Sabrina Kennedy was three years old when she saw her first spirit. Sitting in the bath, she asked her mother, Linda: ‘Who is that man behind you?’
Linda brushed the question off, but later, when Sabrina saw a framed picture of her great grandfather on the wall, she pointed to him and said: ‘That’s him.’
Linda, who had adopted Sabrina when she was a baby, told her daughter that the man is in heaven, but the little girl insisted he was still here. That was when the spiritual floodgates flew open.
As she grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, she became plagued by spirits, visions and premonitions Sabrina, 30, tells Metro.
‘I would see outlines of people. Or flashes or images of a person. Or I would hear them and then start to get visions. Even now, there will be times where I’m walking and I’m like, “Oh my God, not today” because I will see a full person that’s not there. But when I was really young and really open energetically, it would be full of people.
Sabrina – who was born near Salem (where the witch trials began in 1692) and classes herself as a witch, shaman and priestess – came to learn she had special abilities that most of us don’t. She now spends half of her time working as a musician (‘my physical 3D job’) and the other half as a psychic medium and clairvoyant (‘my spiritual or 5D work’).
‘As a child, I would be playing outside and I would tell my parents that I had been playing with a little girl. They would say: “There’s no little girl outside.” And it ended up being a child that had passed away in one of the houses next door.’
The apparitions weren’t always well-intentioned though. When malevolent spirits would target her and she would wake screaming with night terrors, Sabrina would pray to God to prevent spirits coming to her in bed.
As a musician she rubs shoulders with the stars, counting Courtney Love and the late Liam Payne among her close friends, but she has also carried out spiritual readings for celebrities in a work capacity.
‘I’ve read for everyone from actors and actresses to musicians, footballers and their spouses, for example. I’m very open with the footballers wives about their husbands’ escapades; I will never sugar coat my abilities,’ Sabrina adds.
It was when Covid shut down music venues, that her career as a psychic began to soar.
However, her gifts also carry a darker undertone. Sabrina’s dreams are haunted with premonitions about her loved ones, and she is often left with uncomfortable decisions about whether to tell people what she has foreseen.
At 14, she had a premonition that her adoptive dad Tom would be involved in a car accident. Every day she would plead with him to drive safely, but eventually he was still involved in a collision, although not seriously hurt.
Then, seven years ago, when Sabrina was in Nashville, she had her phone off and was taking a nap. Afterwards, she went for a walk, and even though the sun was shining, she felt a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach.
‘It was just like, “Oh, my God, my father’s died”. There was a part of me that felt he had left,’ she explains. Tom, who had been in good health, had fallen down a flight of stairs and snapped his neck.
‘It was just very sudden, but I felt it. And then I turned on my phone, and I had 27 missed calls for my mom and sister,’ Sabrina remembers.
The terrible loss was the catalyst for another psychic onslaught and her powers went into overdrive. ‘It just opened me up tenfold. There was no turning back after that,’ she explains. ‘It flooded in and I started seeing the dead a lot more. It was out of control.’
In the end, Sabrina enlisted healers and mediums to train her to control her abilities and moved to the UK seven years ago.
However, with the UK full of buildings that are often steeped in history, it mean she is still interrupted by ghostly encounters while trying to enjoy a quiet drink with friends.
‘Anytime I go to a restaurant or pub and have more than one glass of wine I become an open channel for the spirits,’ says Sabrina. ‘Anyone could be next to me and their loved one will come through or I will start to receive messages about them.
‘These places are filled with spirits and until I learned to control my abilities I would see different figures walking around the pub and have to blink my eyes.’
Today, Sabrina works with The Modern Psychics – network, providing tarot, reiki, Wicca healing and psychic sessions for £70 for half an hour from a studio near her London home.
It’s a full-on, exhausting profession, and she has to work to control the messages that come to her. ‘From the moment I wake up until I go to bed I am bombarded in the physical and spiritual world with messages’, she explains.
‘I see everything all day, every day and I have learned to find a balance but it is still very difficult for me. I am still severely misunderstood by a lot of people.’
Sabrina says she has met Amy Winehouse and Marilyn Monroe, posthumously, with both women passing on messages for the living.
‘Amy came through to me very heavily after my father died, because she gave me the message of: “Don’t go down the road I took”. She told me to get around good people, stand my ground and know my power. Amy’s not too impressed with a lot of the movies and documentaries that have come out about her.
‘And Marilyn Monroe came through when I was doing a séance with a group of women. She was not happy. She was saying: “The truth will come out about my death.” I believe she was killed. That’s the message I received. Both of those women that have come through were wildly misunderstood, so I can relate to them.’
Despite these celebrity sightings, Sabrina finds her gifts exhausting and is often left completely depleted by the messages coming through.
‘Sometimes I wish I had a nine to five, went home, went to the pub with my friends and went to Pilates. But that’s not not my life, and I don’t know anything else’, she explains.
It can also be a really inconvenient skill. ‘I’ll be in the grocery store and I will get a nudge, and I’m like, “Oh, come on”. And then they’ll keep saying it. But I can’t just go up to someone and go, “Oh, your deceased husband is here and wants to say hello”, because that’s not right.’
That said, Sabrina is grateful for her ‘beautiful relationship’ with death, and all it has taught her.
‘I have a relationship with life that tells me – life is too short. Because everyone I pull through [from the spirit world] says they wish they hadn’t worried about certain things in this life like the mortgage or the marks their kids get at school.’
Sabrina is used to people rolling their eyes at her, or telling her she’s crazy. The worst aspect is when people want to find out their future and she has to decide what to reveal. ‘I may tell the person if I know them. But there have been some instances where I have not told people and it’s happened,’ she admits. ‘And it’s not that I feel guilty, but I’m torn with my abilities, because when is my place to tell someone something?’
When her friend Liam Payne died in October, Sabrina was left wondering why she didn’t foresee his death. The pair had become close years ago when she was working at one of his recording studios and they would often talk about spiritual matters.
‘A lot of celebrities seek guidance from that world, because a lot of them feel lost. Music is an industry with a lot of broken people in it. I would give Liam readings, as a friend, not as a client.
‘He was a very sensitive soul and I did my best to help him with the spiritual side of stuff, and he would help me with the music side. His death has been very, very difficult to grapple with.
‘I’d always felt that he should get on a different path, and any time I had an intuitive feeling for him, I would tell him. So the difficulty of Liam passing and having my abilities was, Why didn’t I see that? How did I not see that?’
Sabrina says she has seen glimpses of Liam, and that one day she knows he’ll get in touch.
‘This is why sometimes I love my gift. I know that sometimes I am able to hold onto that little bit when I am grieving someone.’
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