For 50 years, Matthew Manning has been Britain's most haunted.

Harassed by spirits since the age of eleven and apparently gifted with the power to heal cancer the 'Poltergeist Boy' is not your common-or-garden kook. Having withstood the scrutiny of doctors, academics and every rigour of the scientific method, Manning claims his abilities are from beyond - and beyond dispute. Believe him or not, he claims he's the real deal. And what's more... He can prove it

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Just before you dismiss Matthew Manning as another New Age crank, delusional guru or magician on the make, you might like to ponder the names of some of those who have consulted him. They include, he says, John Cleese, Prince Philip, Van Morrison, Maureen Lipman, Pope Paul VI and Brian Clough.

The disparate nature of his client list (the healer apologises that etiquette prohibits him from disclosing the names of many others, including professional footballers, actors and rock stars) is no coincidence. Manning, who was described by one tireless advocate, the late Sir David Frost, as "the most gifted psychic in the Western world", poses a unique problem for those of us who approach apparently supernatural phenomena with scepticism, in that the details of his extraordinary life and work are far more difficult to explain away in orthodox terms than they are by reference to the paranormal.

Concerning the events of his early years, which earned him international fame as the so-called "Poltergeist Boy", there are just too many witnesses; too many traumatised individuals who saw domestic appliances flying up staircases unaided; too many school friends who witnessed crockery appearing in midair and shattering on the classroom floor; and too many scientifically trained observers who were present when, as a boy, messages from the dead began to appear on the walls of Manning's bedroom at his family home in Cambridgeshire.

Sir David Frost, a timeless advocate, described Manning as 'the most gifted psychic in the Western world'

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Manning is that you - in all likelihood - have never heard of him. He lives in a secluded cottage on Exmoor with his partner, Sarah, and emerges to perform healing sessions twice weekly at a local clinic. Unlike many who simulate then flaunt the kind of powers that have been ascribed to Manning, he does not exploit his reputation in pursuit of great wealth. In the mid-Seventies, after Frost first persuaded him to appear on television, in a special edition of The Frost Interview, Manning, at 19, was featured in every major newspaper on either side of the Atlantic. But fame, he came to realise, never quite suited him. This is the first interview Matthew Manning has given for more than ten years.

He might live within commuting distance of Britain's crystal-gazing capital - Totnes, in Devon - but Manning, 58, is a down-to-earth sort of person; he enjoys a glass of white wine, likes rock'n'roll and, after he collects me in his 4x4 at Bodmin station, he negotiates the tight country lanes with robust expertise. You wouldn't necessarily assume, were you to bump into him in a bar, that this is a man who, on the evidence of multiple tests conducted under rigorous scientific conditions, appears to be able to kill cancer cells with the power of thought. "The last time we met," I remind Manning, "I asked you to place your hands over me, as you would in a routine healing session. I can still remember the heat; you must have been a foot away and yet it felt like standing far too close to a two-kilowatt electric fire. This was coming through two layers of clothing and it was on the edge of being painful. Do you feel that heat when you're working? "Sometimes," he says. On one particular occasion, a male patient passed out from the intense -sensation of burning. No faith or belief, Manning insists, is required on the part of his subject.

Healing can even work on dogs. "The only way I can describe the feeling," he says, "is that I am channelling some kind of unconditional love."

Such phrases are ten-a-penny in advertisements placed by latter-day snake-oil vendors on the notice boards of wholefood cafés. What makes Manning remarkable is that he has invited scientific scrutiny rather than avoided it, and works in sympathetic collaboration with traditional medicine. Prominent surgeons and consultants send patients to Manning and vice versa.

He has the enthusiastic support of internationally renowned specialists, notably Professor Karol Sikora, medical director of Cancer Partners UK, honorary consultant oncologist at London's Hammersmith Hospital and former head of the World Health Organisation's Cancer Programme. Manning, said Sikora, has "a remarkable track record" as a healer, working at what the professor calls "the interface of mind and body".

And it all started, as Manning reminds me over tea in his living room, by accident. "I was eleven. We lived in a modern house, close to Cambridge. My father was an architect and he led a very structured existence. One morning, in February 1967, he came down and noticed, on the floor of the dining room, a silver tankard, which was his.

Normally it lived on a shelf. He couldn't work out why it hadn't landed on the dresser -directly below," Manning continues. "His initial assumption was that we'd been burgled. But nothing was missing and there were no signs of forcible entry. We didn't have a cat. So he examined the shelf, which was solidly mounted and showed no signs of warping. Three days later the tankard was back on the floor; not long afterwards it was there again and a vase of daffodils had moved to the spot where my mother would normally sit at the breakfast table."

His father contacted the psychology department at Cambridge University. "Nobody there," Manning says, "was interested." The movement of objects stopped when he was removed from the house, and subsided altogether after three months, but started again, far more violently, when he was 15. By this time the family had moved to an 18th-century house in Linton, Cambridgeshire.

One night "my bed started to vibrate and the feet rose into the air. Then the head end rose and I was suspended six inches off the ground. Another time, Andrew and Rosalind, my brother and sister, who are younger than me, were in the kitchen. They saw a trolley coming towards them across the dining room; it was floating. They were terrified."

This was one of many occasions on which the family saw objects moving. "Things like hammers, mallets and blocks of wood. Once airborne, the objects would pick up speed, especially as they reached the stairs. They would appear to be hurled to the top with terrific force. The noise," Manning adds, "was just unbelievable."

His father, Derek, who died in 2010, once told me that he had observed a coat hanger "floating up the stairs, then negotiating the turn in the staircase. Which is, in my experience, rather exceptional. A broom went up; we saw it resting on the handrail of the banisters, on the landing, perfectly balanced." The only advice he ever gave his son, Derek added, "was to be absolutely truthful, because otherwise he'd be found out. I believe him to have followed that advice."

Manning remembers his father reporting these occurrences at the local police station. There, by coincidence, he met a sergeant with an -interest in the paranormal, who put him in touch with Dr George Owen, a lecturer in genetics at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Owen, who had written the definitive study of the poltergeist phenomenon, lived only five miles away. The academic helped the family chronicle, and survive, the events that ensued. "Dr Owen taught me that these phenomena are natural, though rare," Manning says. "He explained that they are not due to demonic intervention, and that they are potentially of scientific interest." Owen told the boy to regard what was happening as something akin to measles and assured him that the disturbances would pass.

Owen's notes on the case survive. He took to visiting the property just after dawn and peering through a downstairs window.

Though he never saw anything move, in the time it took him to walk from the window to the front door, he reported, the room could be in complete disarray.

The signatures of dead people - several hundred of them, all in different hands - began to appear, roughly scrawled, on Manning's bedroom wall. The first was signed by one Robert Webbe, a 17th-century figure who left a message that indicated, as Manning puts it, that he "seemed to have no idea that he was dead". On one occasion, witnessed by Dr Owen and others, Derek Manning ushered the whole family into the garden, with his son's bedroom roped off, leaving a pencil on the bed. When they returned after ten minutes, another inscription had been added. Some of the names, which were systematically photographed, appear in historic parish registers; others were of unknown provenance.

In mainstream psychology, as Richard Wiseman, professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and one of Britain's leading sceptical investigators of the paranormal, explains, "the received wisdom concerning poltergeist activity is that implausible movement of domestic objects is always knowingly engineered by one or more occupants of the affected property". In the Manning case, for this explanation to be sufficient would require there to have been a large and elaborate conspiracy that has endured, un-betrayed, for four decades. It would have required the connivance of Manning's entire family, several Cambridge University academics as well as dozens of pupils and teachers at Manning's boarding school, Oakham in Rutland.

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While Manning's career owes its beginnings to the publicity surrounding his bizarre childhood, others who have described witnessing the events have nothing to gain except ridicule. His brother, Andrew, who does not enjoy reliving the memories, recalled that Dr Owen, keen to find out which child was the source of the disturbances, "sent me and my sister, Rosalind, away for a period.

As the poltergeist continued, it became -apparent that Matthew was the cause."

After moving to the house in Linton, in Andrew Manning's words, "It all just erupted, like a volcano under the house. When it got very bad I went to sleep in my sister's bedroom. The house had no carpet because we had just moved, and that made it all the noisier - bangings, crashings, thumpings. We had no explanation. We just hoped it would stop. I used to leave the house immediately after breakfast and come home as late as possible, and hope never to find myself alone in any room." When Matthew was sent away to school, "there was a tidal wave of relief that he had left". The whole experience, Andrew told me, felt like a violation.

Matthew Manning's former classmate Jon Wills, who went on to become archivist at Oakham School, where he still teaches, recalled what it was like in their dormitory in 1970. "There were 24 of us," Wills told me, "in bunk beds. Things just started to happen. Water appeared from nowhere. I remember my bed moving when there was nobody near it. On one occasion," he added, "this pile of dinner plates came crashing down, out of thin air, and shattered on the floor. Where they came from, who knows?

Matthew," he said, "was frightened. I was bloody terrified. It was the sort of experience that, unless you've been through it, you can't begin to- comprehend."

I spoke to several of Manning's contemporaries at Oakham, who all tell similar stories. How, I ask the healer, does a sceptic explain this away?

One night, my bed started to vibrate and then it rose into the air. I was suspended six inches off the ground (Matthew Manning) "Well, I suppose by saying that you have a 15-year-old boy with the ability of somebody like Derren Brown. He might be able to produce illusions like these, but he has been practising for years. And, believe me, it didn't happen like that."

Manning's school asked him to recite a banishment spell every evening in the -dormitory, which he did to no avail. The unpleasantness only abated, he says, when he began to transcribe messages in a form of what is commonly called automatic writing.

The bizarre tone of some of these psychic -communications suggests that facilities on the astral plane include a minibar to which the senders have unrestricted access. One spirit used his rare opportunity to contact earth to complain that "John has got my spoons". Another message came from a demented-sounding Stafford Cripps. The former Labour politician and chancellor of the exchequer is hardly the most obvious choice of subject, I suggest to Manning, especially when you think of the range of more sensational potential correspondents, such as Hitler, Oscar Wilde and Jesus. "I died in Switzerland on April 21 1952," wrote Cripps. "I am now restless. My body is at Sapperton. Where is Frith Hill? Here is Charles, father, now, I must go." "I'd never heard of him," Manning explains. "When I got the message I misread the signature and I was asking people about a man called Richard Cripps."

When Manning appeared on The Frost Interview in 1974, the broadcaster (who described Manning's abilities as "quite literally beyond belief") read out research confirming the detail in the message. Frith Hill was Cripps' home address. A graphologist, commissioned by Frost to compare the posthumous signature with an original, said, "It shook me.

This is not a copy or a forgery. If this signature were appended to a will, I would pass it as genuine."

The poltergeist activity stopped, Manning recalls, "after I started to do automatic writing. One day I was writing a school essay and began producing a long screed that was not in my hand. We noticed there was no more poltergeist activity for about 24 hours after that. So I sat down -deliberately to try to do this strange writing again. A lot of what came through was nonsense; other things purported to be messages from people who had died."

I ask him what Professor Richard Wiseman would make of that. "Well," Manning replies, "there is quite a bit of Richard Wiseman in me. I am sure he would be extremely sceptical. Like him, I was always inclined to seek out a 'rational' explanation, largely because I had George Owen behind me, who was a scientist. I had always imagined that the automatic writing, whatever it was, was probably flotsam that was coming out of my unconscious. I didn't care, though, because it seemed to stop the poltergeists. But when I began writing in [fluent] Chinese and Arabic, as I did, well that did freak me out a bit. Because those languages were not, so far as I was aware, present in my subconscious."

Schoolmate Jon Wills observed Manning produce a number of pictures, including a drawing in the unmistakable style of Albrecht Dürer. "I can think of no conceivable explanation for that in terms of orthodox physics," Wills told me. "Matthew did not have the artistic ability to produce anything of that kind. And he never knew who was doing the drawing until the end, when it was signed."

Manning was approached by the publisher Colin Smythe, who is now agent to Sir Terry Pratchett. After leaving school he started work on a book about his experiences called The Link. "This was around the time The Exorcist was released,"

Manning says, "and Uri Geller was becoming very famous. A friend of my -publisher knew David Frost, and I was taken to tea with him at Claridge's in 1974. I was just 19. We didn't have a television at home. I didn't know who David Frost was, but he decided that afternoon to give an entire show over to me."

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Expressing an interest in the paranormal was quite a risk for Frost, I suggest to Manning, when you think of his main profile as a formidably serious political interviewer. "It was a huge risk, and very brave of him, I think. I was totally unheard of. The Link hadn't even come out. David was extremely open-minded and fascinated from the beginning, and always incredibly kind to me. He took a lot of stick from a lot of people. Because it was Frost fronting the show, people who might have dismissed certain ideas thought, well, there must be something to this. I was very, very shy. I had no idea that the show was done in a theatre in front of a live audience of more than 600 people."

In the course of the half-hour broadcast, Manning appeared to channel diagnoses from a dead physician called Dr Penn who, working from the birth date of a member of the audience, accurately identified a young woman in the audience as suffering from kidney problems and heart disease. He had brought professional-looking drawings that he said he'd psychically received from artists including Picasso and Aubrey Beardsley, even though all friends and family confirm Jon Wills' assertion that Manning is no artist. "It's true," Manning tells me. "I can just about do a matchstick man."

Strangest of all is the material on Frost's original, unedited version of the studio tape, which contains footage of three false starts to the programme. Earlier takes were abandoned because of monitors coming on when they were actually off, and a wholesale failure of the sound system.

The laboratory work was useful to me. Without it I wouldn't have believed I was capable of healing (Matthew Manning)

Frost's enthusiastic support - the two remained friends and occasional collaborators up until Sir David's death late last summer - made Manning internationally famous. "From my being completely unknown, The Link became a bestseller all over the world and I was booked on a three-week American tour.

After that," Manning adds, "everything exploded like a bomb."

His success on The Frost Interview marked the beginning of what Matthew Manning calls his "performing monkey" period. He was visited by two papal envoys, Archbishops Hyginus Cardinale and Bruno Heim. "They came with 50 birth dates," Manning remembers. He selected one of them which, "though I didn't know it at the time, belonged to Pope Paul VI, who was -seriously ill".

Manning was sent out on tour, and proved to be something of a psychic all-rounder. He appeared to be able to project and receive numbers telepathically. He could bend spoons just like Uri Geller. "The whole thing became a ludicrous circus that centred around Geller and myself," Manning says. "The two of us were constantly being compared. But Uri Geller is streetwise in a way that I have never been. You have no idea how it feels to be 19 in the middle of a room full of cameras and aggressively sceptical journalists, who sit you down and ask you to make something inexplicable happen on demand."

I have a tabloid clipping from this period which describes a laboratory experiment in which Manning was presented with a row of light bulbs wired in series, and asked to switch them on using only mental energy. The headline reads: "Psychic Can Only Light Two Lamps". "That's right," says Manning (who, on one occasion, was reported to have blown every fuse in a Madrid department store). "The amazing thing about that experiment, to them, was that out of nine light bulbs I failed to light seven."

He went on to subject himself to hundreds of other laboratory tests in Britain and North America. In Toronto, in an experiment with Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he demonstrated an apparent ability to move a compass needle at will. "I felt a curious sensation in my eye," Josephson told a reporter after the experiment. "It was as though I was seeing the compass through a heat haze, such as you get from a rising bonfire."

Manning made a goldfish change direction. He made a gerbil slow down on its wheel. Reading the accounts of these experiments reminded me of a remark of Dr Jonathan Miller's. "When you examine the operation of the human eye," Miller once said, "I'm amazed that so many people are obsessed with the more suburban miracle of telepathy." "I know exactly what he meant by that," says Manning. 'The things that orthodox medicine can do - the things that the body can do - I find utterly amazing. But that doesn't mean to say you should disregard telepathy."

By 1976, he says, "I began to ask myself whether I really wanted to spend the rest of my life on that circuit. I was sick of the whole thing. I decided to quit. I went out to India at the beginning of 1977. I hired a taxi driver to take me to the Himalayas, through Simla, and ended up in the small mountain village of Narkanda, where I stayed the night. I set my camera up to photograph the sunrise and... I know this will sound mad to you, but I had this sudden, extraordinary sense of being at one with everything that was around me: the rocks, the mountains, the trees and the sky. I got this overwhelming sense of something that I can only describe as God. I didn't even take a picture."

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Were you smoking at the time? "No. I just had this certainty that I should do only the things that I felt were right, that if I did have certain abilities I should put them to good use and that I should follow only those paths that would lead to healing."

In Texas, under the supervision of an American psychologist, Dr John Kmetz, he attempted to disrupt the charge on cancer cells, held in small flasks, to make them less active. "I tried to envisage the cells as being -surrounded by white light," says Manning. "I imagined I was talking to them." In 27 out of 30 trials, Kmetz noted an increase "ranging from 200 to 1,200 per cent" in the number of dead cancer cells in flasks that the healer tried to influence. Two identical sets of containers - one of which was left untouched, and another of which was treated by a non-psychic mimicking his movements - showed no change on any of the trials. Manning's opponents later suggested it was possible to diminish the cell count by tapping the container, a charge he vehemently denies.

Brian Clough wasn't easy to deal with. But gradually he looked forward to coming and I believe it helped him (Matthew Manning)

Sceptics, he insists, "have always said we will accept healing when we see the results of double-blind laboratory experiments.

Well, there are hundreds of positive results from my area of healing and it is still not accepted by mainstream medicine. The bridges I have built with doctors have come from patients, rather than experiments. But that laboratory work was useful to me, because without it I don't think that I would have believed that I was capable of healing."

Known in the Eighties as a tirelessly gregarious figure, Manning has been a reformed character, he says, since he separated from his first wife, Christine, in 1994. His memories of the early years of his healing career, in which he was touring the world performing demonstrations, are a catalogue of casual sex and drugs that might shame a heavy-metal guitarist. In his thirties, he admits, he sustained the reputation of "a hell-raiser with whom no sensible person would want to keep pace".

Last time I had dinner with Manning he was living with his second wife, Gig, in a Suffolk village called Hartest. Gig died of cancer some years ago. Christine, mother of his two children, died of cirrhosis in 2000, aged 40. I do recall that on one night I spent with Manning in Hartest, he got outside of a fairly impressive amount of port. He's slowed up a bit since those days, he says.

Years earlier in Hartest, Manning had fallen in with the thirsty painter Francis Bacon, who had a house in the village. (The artist, he says, "could really pack it away"). Manning's party drink was a yard of ale filled not with beer but champagne laced with brandy: a challenging formula which more or less guarantees the drinker an eventful evening and a interesting selection of new friends.

Residents of Hartest who knew Manning in that period share a number of rather un-spiritual memories of his socialising. The healer was placed in the "crash" position on the carpet of the local pub, after losing consciousness while celebrating his 38th birthday. "I think the person who did that," Manning says, "saved my life."

A year later he was seen pursuing a naked farmer (who he says he'd discovered in the arms of his first wife and ejected from his bedroom) round the village green in the early hours. This last incident precipitated a 12-hour binge, over the course of which he consumed 13 bottles of champagne and "quite a few" other drinks. In the grip of the ensuing hangover, he says, he swore "never to drink like that again".

What made the author of 2002's The Healing Journey ("Limit alcoholic drinks, if consumed at all") behave in this way? "I totally lost the plot," says Manning. "I think I felt that I'd never had an adolescence because of the poltergeist stuff."

Then, as a healer, "I'd noticed from the beginning that people thoughtI'd be some body in open-toed sandals, living on herbs and organic root vegetables," he says. "In the pub, I wanted to show that I was just an ordinary guy, but then the drink got the better of me. Looking back, I think I came very close to killing myself."

Even at the height of his hedonism, his private life did not damage his reputation as a healer. Cancer of any kind has been known to go into permanent remission for no apparent reason, but the phenomenon is extremely rare, and usually estimated at one case in 100,000. Talking to Manning's surviving ex-clients, you notice a far higher incidence.

I spoke to one of his former patients, who told me that she first went to Manning more than 20 years ago, suffering from breast cancer. "The doctors gave me three to sic months," she said. "They told me that further treatment would be useless. Matthew was my last chance. I went to see him regularly for about a year. The heat from his hands," she added, "was phenomenal. When he put them near me I felt a shooting pain. When I looked at my skin afterwards, where his hands had been. I had marks, as if a flat iron had been pressed against me."

Has he asked scientists to measure the heat coming off his hands? "Yes," Manning replies. "They did that experiment at Birkbeck College."

And? "The instruments," he says, "showed no rise in temperature."

While I've never found Manning anything less than honest and believable, some of his acolytes' statements are of the kind that would strain most people's credulity. "I became smaller and smaller until I turned into a white bird - a gull maybe," one woman wrote, after attending a group meeting with him. "I flew out of the window and into the sky. At which point," she continued, "I thought maybe I would have a feeling of freedom - but no. I flew directly off up the A38."

Let's imagine that every aspect of the healing process can be ascribed to the mind and volition of the subject, I suggest to Manning. What if everything - the searing heat on my shoulders, the recovery of cancer victims - is merely some combination of auto-suggestion and an exaggerated placebo effect. Would that matter? "I have asked myself that question many times," he says. "My ultimate concern is that someone should be helped. I would be a fool if I claimed that a placebo effect couldn't play some part in it. But if you could show me beyond doubt that all i offer is a placebo, then yes - to be honest, I would be worried. But I know that's not the case. A lot of the work I've done has been with children and babies. I've had very good results with complete sceptics."

How was Brian Clough as a patient? "Well, when he first came, towards the very end of his life, he was not easy to deal with. It was a family member who first called me. He was initially bombastic and very rude - 'This is a load of bullshit' and so on - but gradually he actually looked forward to coming and I do believe the treatment helped him. I know that something is happening here."

When treating cancer sufferers, as he often does, says Manning, "I always tell people: I am not a miracle worker. Let me work with you two or three times. If there's no improvement I am not going to carry on endlessly. We have five possibilities. One: I can't do anything and I cannot say, even after 35 years, why what I'm doing hits the bull's eye with one person and fails to hit the board with someone else. Two: whatever I do may slow the progression of a disease; remember, people often come to me when all other possibilities have been exhausted. Three: you might find that healing stabilises the condition for a year, or five, or longer.

Four: you might find the problem remains but is greatly improved.

And the fifth: I always aim to knock the disease right out."

When he began working as a healer Manning says, "I was a complete atheist. It's the experiences I have had that have persuaded my there is something out there. Whether you call if God, cosmic consciousness, universal love...I think we're all talking about the same thing."

As the sun goes down, Manning's thoughts turn to the question of whether time is a uniquely human perception. "I have this idea," he says, "that there is no such thing as time; that time is a man-made concept. If all time was simultaneous, as I believe it to be, it would mean that there is no such thing as past, present or future. I think that would explain certain phenomena. i think scientists may one day come up with an explanation that has little to do with spirituality and everything to do with quantum physics."

I imagine that Manning is thinking back to his early years, when he was hailed as a clairvoyant. In June 1975, five days before the event, he predicted the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 66 at JFK Airport, which claimed the lives of 115 people. It's been many years, he says, since he was interested in such work. At this point I can't help telling Manning that i have several witnesses who will confirm the details of a dream of my own, in which a higher authority communicated to me that the exact scoreline in both legs of Manchester United's semifinal meeting with Sunderland in the League Cup earlier this year. This pre-sentiment, the details of which I tragically failed to share with William Hill, leaves Manning visibly underwhelmed. Of course, predicting the future takes you into dangerous and uncertain territory and, at worst, can leave you looking like an idiot. And yet, where Manning is concerned, I can't help but share David Frost's view: that the more science develops techniques that might measure Manning's experience, the more his life and achievements may come to be recognised and celebrated. "You can smell a charlatan," one of the healer's patients - an office-worker and not a believer in spiritualism - once told me. "And Matthew Manning isn't one of them."

Originally published in the May 2014 issue of British GQ.