A woman who claims she has "seen spirits" for almost her whole life left her job to speak to the dead.
Spiritual Rita Haworth was just nine-years-old when she felt her first spirit while her parents went out for the night and her aunt was babysitting.
Spookily, later that night her mum and dad were in a car crash near the family home in Bolton and the young girl claims to have heard a loud bang.
Rita then apparently began getting regular visions and started talking to the dead, the M.E.N reports.
While she was in her 20s, she went to numerous medium groups before going on to train with some well-known mediums around the globe.
The 63-year-old said: “I’ve given copious amounts of readings to people over the years.
"In my earlier years, I did see things just randomly. But now I’m fully developed, I’ve learnt how to control it.
“I have specific times when I work; I have a spiritual room in my house where I work from. It’s like a radio.
When I’m ready to work, I have a ritual I go through and then I open up to the spirits.
"Then I close down, because I have to live in the real world. If I left myself open, I would get messages from everyone trying to get in contact with me.”
Rita, a former social politics lecturer at the University of Salford, now lives in Ladybridge, Bolton, and has taught a masters course at the University of Manchester.
But she left that life four years ago to focus on speaking to the dead and her spiritual work full-time.
On one occasion, the grandmother-of-two claimed to see the spirit of her best friend in her bedroom.
She said: “When I was 17, I went to a catering fair in London. When I came back that evening, my mum said, ‘Have you seen this in the paper?’
“When I looked, my best friend from school and her boyfriend had been in an accident on a motorbike. He died straight away at 17 and she died a few days later.
“A couple of weeks after that, I went to bed and I started seeing flashing lights around the room. One materialised and it was my friend. I could see her outline stood there.
“We had a conversation and she told me I was going to go on and help thousands of people.
At the time I was only 16 and I was a bit sceptical. I thought, ‘Am I seeing things? How can I help people?’ I could hardly help myself at that age.”
To get in touch with troubled spirits the Bolton woman has used Ouija boards in the past.
She explained: “We made a makeshift ouija board and I got contact pretty quickly from a guy called Bill in the spirit world.
"The glass was whizzing about all over the place; he was being aggressive while trying to communicate.
“I said a prayer for him to move on because he seemed to be stuck. The atmosphere felt lighter afterwards. A few years later, I was speaking to someone about it.
"They said they knew the home and a man called Bill lived there. He shot himself inside the barn. I got confirmation of exactly who he was and what he had done.”
Rita says she has also been able to predict futures through psychic readings. The mum-of-one remembers a time she met a young girl.
"She wanted to be a police officer and she had tried twice to get into the police force," Rita added.
"She said to me, 'Please tell me it will be third time lucky'. I did a sitting for her and I told her she would get into the police force, but she would only stay 10 years.
"She asked why, and I pretended I wasn't sure. I didn't tell her because it wasn't good. Some years later, my sister bumped into the same lady.
"She asked how she was doing, she was shopping at the time. She told my sister she was buying some pyjamas because she was going into a hospice; she was dying. I could see that she only had a short time."
Rita has since released a book – Ambassador For Spirit – revealing the heartbreak and trials she has faced in her life while taking the reader through her spiritualism journey.
