearing a hairstyle that’s a definite nod to the 1940s, bright red lipstick and a pair of skyscraper heels in a matching shade of scarlet.
“I think people think I have a crystal ball or that I sit at home surrounded by wind chimes, but it’s not like that at all,” said Lucy, 31, who lives in Cottingham.
Lucy’s ability to hear messages “from the other side” was something that became apparent when she was very young. “When I was very small I didn’t realise that the people I saw around me weren’t just normal people – but my mother and father did. I was talking about people who used to live in the house, relatives I had never known who had passed. My parents let me talk about them but didn’t make a big thing of it.
“I feel it’s more of a gift than anything. My grandmother on my mum’s side had it as well, apparently, and it scared her to death. She wouldn’t have anything to do with it and wouldn’t talk about it at all.”
During her schooldays, Lucy suppressed the voices. “I didn’t want to be seen as any different to anyone else,” she said. When she eventually “came out” about her psychic abilities, it caused mixed reactions.
Lucy said: “Some people I had been friends with for many years reacted badly; other people really surprised me and said, good on you. My mum is fine talking about it, in fact she was the one who came up with the Psychic In Stilettos tag, which I use on Facebook and when I give talks. I wear stilettos all the time because I am very short. I never wear flat shoes. I walk like a duck in them.
“My dad doesn’t really say anything about me being a psychic medium, but he does say he is proud of me. My brother jokes about it, but even he says he is proud of me.”
“All the work I do is for free – this makes me a very poor psychic medium – but I have never been able to bring myself to charge anyone, especially as they are more often than not grieving. I have never wanted to make money out of what I do, although I don’t hold it against any genuine psychic mediums that do and need to make a living. I just can’t bring myself to do it.
“I used to do a lot of readings but have found my skills seem to work better on other things. At the moment I am working with a lady in Florida and the local police there on finding a missing woman and her murderer. The land where I believe her to be is owned by the military but because of what I have given the police, they have managed to get permission to search it. I really think they will find her.
“Another case I am still investigating I came upon by chance. I was asked to be a guest psychic medium for an event in Stoke, and a family came to see me. As soon as they sat down, I knew their son had been murdered, although his death was recorded as accidental.”
The body of Jordan Walchester was found on Playa de las Americas beach, Tenerife, in September 2010. His death was recorded as by drowning but a wound on the back of his head led his family to believe he may have been attacked. The Spanish police report that Jordan, 24, had banged his head on rocks, was dismissed by a British coroner’s court earlier this year, where the cause of death was deemed “unascertained”. There was not enough evidence, however, to clarify whether Jordan was attacked, drowned or had fallen. His parents, Karen and Ivan, were resigned to the fact they may never know what had happened to Jordan when they met Lucy, appearing as a guest with a Stoke group of paranormal investigators.
Lucy said: “As soon as this family came into the room, I thought, their son has been murdered. In the few days beforehand, anywhere where there was food, I kept being drawn to the snack displays and Twiglets. I couldn’t understand it but a voice kept saying to me, ‘tell them Twiglets’.
“I had to tell this family, ‘the first thing he wants me to say to you is Twiglets’, and it made the mother, Karen, emotional. “She said, if someone mentioned Twiglets, she would know it was her son because he was obsessed by them, apparently.
“I keep in touch with the family, they are lovely people and they are struggling to cope with the loss of their son. I am gradually getting more things coming through about what happened in Tenerife. It’s somewhere I have never been but I am picking up some things about the person I believed killed Jordan. He didn’t do it on purpose, he was trying to rob him. Next year, I am hoping to have got enough funds together to go to Tenerife, I believe I can find where this man lives.”
Lucy said: “Jordan wants his family to leave it and get on with their lives, but Karen has said she wants to find out what happened to him, and I am a bit torn, because now I have started looking into it, I can’t stop.”
Karen told the Mail that there had been lots of complications surrounding her son’s death, including a faked Spanish post mortem, conflicting reports about how much water was in his body and how he came by his head wound. “I have a sworn statement from a Home Office pathologist that the Spanish police did not carry out the tests they said they had done,” said Karen. “Jordan’s body was embalmed, which also made it more difficult to determine the cause of death.”
Karen said she and her husband had been to see a number of mediums with varying success. “When friends of my husband, the Stoke on Trent Ghost Hunters, said Lucy was coming to visit and would we like a reading, we thought we would go along.
“As soon as she saw us, Lucy said Jordan was with my brother, who died when he was 38 of a brain haemorrhage, and she told us his name. She said Jordan would like to kiss me on my head, it was the last thing he did before I dropped him off for his flight and only he and I knew about that.
“When she said about the Twiglets, I just knew it was Jordan. There was no way Lucy could have known any of these things, we had never seen her before.”
Asked what she felt was to be gained by visiting mediums, Karen said: “It is a comfort to know Jordan is out there somewhere and that he is in contact with us, and we will see him again. I feel sorry for the number of people who lose a child abroad. It has been absolutely devastating for us and it has nearly killed Jordan’s grandparents.”
Lucy, who is possibly being lined up to host a psychic TV show in the US, said being a psychic medium used a lot of energy. “Some of the people who are sending me messages are really persistent, but I have learned to shut it down.
“I will continue to do readings for people if they really want me to, but I would rather focus my attention on cases such as Jordan’s death, and missing persons. That’s where I really see myself going.
“There will always be those people who say you are a fraud and that they don’t believe you. I think that’s fine, and I think every psychic medium gets that. I can accept it because I know I have helped people.”
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