The day I met Dan is one I will never forget. It was Christmas 1994. I was 27 and had been single for a few months. My friend, Donna, was always trying to matchmake, and she'd been on about her friend, Dan, for a while.

'You'd get on so well with him, Jo!' she'd tell me. I wasn’t that bothered really, but she kept talking about him, so I agreed to go out for lunch with her and a group of her friends, Dan among them. At 24, he was three years younger than me and worked as a health and safety inspector on building sites. He was great fun and good looking, too tall and dark with a lovely smile. There was an instant spark between us. We all went out for the evening after the lunch, and it went from there. He swept me off my feet.

We were both renting places in Essex at the time. I was saving up to buy a house of my own, and we decided we may as well look for a place together. We'd only been seeing each other for a few months, but it felt like the right thing to do I could really see myself spending the rest of my life with Dan. His sister was amazed. 'I cant believe that he's looking for a place with you,’ she said, laughing. 'I never thought he'd settle down.'

In May 1995, we bought a two bedroom Victorian cottage in Ramsden Bellhouse, a village just outside Billericay in Essex. We were blissfully happy there.

Dan and I often talked about having kids together, but we didn’t have immediate plans we were much too busy having fun. Dan was a real thrill seeker and always persuading me to do things I wouldn’t have dreamt of. He encouraged me to go skiing, which I'd always thought I would hate, but I ended up loving it. And on a holiday to America, he dragged me on a huge roller coaster. I screamed in terror, while Dan sat there laughing his head off.

On 9 August 1997, we were due to go to the wedding of Dan's cousin. I'd been out with Donna the night before; and it had been quite a late one. Dan was very healthy he didn't drink or smoke and had been playing squash while I was out boozing. At Sam that morning, I woke up feeling quite rough. But I kissed Dan good morning, and we chatted about what time we needed to leave for the wedding.

I went downstairs to make us both some tea, then brought the mugs back upstairs. I climbed back into bed next to Dan, and he suddenly sat upright and swung his legs out of the bed as if he was getting up. Then he just fell to the floor. It looked as though he was having a fit.

'Stop mucking about, Dan,' I said, laughing sleepily. But he didn't stop. Now alarmed, I leapt up and looked at him. He was turningblue and foaming at the mouth. In a panic, I ran to the phone and called an ambulance. The paramedic there told me over the phone how to do cardiopulmonary resuscitation [CPR] on Dan to try to get his heart going. I pumped his chest, giving him mouth to mouth and sobbing at him to come round. There was no response. When the paramedics arrived, they sent me downstairs and stayed in the bedroom with Dan. I could hear them shouting orders at each other, trying to resuscitate him. But after a few minutes, it all went quiet. One of the paramedics came downstairs. I knew what he was going to say: Dan was dead.

I was hysterical. They asked me if I wanted to go up and say goodbye to Dan before they took his body away, but I couldn't bear to see him like that. Within minutes, the house was full of official looking people police and a doctor to certify Dan's death. The rest of the day was a blur. My mum came round, and we had to get in touch with Dan's family, what was awful. I tormented myself that I hadn't performed the CPR properly, that I could have saved his lift if I'd done it better.

Mum got me some tranquillisers from the doctor to calm me down and took me back her house fox a few days. An inquest was held into Dan's death, and they discovered he'd had an undetected heart aneurysm, a swelling in an artery that had ruptured. It had probably been there for a long time, and his dad had died of a heart attack in his mid forties, so there may have been a family weakness. They said Dan probably died the minute he hit the floor so he was already dead when I was trying to restart his heart, and there was nothing more I, or anyone else, could have done to save him.

Although I was in shock, I wanted to return to the home Dan and I had shared. I couldn’t face going upstairs for a couple of days, but I did want to be back in the house. After all it was my home. The funeral was held on, 17 August. It was an unbearably sad day Dan's friends and family were in complete shock. None of it made sense. He was only 26 and had been so fit and healthy, with no warning of anything wrong. We had the wake at our house. I wandered round in a daze Princess Diana died a couple of weeks later but I was oblivious to it. I was grieving so much for Dan that I hardly noticed anything else. I just couldn't believe that the month before, we'd been happy together, laughing and planning a baby, and now he was gone.

I couldn't face going back to work – I was a magazine designer for a while. But I did try to get on with normal life. Donna and all my other friends were fantastically supportive. Eventually as time went on, I started to do the odd day in the office. I was still only 29, and I knew Dan would have wanted me to carry on with my life. But I couldn't think about meeting another man.

Then, abort a year after Dan died, Donna dragged me to a party and I got chatting to a man called Vince, a builder five years older than me. I thought he was lovely but didn't want to throw myself into a new relationship. I told him all about Dan, and he was very understanding and sympathetic. We started dating, Even that was quite difficult with some of Dan's friends and family they didn't think I should be seeing anyone else at that time. But I knew if the situation was reversed, I'd have wanted Dan to meet someone else.

Vince started to talk about going travelling. It was something I'd never done, and listening to him waxing lyrical about all the exotic places he was planning on seeing, I thought: 'What the hell I'll go with him!' I decided to rent out the house, and Vince and I went all around the world, visiting Singapore, India and Bali. It was just what I needed, and it helped bring Vince and me closer, too, as we got to spend time together in a different environment. We were away for six months, then came back home at Christmas and began renting a place together.

In April 1999, I became pregnant. We decided we needed a permanent place and would move back into my house. I had no problem going back there it was good to be home and the house always had a nice atmosphere, Vince was very sweet about it, too. He never suggested we make a new start somewhere else. I think, deep down, he must have found it hard to cope with knowing about Dan. After all, it wasn't as if I made a choice to leave Dan he was suddenly and cruelly taken away from me, and I suppose that could be quite hard for a new partner to cope with. But Vince was always understanding about it.

We redecorated the whole place before moved back in, so it felt like a new home. Our little boy, Henry, was born in December 1999, and Vince and I married in May 2001 We had the reception in our house. Of course I still thought about Dan, but my life had changed by then. I'd lost touch with most of Dan's friends and relatives, and I had my little family to think about. But Donna would¬ sometimes mention Dan when she came to¬ the house. She'd say: 'Oh, Jo, I'm sure he’s still here.' But I never noticed anything, so I didn't think much of it.

SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

At the beginning of 2003, I became pregnant again. We needed to enlarge the two bedroom house, so Vince added an extension on the back. We split the old bedroom the room where Dan died in two, and half of it, including the area where the bed had been became the bedroom for our new baby.

Grace was born in September. Right from the start, she slept badly, screaming at the top of her lungs several times in the night. I didn’t worry to start with. But by the age of two she was still doing it. It began to get quite stressful. She would scream wildly and come into our room four times a night, shaking with fear.

I tried everything to help her programmes to get kids to sleep, even a mild sedative - nothing ever worked. One night I heard Grace screaming and went into her room to find her cowering behind her chair, sobbing with fright. 'What’s wrong?' I asked, smoothing her hair. 'I'm scared,' she sobbed. 'Someone's in my room and they keep waking me up.'

I told myself it was a childish fear, that she was just seeing shadows, which made her, think someone was in the room. But I was shocked by the depth of her terror and started to think of comments our friends had made about the house, too. Although Vince and I had never felt anything was wrong in the house, others had. One friend, Ange, hated Grace's room. She came to visit us once and went up to see Grace. 'It's freezing in there,’ she said when she came downstairs.

I told her not to be ridiculous the heating was on full blast. She shook her head. Jo, I'm telling you, there's something not right about that room,' she said.

Donna was convinced Dan's ghost was in the house, too. She said the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end when she carne in. Then, last summer, I began to think she might be right. The pub next door to our house had a beer festival. It was a really fun afternoon, but the toilets were full, so Donna and I came back to the house to go to the loo. As she often did, Donna insisted: 'I'm sorry, Jo, but I'm sure Dan’s here.'
Exasperated, I cried: 'Well, if he's here, why doesn't he give us a sign?' At that moment the lights in the sitting room where we were standing, flickered on and off. We gasped. Not long afterwards, I had a party to celebrate my birthday. Lots of our friends came round. One of Vince's mates, Alan was chatting to Donna. Suddenly, he stared, as though he was looking at something over her shoulder.
'What is it?' Donna asked. Alan shook his head. 'It was weird I thought I saw a man behind you,' he said. 'He was in his mid-twenties, tall and dark.' Donna and I looked at each other. We knew he meant Dan.
I had to take the idea seriously then. Maybe Dan's spirit didn't like me living there with a new man and was trying to protest. I didn't want to push Dan out if he wanted to be there, but more than anything I wanted him to leave Grace alone. The poor little mite looked exhausted. So when a friend told me about a spirit clearer called Susie Shaw, I wondered if it would be worth a go. Although I hadn't sensed Dan in the house myself,

I was open minded about the existence of ghosts and was convinced by then that something strange was going on.

A SPIRITUAL SOLUTION

When Susie came round, I explained Grace's sleeping problems, but didn't tell her about Dan. She walked round the house, trying to pick up on the energies.

When she joined us in the living room, she looked at me and said: 'Your house is beautiful, but there's obviously something going on here. I feel a great sadness. There's a youngmale spirit stuck in Grace's bedroom. I was overwhelmed by emotion when I was in there some tragedy has happened.'

I broke down and told Susie all about Dan. She said she was going to go up there and spend a bit of time with him to see if she could persuade him to move on. She stayed upstairs for some time. I sat anxiously in the living room, hoping Susie could help, but also worried about forcing Dan out if he didn't want to go. When Susie came downstairs, she said: 'Dan didn't realise he was dead. This can happen when someone has died suddenly and at a young age. There's a sense they had so much to achieve and hadn't got to do any of it.'

She told me she had explained everything to Dan and that now he understood. 'He wants you to know he still loves you and wishes for you to be happy,' said Susie. 'He also misses his two sisters he was close to his family so I knew he was ready to pass. I called on members of his family in the spirit world and the Archangel Gabriel to come and take him over. He went very peacefully.'

I couldn't stop crying. It broke my heart to hear Dan hadn't realised he was dead. But Susie reassured me it was right to help him pass on. Then she performed a fire ceremony, a Native American ritual to help us let go of negative emotions. In a bowl, she poured salt to represent the earth and rum for water, then lit the mixture the fire is meant to cleanse everything away.

Afterwards, I felt very emotional. Susie said that, subconsciously, I might have realised Dan was still around, even though I hadn't noticed him consciously. So this time, it really was goodbye. I felt as though I was grieving again. Yet I also felt lighter and freer. When Vince came home that night, he said the atmosphere felt brighter, too. Like me, he hadn't noticed anything before, but he could still tell something had changed. Amazingly, Grace has slept through every single night since Susie's visit. She's never been like this before. One morning, I even had to go and wake her up, which was unbelievable.

Dan and I had a lovely relationship, and what happened was absolutely tragic he was so young and had so much to offer. But I know he wants me to be happy, and I am. I feel we can all move on now. SPIRIT & DESTINY

• For a consultation with Susie Shaw, call 07704 289199.