Matthew Manning

Many years ago, I guess it would have been in the mid 1970s, my mother showed me an article in The Daily Mail, her preferred newspaper (my father read The Times, these days it is hard to tell the difference). The subject of the article was a young man by the name of Matthew Manning. As a teenager he and his family (and colleagues at school) had been plagued by poltergeists. This tends to happen when a person is in their adolescence. He wrote a book, The Link, about this and many other experiences (yes, spoon-bending included). For anyone who dismisses such happenings as imagination or coincidence has to confront a mountain of evidence, not only in this book but from other people who have had similar experiences. (The book has recently been re-published).

But the article in the Mail was about how Matthew was dealing with such events. By this time, I would guess he was around 20, maybe a little more. He had started producing healing cassettes, using visualisation to help cure illness, mainly the more obvious types such as depression and anxiety. He gave me one or two to take away.

At the time, I was a Hospital Radio DJ in my spare time, on Hospital Radio Wey, in Weybridge. One of my contemporaries was Mike Read who went on to carve a very successful career as a DJ on BBC Radio 1. I thought, “Why not go and interview Matthew for my programme?” I used to visit wards on one evening of the week, chatting with patients, collecting their requests. I didn’t have an illusions about how many people were listening by the time my programme ended at 10pm but I served a purpose also by (hopefully) raising spirits.

So this is what happened. After a few weeks of negotiating, I went to a small cottage in the English countryside to await my subject. I had a small cassette recorder such as was used by reporters at the time – very professional! Matthew arrived in an MG Midget and we sat together on the sofa in the lounge. We chatted fo about 45 minutes, mainly about his plans for the future, a life of healing. By that time, he had rather put the spooky things in the past, maybe for that reason I didn’t ask him about that period. I thought afterwards that this was quite a risky exercise, to play an interview about alternative healing to an audience in hospital. Ohh, naïve days!

I made one big mistake. I had read several interviews with Matthew which he had given to other newspapers and the interviewer often asked for healing or some demonstration after the interview. I did the same, error! He put me in touch with one of his assistants and I went back for healing once. But my motive for doing the interview was genuinely to known more about what he was doing. But, of course, I destroyed that instantly.

Sine that interview, I have followed Matthew Manning. I have been on his healing workshops in the UK, and I have never hesitated to promote what he is doing. He now organises many healing events with his website, of course.

I’ve written about Matthew because his story touches two subjects of this website. One is ghosts and poltergeists, and the other is… how can a man under strict testing conditions influence cancer cells in a test tube? The sceptics will be out in force here! But what I have written here actually happened. And it leads on to what I have written about healing in the Christian context (because, of course MM operates outside any religion).