‘I'M AUSTRALIA'S REAL-LIFE GHOSTBUSTER'

THIS PROFESSIONAL AUSSIE GHOSTBUSTER AIN’T AFRAID OF NO GHOSTS

- Paul Ewart

By day she works in sales, by night, she’s a real-life ghostbuster.

For nearly two decades, psychic and paranormal investigator, Soula Vaitsis, has scoured everything from abandoned asylums and spooky jails, to ghost-plagued suburban semis, in the hopes of an encounter with a disembodied spirit.

But the seeds for the Melbourne-based mum’s otherworldly occupation were sown after a childhood encounter with a ghost.

“I was only 7 at the time,” the 46-year-old tells New Idea. “I was at a local park with my cousin. We were on the swings next to one other when my cousin said to me: ‘Don’t pull my hair!’ I was swinging next to her at the time. I replied: ‘I didn’t.’ And then, suddenly, I felt my own hair being pulled.

“Jumping off the swings, we both began to run, before I stopped to turn back, and then I saw her – a woman in a long, white nightgown with long black hair and black holes for eyes, floating a metre off the ground.

“Our feet barely touched the ground running home – my heart was pounding so hard! I told me parents, but they didn’t believe me.”

Traumatised and terrified by the encounter – “to this day I can’t sleep in a dark room alone,” she says – more experiences soon followed.