THEO PANAYIDES meets a psychic although she is able to offer no insights for what to expect in 2012
I suspect it’s the contrast that shocks me. I’m sitting in a big house in a well-heeled suburb of Limassol, talking to 75-year-old Joan Bunyan. It’s normally a quiet street, but today we’re talking over the racket of the Public Works Department fixing the asphalt. They come fairly often, says Joan, but only do a small section each time, so it’s over quite quickly. The house is cosy. There are Christmas decorations on the walls. The tablecloth on the dining-room table has a black-and-white African design. Then suddenly we’re contacting the spirit of my dead grandfather.
The suddenness is shocking too – because this isn’t a séance. We don’t hold hands, or draw the curtains. I didn’t even know this was going to happen – though Joan is a psychic, and we’ve been talking (partly) about spiritual things. I’d just been asking whether she’s a medium as well, and she’d replied that yes, she can “connect” if that’s what the client wants.
“If somebody comes to me – ” she says, then breaks off: “All right, let’s do an example now. Who have you got on the other side?”
Who, me?
She nods. “Somebody on the other side of the veil.”
Really? She seriously intends to talk to a dead person? Just like that? In this big suburban house, with the Christmas decorations on the walls? ‘Well,’ I stammer, ‘my grandfather passed away some years ago…’
“Well all right, shall we contact him? All I need is his first name. Would you like to contact him? It’s up to you. I never force anybody into anything.”
But… what’s going to happen?
“Well, you know, you’ve got free will here – God gives you free will – and you’ve got free will on the other side. If he chooses to come, fine. If he doesn’t choose, well, I’ll tell you. Anyway, if he comes you can ask any question, but the entity that connects to me – I’m a very strict medium – has to tell me something about himself that only you know, because I’m seeing you for the first time and I don’t know your grandfather. But anyway, it’s up to you.”
I hesitate. This all sounds very strange.
“You don’t need to. If you feel apprehensive that’s fine, don’t worry.”
No, let’s do it, I reply, suddenly deciding to go for it. I give Joan my grandfather’s first name, and she nods. Her eyes close; her face goes slack. For about 30 seconds she stays in this position – my heart is thumping, unsure what to expect – then she smiles, contact having apparently been made.
“OK. He said he was a very kind person, everybody knew him as a kind person. But he said sometimes he was somewhat belligerent. Would that describe him?”
Um … I suppose so.
“OK. Is there anything you’d like to ask him?”
Well, just – you know, how he’s feeling.
She nods again. The eyes close, the face goes slack. Another 25 seconds. “He’s telling me that he’s very proud of you, of what you have become or what you’ve done in your life. And he said you’ve exceeded all expectations, even of your own family. Is that correct?”
Well … I don’t really know, I reply, trying to sound suitably modest. She laughs; she does this often, a high-pitched tinkling laugh. “Anyway, that’s what he’s saying to me,” she adds, and does another of her frequent tics – a little ‘pfft’ sound, the aural equivalent of a shrug. It seems odd to hear someone speak so casually of such weighty matters, then again Joan seems to operate in a sphere where the usual human fears and obsessions mean nothing. This, after all, is a woman who claims to know when she’s going to die – “I know when my demise will be,” as she puts it – and insists she feels no pressure as a result. It’s easy to imagine her reacting to that information with a shrug and a ‘pfft’ sound.
To be fair, she’s not primarily a medium. Her speciality is “angelic readings”, in which she asks her guardian angel a question on behalf of a client, and receives advice on what the client should do. “I never add anything to what I hear,” she explains, “so it’s not coming from me”. She was quite popular in her native South Africa, where people often came to her with problems. “I used to mentally think to myself a question, whatever they needed to know, and I used to get an immediate answer”.
What kind of answer? Like warning them not to do this or that?
“Oh no,” she laughs, “I never give freaky messages!” It was never ‘don’t go there, something will happen’. But, for instance, a client might come asking for advice about a troublesome daughter – and the angels might suggest that the girl “do music”, go into a music shop and choose her own instrument to play, “and that made a whole difference to her life, she became easier to manage and more productive”.
“Angels are all around us,” insists Joan earnestly. “God has nominated a guardian angel to each and every human being to help them during their lives. Whether they accept the help, or ask for help from their guardian angel, is up to them. I ask, and I get answers”. She even recalls asking for help during exams, when she was a child in Lower Houghton, near Johannesburg – not the whole exam but perhaps at the end, going through the questions she’d left out. “What’s the answer?” she’d mentally ask, and the answer would arrive angelically. She laughs: “Never told anybody that before!”
There was nothing ‘freaky’ about her childhood, as the only child of a newspaperman and a dress designer. “I had a wonderful life, and two wonderful parents who sent me to the best schools in Johannesburg. I always had the best of everything”. Early on, however, “I found when I was quite young that I was able to, ummm, sometimes – not always, but sometimes – know what was going to happen in the future”.
Call them premonitions, the first instance coming when she was six years old. Joan had hurt her finger, and insisted she had to go to hospital. Her mum bandaged the cut, and tried to dissuade her – but little Joan was adamant. After a few days of pestering, Mum duly took her to the children’s hospital, at that time full of polio victims. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, said Mother, coming here with a sore finger when all these other children are so sick? Joan’s turn came, Mum waiting outside – and “my mother says she nearly fainted,” recalls Joan, “because they rushed out and told her to sign this form and they’d operate immediately! Because it was blood poisoning, and if it went to my heart I’d be dead!” Even now, one index finger is thicker than the other, the result of two operations and a month in the children’s ward.
Hardly conclusive evidence, a sceptic might protest – and it’s true. You can’t ‘prove’ what Joan Bunyan says. You have to take her at her word, or else dismiss her as a charlatan (I suspect she doesn’t care either way). One thing to note is that she hasn’t made her living through her readings. Most of her years in South Africa were spent working alongside her husband James, a building contractor – she “ran the office side” – whom she married at 24 and stayed married to for 47 years, till his death (they have two daughters, one in England, the other in Cyprus). That marriage was her rock, possibly the most important thing that’s happened in her life.
“I’ve had a wonderful life,” Joan Bunyan tells me, unprompted. And later: “I think my life has been amazing”. And again: “My life has been fantastic, that’s all I can say”. Elementary psychology suggests that when a person insists so strongly on something, it’s usually because the opposite is true – but Joan never mentions any lows in her life, except one: James’ death four years ago, in Cyprus (they moved here in 2003). He’d been
frail, having undergone a triple bypass, but his death was still a massive loss. “I was left behind,” she admits. “I was left behind, lonely, you know?”
She has her daughters, I point out, trying to cheer her up.
“Yeah I know, but what I am trying to say is that when you’re with somebody constantly, every day for 47 years, and for 47 years you’ve worked together, lived together, did everything together… and now, there you are”. She shakes her head. “I felt down, I must be quite honest. I felt down. And I prayed, and I asked mentally ‘why am I here, what must I do now?’, you know? And I was told that I should start writing.”
That’s how her books began – dozens of them, some no bigger than pamphlets, “written by Joan Bunyan under divine inspiration by the Spirit of Truth” as she puts it. They have titles like ‘The Amalgamation of Universal Ideas and Programmes for Posterity’, and they “come to me mentally,” she says: “I haven’t written [them]. I just typed”. How does it work? “I get a message that, um, now’s the time,” she explains. “And I go sit at the computer, and I start typing. Whatever comes into my mind, I type. I never read it, I just type it”. Then she relaxes, has a cup of coffee, and goes through what she’s written – not to change anything, just to add commas and correct typos. If nothing else, the process is therapeutic: once she started writing, after her husband’s death, “I felt much better”.
What are the books about? The gist of it, she says, is that we’re now in the seventh millennium (Moses having taken down the Ten Commandments 6,000 years ago), and seven is a “mystical number” so “this is a wake-up call for humanity to try and become better”. The thrust is apocalyptic, underlain with thoughts of the Second Coming (“I’m sure you’ve read the Bible. Have you read Revelations?”). It all seems quite vague, I point out. Can’t she be more specific? After all, a millennium is a long time. “It’s only 1,000 years,” she replies incontrovertibly.
One thing’s for sure: my main aim in meeting Joan Bunyan – to see if she could offer some specific prediction for 2012 – was a total bust. “I don’t predict, I must be quite honest,” she admits apologetically; “I’m just an ordinary person like you”. Can she even say if the future is set in stone, or whether we can change it? “Oh I don’t know. I can’t give an answer to a complex question like that,” she demurs. “I always live the best life I can, you know? What is important for me is that every morning I say the Ten Commandments to myself, so that I don’t forget them during the day.” She’s not even sure who came up with the whole 2012, end-of-the-world business. The Mayans, I point out. “The Mayans. Oh, right…”
Still, I don’t regret meeting Joan. It’s not every day that one can go behind the doors of a big house in a well-heeled suburb of Limassol and contact spirits, or talk about angels – or even think back to 1960, when she and James went on their honeymoon. It was Joan’s first time outside South Africa. They got on a small plane – only about 12 passengers – and travelled for six and a half weeks. They went everywhere: England, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, Africa. When they passed Victoria Falls, the plane flew low so that passengers could take pictures. In Spain, Joan and James saw a bullfight. In Portugal it was fiesta time, and people were dancing in the streets. “We were so happy,” she recalls. “And when I got to Harrods, wow, that shop is amazing! I’d never been in such a big shop in my life. I wanted to stay there the whole day!” She laughs fondly, her angels temporarily forgotten – trumped by a memory of youth, and happiness right here on Earth.
