Communicating with the spirit world, or “hearing spirit” as Ashley calls it, is something he claims to have been doing since he was a child. “At first it was like hearing a foreign language. I started training when I was 18 but didn’t start working until I was 25,” he says. Ashley claims that he has always heard from spirits, but that he became “closer” with them after suffering a major stroke in his early 20s. The stroke killed a third of the brain cells on the left side of Ashley’s brain, and he thinks his closeness with the spirit world “assisted” his recovery. These days, he works full-time as a civil servant and does his mediumship in the evenings and on weekends.