The Baby Mind Reader: Amazing Psychic Stories from the Man Who Can Read Babies’ Minds. Derek Ogilvie
course. I just didn’t want to be an engineer. I wanted to be a pop star and on television. The problem was that I didn’t know how to go about doing this so I forced myself to go to college and get a qualification, just in case my pop career didn’t take off. It wasn’t to be one of my better decisions.
I didn’t fit in at college from day one. I wasn’t the engineering type and had no real aptitude for or interest in it. In my second year, I had what I thought was a nervous breakdown. When I initially went to the doctor and told him I was having panic attacks on the bus and hot flushes in lectures, he told me I was just going through an awkward stage in my life. He suggested I might subconsciously be finding the pressures of college life a little difficult, and struggling to come to terms with the possibility that my childhood dreams weren’t going to become reality. It was all very man-to-man, ‘it’s time to grow up’ stuff but I knew there was more to it than that. I understood the reasons better than anyone but didn’t want to share them in case I was ridiculed.
I went along with the doctor’s theory that the pressures of college had made me unwell. This was not a total lie because I did hate every second of it. However, the truth was that I was finding it really difficult to cope with being gay and couldn’t handle lying about my sexuality any longer. Additionally, I was even more conscious of energy at that time, and could ‘feel’ things from people, especially my fellow students. I could sense their health problems and personal issues which, quite honestly, were sometimes a great deal more than I needed to know. I really thought I was going mad. I knew I had some sort of sixth sense but hadn’t realized why I had it or, more importantly, how I should use this ability. At that time it was more of a hindrance than a blessing, and I thought I needed some professional help in order to get these crazy thoughts out of my head.
I was never honest with the psychologist who was assigned to look after me. Within the first few minutes of meeting her I realized that all she understood had been programmed into her by her profession, a profession that had a total disregard for all things psychic. I had to face reality – what I thought I needed wasn’t going to come from her.
What I’d been trying to cope with was draining me every day. I was exhausted, both mentally and psychically. My nervous breakdown took its toll, and I was forced to repeat my second year at college. When I went back to college after the summer break I felt slightly better about myself. I was more confident and was beginning to come to terms with my situation, albeit in a rather weird way. I had made some decisions during the holidays. I was going to put my worries about being gay and psychic in a little box, lock it and throw away the key. I decided that the more I ignored my issues, the less they would worry me and the happier I would become. I didn’t even stop to contemplate what this decision could do to me psychologically. I would pretend I was just a normal, straight guy, and this was the image I would portray to my new college buddies.
My new fellow students were very different to the ones I’d been with in my previous years. They were friendlier and more socially aware, and I quickly made friends with a group of boys who would become a great influence in my life, although I didn’t know it at the time.
One summer, I was looking to make some money, and one of my college pals, John, offered to go busking with me in Glasgow. John played guitar and I accompanied him on my accordion. We both had a go at singing but after a few hours it started to rain and we tried to find somewhere to shelter. John noticed that there was a music shop nearby so we went along to have a look as he was thinking about getting a new guitar.
I hit it off immediately with the music shop owner, Peter Bryce. I suddenly realized that if I bought a few guitars out of local papers or from students at college I could clean them up and sell them on in my new-found friend’s music shop, hopefully making a profit. Within a few months, after much negotiation and wheeling and dealing, The Guitar Store in Glasgow was born. I had new dreams now and knew that I had to follow them or I would be miserable for the rest of my life, so I left college during my finals, much to mum and dad’s annoyance, and set my sights on being a businessman.
The success of my new business was astounding. I was now running The Guitar Store on a full-time basis. Within a year I’d bought out my business partner, Peter, the owner of the original shop. I put every hour God sent into making that shop work. I needed something to concentrate on so I would forget about my sexuality and dim my sixth sense. The Guitar Store flourished and I moved to new premises in Hope Street in Glasgow in 1988.
I kept working hard, building up the business over the next few years until I sold it in 1994 to a major music manufacturer and wholesaler. By that time I’d worked non-stop for seven years and was totally burnt out. I needed time off. After a protracted negotiation period, I walked away with around £200,000 from my deal and started to think about my next move. The amount wasn’t anywhere near the magic million figure, but at least I was on my way to my dream.
I’d been working hard and making good money so I liked to splash the cash now and again. Looking back, I now realize this was the start of my problems with money. I had reached a stage in my life when I felt I needed money in order to be me. Money had become my God and I hadn’t noticed it.
During the summer of 1994, I made the biggest decision of my life: I told the world that I was gay. It was during that time that my psychic abilities took a hold of me and soared. I think that at the moment I was honest with myself about my sexuality I just became me – the whole me, not just the pretend me who had tried for years to fit into the heterosexual world. There was no more pretence and no more lies to hide behind. I was free.
To my surprise, no-one was offended by my revelation. It was the release I needed, and in some way it helped me come to terms with the dramatic event that had taken place at the Christmas dining table all those years before.
It was then that I decided to try my luck in the bar and club world, an area of business I thought would help me achieve my childhood goal. I still wanted to be a millionaire! I bought my first bar, Mojo, for £250,000.
During my time working in Mojo I noticed that my psychic abilities as a medium started to become more pronounced. Within the first few days, it became fairly obvious to me that the building was haunted. The ghost who would come to try and talk to me seemed, from the information I managed to get from her, to be stuck there, as if she was in some sort of time warp. She was always tearful, and I knew from the emotions that would run through me when I connected with her that she needed help quickly.
I was very inexperienced at that time, so through a friend of a friend I managed to locate a medium whom I thought would be able to help me deal with my spiritual encounter. The medium was helpful but honest enough to tell me that she was also out of her depth. I therefore decided to bring in the ‘heavy squad’, and located a couple of Glasgow University chaps who were part of a psychic society and asked them to come and sort it out for me. They did and were incredibly helpful. After much investigation, they told me that the ghostly presence I had been tuning in to was the spirit of a prostitute who had been murdered in the early 1920s in the building, and that she had obviously been seeking help to cross over fully into the spirit world. Thankfully, she had come across me, someone whom she knew could communicate with the dead, and had just managed to get her message through. We arranged for a priest to come to the bar and bless it in order for the prostitute’s spirit to be given the peace she’d been craving for nearly 80 years.
I started to see my first boyfriend, Michael, around the time I opened Mojo. Michael, a teacher, was very supportive when I began doing psychic readings for friends and family. His encouragement really helped me come to terms with my sixth sense.
Within a year of opening Mojo, I had achieved more than I thought possible. The bar was doing great and had become one of the coolest bars in Glasgow. However, I was beginning to get itchy feet. It was therefore a great relief when, in the summer of 1996, I received a call telling me that someone wanted to buy Mojo for £620,000. I jumped at the chance.
My next bar project, Ocho, also made me a great deal of money. Because it was doing so well, in 1998 I decided to sell it and open another bar in Glasgow, Bar Budda. I’d always