Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 1, 1/8 by Estelle Roberts

CHAPTER ONE
1889 – 1919

“This girl must be called Estelle, for one day she will become a star.”
These words were uttered by my grandmother as she gazed down at her daughter’s child who had entered this world barely two hours before.

In later years my mother told me of this incident for which there was no apparent reason. My grandmother had no reputation in the family as a prophetess, and no doubt would have been shocked at any suggestion that she had psychic powers.

However, my father had different ideas in the matter of names. For the good and sufficient reasons that I was born on May 10th 1889, and that we were then living at May Cottage in Kensington, he chose to call me May. And so, in due course, there appeared a new entry in the registry of births – May Estelle Wills, daughter of Edwin Blackstone Wills and Isobel, his wife.

My parents were good kindly people, typical of the Victorian age. They had a family of eight children, five girls and three boys, and we all lived in Kensington in comfortable but not affluent circumstances. In company with my brothers and sisters, I grew up a very ordinary, unremarkable child with the sole exception that from the moment of my earliest recollections I heard voices which the other members of the family could not.

Though I knew nothing of Spiritualism I soon came to recognize them as the voices of the spirit
people, and knowing myself to be part of them as they were part of me, I never had the slightest fear of them. My father, however, had no understanding of such things and, although he was always a just man,

he nevertheless frequently felt it his duty to correct my allegedly riotous imagination by means of his leather belt! I was repeatedly told that such things were evil, and because of this until the day of my enlightenment, I was haunted by the fear that perhaps my mind was a little “touched.”