Reviewed by Ciaran Farrell
Kieran, the author, is a remarkable man who has been on a remarkable life journey. By day he is a graphic designer, artist and illustrator and at night he is a paranormal enthusiast who believes that the paranormal is part and parcel of everyone’s ordinary life. His mission is to develop new paranormal perspectives that will normalise the paranormal within the normality of everyday life. In order to do this, he became an author and a podcaster. He now has a YouTube channel.
This is why he has used a quote from Galileo, “I’ve loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night” to illustrate his fascination with the paranormal. It was through this fascination that he conquered the fear of the entity which he encountered which forms an integral part of his journey towards becoming a medium.
He was born in Oxford, into a family of British, Sardinian and Polish heritage and studied at Matthew Arnold School, Oxford, and Cherwell Valley College and later at De Montfort University.
Kieran’s life began in an ordinary enough way as the son of working-class parents on an Oxford estate, but then when he was five years old disaster struck. In the spring of 1990, he was safely traversing a road crossing with his mother when he was knocked down by a speeding car and sustained life-threatening injuries. He was rushed into the John Radcliffe Hospital where doctors fought to save his life. Kieran had to endure further surgery and many months of painful physiotherapy and rehabilitation. The photograph of the duck on the cover of his book is of a little wooden badge of honour or memento that the staff of the John Radcliffe gave to him on his successful recovery.
Kieran’s story is not the usual one of heroism involved in a triumph over tragedy life story. It is far more complex and interesting than that as he encountered what he first thought might have been some kind of timeslip or possibly an entity when he was in hospital which took him on a journey through time and space.
When he returned home, various strange things began to happen to him including an out-of-body experience in which he witnessed a teenager and he began to take time out through vacations in the stratosphere in which he would encounter cloud people. These phenomena might have been as a result of his informal meditative state or he may have become more aware of his psychic environment.
Kieran and his family moved to a different house which was in the suburbs of Oxford and had been constructed for soldiers and their families after the Second World War. He had already been suffering from nightmares, but his increasingly frequent and serious night terrors combined with his feeling of horror and sadness within his dreams caused him to wake up in tears. These night terrors would follow him into the waking world, and the object of the fear in his dreams was ‘the dark man’ in his room, which could be seen in the corner.
Then to make matters worse, Kieran’s pet and the family’s beloved tortoiseshell cat died in an accident. It was not long before the cat started to visit him in spiritual form, and his view of the Catholic Church and its priesthood changed, as did his family’s in relation to his parents’ divorce. This was because one of the local priests considered that marriage vows should be for life, and that divorcees were people who needed to make amends for their change in marital status. This meant that when Kieran and his family decided that something needed to be done about the phenomena that they were experiencing, they turned to a medium rather than to the church.
Then during a tough time for Kieran when he was being bullied at school, both he and his sister started to hear unexplained whistling and various other strange noises of laughter and drinking coming from a room full of people, which did not exist in their house. These phenomena became more commonplace and there were even some physical phenomena as well. Then there was an encounter with a similar entity to the one Kieran had experienced in hospital.
The increasing frequency and severity of the phenomena led to a medium being called in who considered that there was a dark presence that dwelt within the family home and a clearance was performed. Kieran felt a great deal of relief after the clearance. His mother felt that something had been following him for a long time which had now been removed by the medium.
It was at this point that Kieran began to reflect upon his experiences and those of his family, and he began to explore his underlying psychic abilities. He joined a mediumship development circle out of curiosity, but much to his surprise, he found that he was actually good at the group’s exercises. He also found that others started to see him as a natural psychic with mediumistic abilities as a result.
Kieran had already been experiencing premonitions on a semi-regular basis, and it was one such premonition that led him to land his first and defining job as a graphic designer at a Creative Media University which was located in a beautiful period building. He was to discover much to his horror that the building held its ghostly secrets.
He spent many years in this job and then, later, found another role which provided him with the opportunity to move house and to settle down with his wife so they could have a second child. Then he was able to turn his attention to investigating the paranormal as a ghost hunter, paranormal experiencer, and of course a psychic and medium.
Kieran has also described in his book some of his psychical and ghostly adventures which he has engaged in while exploring the world beyond the veil, as well as his reflections on them in a self-effacing and often humorous way.
Kieran has written an engaging and compact autobiography which centres on the paranormal in his life as he has made his journey through life. In his search for the truth and substance of the worlds beyond our own, he is a philosopher, an adventurer, and an explorer, with his feet very firmly on the ground as he seeks explanations.
One of Kieran’s passions has always been reading, and this shows in his writing, and his open, informed, but nonetheless informal style in which his book has been written. This style is engaging and always offers the reader other explanations in addition to his own. He invites the reader to think over what he has related, and then perhaps come up with their own interpretation of events.
After reading Para-Normality, I can see why he has written it in the way that he has done, in order to present the paranormal as a part of the normal trials and tribulations not only of ordinary everyday life, but also as a part of the more tragic circumstances of his life as well. To me, it is Kieran’s modest courage that stands out and which makes him a truly remarkable man having been through what he has from the car crash that nearly ended his life to the daily struggles with the entity that followed him.
Kieran’s dream is to “share his experiences with the world by using creativity to help people find the spark of excitement in their own pursuit of knowledge”. He hopes that by doing so, his children and others may grow up in a more peaceful world. It is this desire which motivated him to write his book.
I would recommend Para-Normality as an engaging and interesting read both as a biography of someone who turns out to be a very special person both as a result of his courage in adversity and also because of his special talents and interests.
Para-Normality is in some ways not only a short and compact autobiographical book covering Kieran’s life journey in which he triumphs over the adversity of the car accident. It is also to a certain extent a quiet ‘coming-of-age’ drama as Kieran begins to realise his own talents and begins to explore them. I therefore consider that Para-Normality is not only of interest to the psychical researcher but also to the paranormal investigator and to a wide general readership.