The Seagull | Dangerous Memories Ep 2

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Speaker 9 Tortoise

Speaker 10 Just a warning before we start.

Speaker 10 This episode contains references to child abuse and to sexual assault.

Speaker 11 I cannot believe it, I found it.

Speaker 10 Will you read me the email you sent her? Yes.

Speaker 11 This is so surreal. I'm just going to grab my glasses.
I'm a bit on the blinder side of life.

Speaker 11 I cannot believe it.

Speaker 10 There's going to be lots of stuff about Anne, too.

Speaker 10 Are you ready? I'm ready.

Speaker 10 I'm with Fipsy in her East London flat. We're sitting at her kitchen table and she's scrolling through old emails on her laptop from the time in her life that she spent with the healer, Anne Craig.

Speaker 10 We recorded our conversation over a couple of days in the autumn of 2023. Like everyone I've talked to for this investigation, she had a lot to get off her chest.

Speaker 10 It's not really the sort of story you can fit into one afternoon. It was the first time she'd really relived her experience in this way.

Speaker 10 She told family and friends, but never in this depth. So once she started...

Speaker 11 I was part of a holistic therapy cult.

Speaker 10 The words began to pour out. And on my second visit, she discovered something she thought she'd lost.

Speaker 11 Her name is Anne Craig, and she tells people that she breaks them down and builds them back together.

Speaker 10 It's an email she wrote detailing her experience with Anne from start to finish.

Speaker 11 On her website she states eight sessions as the ideal amount but I saw her twice a month for two years with no signs on her part of slowing down. The fact is, I got out two years in.
That was that.

Speaker 11 It's okay for me, sure, I must have some leftover trauma. I am sure of that.
But what I am most afraid of is my friends who still go and see her.

Speaker 11 And I'm looking for help to help my friends who I love.

Speaker 10 So Fipsy got out

Speaker 10 but this experience wasn't over for her because a question was beginning to form in her head.

Speaker 10 What is it that I've just got out of

Speaker 10 and how can I get my friends out before they go deeper?

Speaker 10 It's the same question that's been driving me through these conversations.

Speaker 10 What was Anne Craig really trying to do

Speaker 10 and why was she doing it?

Speaker 10 But by the time Fipsy was asking this question,

Speaker 10 for another young woman, it was already too late.

Speaker 10 I'm Grace Hughes Hallett and from Tortoise, this is Dangerous Memories, Episode 2, The Sea Gull.

Speaker 10 Let's rewind.

Speaker 10 The last time you have Fipsy in episode one, she was in her fourth session with Anne.

Speaker 10 She was years away from writing the email that you just heard.

Speaker 10 It was during that fourth visit that she let Anne in on her big secret, that she was struggling with her sexuality.

Speaker 10 And it was then that Anne introduced Fipsy to the idea that there might be something else at play, something sinister,

Speaker 10 something at the root that explained it all.

Speaker 10 She suggested that Fhipsy might have been a victim of sexual abuse.

Speaker 10 But Fipsy had no memory of being abused.

Speaker 10 Anne said she'd repressed it. It's a terrifying thought, but one that Anne Craig said they could deal with and unpick if they work together.

Speaker 10 So began a series of suggestions that would skew the way that Fipsy looked at the world and the people closest to her.

Speaker 10 And things started to escalate outside of the sessions too.

Speaker 10 Along with a couple of the Florence Art School friends who were also seeing Anne, Fipsy was about to take another step out of her own world and further into Anne's.

Speaker 11 One of my friends knew a guy who owned this disused pub that was to be demolished at some point in the future and replaced with apartments.

Speaker 11 But he did not want squatters in there. So we were like the squatting anti-squatters.

Speaker 10 So Fipsy Fipsy and the other two moved into what would become a sort of Anne Craig client commune.

Speaker 10 It was a big, dilapidated, empty pub called the Cowshed on Labrick Grove in West London.

Speaker 10 The disused pub itself was on the ground floor. The girls' rooms were on the grubby floor above.
And a studio space on the top was where they worked on their art.

Speaker 10 There was no hot water and unreliable electricity. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but Fipsy and her friends were all bohemian artist types.
They found it exciting.

Speaker 11 I mean, not only were we all seeing Anne, but we were also painting and making music, and we'd put on exhibitions and gig nights.

Speaker 10 So how many of you were there?

Speaker 11 There were at least three of us.

Speaker 10 And all three of you were seeing Anne Gray. Yes.

Speaker 10 One of the women who lived in the pub would prefer not to be named in this podcast.

Speaker 10 The other was Fipsy's friend Huey, a close friend from Florence. Fipsy remembers how she felt when she found out Huey was moving in.

Speaker 11 Huey moved in shortly after I moved in

Speaker 11 and I was really excited because she was one of my best mates and I couldn't wait to have her there

Speaker 11 and

Speaker 11 she had just started seeing Anne. which made me even more excited because this is like great part of the inner circle.
I don't need to hide anything from her.

Speaker 11 So that was really nice for me at the time.

Speaker 10 Huey was a year or two younger than Fipsy, but from a similar world. Posh family, all-girls boarding school and with a passion and talent for painting.

Speaker 10 Fipsy describes Huey to me as a very kind, good friend and the life and soul of the party in Florence.

Speaker 12 A friend used to say that it looked like dressing up box being sick on me.

Speaker 10 This is Huey.

Speaker 12 I used to wear, you know, crazy tights and boots and tutus and waistcoats on a different waistcoat and, I don't know, different crazy coloured hair.

Speaker 10 Huey had also been told about this incredible healer lady by friends in Florence.

Speaker 12 So I left Charles Cecil in December 2009 when I was 22. And I moved back to London and I was just this tiny frog spawn in a massive lake and I didn't know who I was and I

Speaker 12 for some reason just couldn't be the creative person that I'd been in Florence and I just felt very lost and I remembered about this you know this woman and I asked my friend if I could have her contact details and I picked up the phone and and just called her

Speaker 10 and shortly after that Huey began on her journey to discover the root of her problems.

Speaker 10 When she moved into the pub in 2010 she'd been seeing Anne Craig for around six months

Speaker 10 and Anne seemed pleased that the girls were all living together,

Speaker 10 all following her guidance under one roof.

Speaker 11 All three of us were very devoted to the work.

Speaker 10 Fipsy told me that by this point they were all deep in their work with Anne and would spur each other on.

Speaker 10 They could talk freely with each other about what was coming up in their sessions.

Speaker 11 We didn't have to mind our P's and Q's, monitor the kind of extreme stuff that we would be sharing with each other about our own sessions with her.

Speaker 11 We could speak very authentically about our experiences with Anne without worrying about it.

Speaker 10 And what kind of things were you talking about? What were the themes and what was the tone?

Speaker 11 The themes were how all these other people that were living from the head were so poor in spirit and so unenriched and unfulfilled. We had delusions of grandeur in a way.

Speaker 11 You know, we were the special ones. We were the ones that didn't need to wear bike helmets because the spirits protected us from accidents.

Speaker 10 Did she tell you that? Yep.

Speaker 10 Like Fipsy and a few others from the art school crowd, Huey was going to regular sessions at Anne's house. They'd have a cup of chamomile tea, go up to the pink room, sit on the comfy chairs.

Speaker 10 They'd get down on the floor with rolls of paper and coloured pens to write things with their left hands for Anne to interpret. Dreams would be analyzed for hours and hours on end.

Speaker 10 But Anne required more from them than just the sessions and Huey in particular was a very diligent student. She was devoting huge chunks of every day to Anne.

Speaker 12 You'd wake up, write your dream down in the early days and send it to her to analyse.

Speaker 10 This is how Huey described a typical day.

Speaker 12 And then she will have sent emails back with questions. So the

Speaker 12 writing work would be informed by her question so you'd write her question and then and then it's automatic writing so you'd write with your left hand so quickly that it's just squiggles but it's your thought process so squiggle squiggle squiggle and all the thoughts pouring out but that's where information would come or answers would come or you'd you'd work something out because you're not thinking you're just free flow writing So that's kind of the work involved.

Speaker 12 A lot of writing like that. And then you'd go and burn it

Speaker 12 release everything you'd written about. If emotions came up through the writing, I had to deal with it.

Speaker 10 Burning was a core part of Anne's philosophy. The bad energy disappears into the atmosphere and I have to wonder if there was another reason.

Speaker 10 Given everything that's happened, I've wondered whether telling her clients to burn everything is perhaps an indicator of the fact that Anne knew what she was doing was unusual, unusual, unorthodox,

Speaker 10 or that it might even get her in trouble. And that's not the only thing that makes me think that.

Speaker 10 I've also been told that Anne encouraged some of her clients to move from their usual email accounts to an encrypted email server called Hushmail.

Speaker 10 Why would a therapist, healer, self-development coach, someone in that position tell their clients to do

Speaker 10 In those first few months, how many hours a day were you doing this work for Anne?

Speaker 12 I'd say when I moved into the cow shed, I stepped it up because I was more inspired by being living with my friends who were working with her and wanting to do well and excel.

Speaker 12 You know, when you're in your room writing, which is quite lonely, it's comforting that you've got someone next door doing something similar. So it was quite a, yeah, it's just like nice.

Speaker 12 Felt very normal, didn't feel weird in any way. So then I probably would do maybe, I don't know,

Speaker 12 a couple of hours in the morning, and then maybe

Speaker 12 a couple of hours in the evening. And then in the day, I'd be doing art, painting or

Speaker 12 seeing friends. It was all pretty light at the start.

Speaker 10 The fact that Huey describes four hours a day of locking herself in her room and doing her homework for Anne as light is pretty revealing.

Speaker 10 During that time, Fipsy and the others were encouraged to follow some guidelines from Anne.

Speaker 11 I remember she also told me to be very careful about other things that I was reading, and she discouraged me fervently from reading any newspapers, listening to the radio, reading any other books, in fact, reading anything at all.

Speaker 10 Not all of Anne's clients ended up in the pub, and not all ended up seeing her long term.

Speaker 10 And not all of them wanted to speak on the podcast, but we have spoken with many of them.

Speaker 10 Some were spooked by Anne's approach and stopped seeing her after a couple of sessions. Anne's parting message to one of them, you better start wearing your bike helmet.

Speaker 10 There are lots of parallels in Huey and Phipsy's stories. And there's something they both mentioned to me which I think is important,

Speaker 10 because because it feels like a clue to what Anne's goals or intentions might have been.

Speaker 10 It's a book she gave to both of them. It's called Jonathan Livingston's Seagull.

Speaker 10 Fhipsy described it as a short novella, a parable.

Speaker 11 About a seagull that is breaking, breaking, literally flying the nest and breaking free from its family unit in order to go against the grain because the seagull has always felt different.

Speaker 11 So the seagull should live its best life and not act like the seagull that is expected of it.

Speaker 11 That was my first segue into being brainwashed, was reading that book and cutting out all other bits of information.

Speaker 10 What did you see in that book?

Speaker 10 What did it make you feel?

Speaker 11 It made me feel like Anne could see me. Funnily enough, and I've never thought about this before, so it's a really good question, but it made me feel validated in some way

Speaker 11 because she had seen something it felt as though she had seen something in me and almost in a bespoke manner offered me this book because she knew that i personally would benefit from it and so when i read it i felt like i was jonathan livingston seagull

Speaker 10 it acted a bit like a poetic instruction manual Follow these steps and you too will become the seagull.

Speaker 10 It's become a helpful way of thinking about the journey she wanted Fipsy and Huey to embark on. But if it's an insight into Anne's methodology, it still doesn't take me to the why.

Speaker 10 Once you become the seagull,

Speaker 10 what's next?

Speaker 10 For Huey in particular, the book had a real effect.

Speaker 12 It really stuck with me because being alone and working alone and just dedicating himself to his gift, he reached enlightenment, but he had had to give up everyone to do it i kept thinking about it this idea of you have to leave the flock if you if you're going to

Speaker 12 make any change within yourself or find your true purpose you have to leave the flock and and also talked about you should always say we come into the world alone and we leave the world alone and no one wants to see it no one wants to accept it but we're always alone and i remember once lying on the floor in my flat and I just felt, I think I was crying and I was just terrified about this idea that I was truly alone and I had to accept it and I had to leave everyone and

Speaker 12 I definitely didn't know what was coming.

Speaker 10 It's hard to wrap your head round. Huey was taking it to heart.
She was preparing to leave the flock.

Speaker 10 Why would she follow this hugely upsetting piece of advice without question?

Speaker 10 It's something that Huey's often brought up in our conversations.

Speaker 10 She really worries that people will listen to this and think to themselves, oh, well, this is just a bunch of silly posh girls falling into a silly trap.

Speaker 10 But Huey thinks there's a significant detail from her own life that it's important to share,

Speaker 10 which she believes is what made her so vulnerable to Anne from the start.

Speaker 10 When Huey was in her early 20s, living in Florence, she was sexually assaulted, an experience that, understandably, really affected her.

Speaker 10 Anne explained to her that that would not have happened to her if she had not been assaulted as a child.

Speaker 10 And Huey says that Anne focused on this event, questioning why this had happened to Huey, and if it meant there was something more sinister to uncover about her childhood.

Speaker 10 It had a profound effect on Huey to hear that from Anne.

Speaker 10 And remember, she was spending hours and hours with this woman, over weeks, months and years.

Speaker 10 She was a frog in boiling water.

Speaker 10 The temperature was rising, but so slowly that she didn't notice.

Speaker 10 Whatever her ultimate objective,

Speaker 10 Anne Craig Craig succeeded in the first crucial step.

Speaker 10 Whilst drumming in this mantra of isolation and independence, she was simultaneously training them to be entirely dependent on and answerable to her.

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Speaker 2 This message is brought to you by AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 5 You know, we spend a lot of time here separating fact from claim.

Speaker 6 And when it comes to mobile networks, that distinction matters.

Speaker 5 When AT ⁇ T makes a claim, it's one you can count on. AT ⁇ T is America's fastest and most reliable wireless network.

Speaker 8 And that's not opinion, it's data.

Speaker 5 Based on Root Metrics United States Root Score Report, 1H 2025, tested with best commercially available smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types.

Speaker 8 Your experiences may vary. Rootmetrics rankings are not an endorsement of ATT.

Speaker 10 And it's around this time, in 2011, that Huey and Fipsy's paths diverged.

Speaker 10 Despite Fipsy opening up to Anne in her fourth session, Months later, she was no closer to understanding herself, or to getting an answer to her burning question, am I gay?

Speaker 10 Have you ever heard the Philip Larkin poem that begins, they fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

Speaker 10 It's really not uncommon for therapists or counsellors to be interested in a client's childhood or in their early relationships with their parents.

Speaker 10 But Anne seemed to Fipsy to be singularly focused on that. In all the hours of sessions, whenever she steered the conversation to her sexuality, Anne redirected it back to Fipsy's parents.

Speaker 11 Anne's entry point was always through my parents.

Speaker 10 Over time,

Speaker 10 Fipsy's thinking shifted. Through the work with Anne, an altered version of Fipsy's childhood was being created.

Speaker 11 Always through

Speaker 11 destroying

Speaker 11 the happy relationship that I had with them. And she would find a way to poison that.

Speaker 11 And I was so vulnerable, I just took it.

Speaker 10 It was her family that was the problem.

Speaker 10 They were the blockage, preventing her from going on her journey to healing.

Speaker 11 If you remember, I mentioned that Anne's big belief system was centered around people who are from the heart.

Speaker 11 and people who are from the head. Heart equals good, head equals bad.
Suddenly, automatically, almost everyone I know is from the head and therefore automatically a kind of enemy.

Speaker 11 Us versus them, heart versus head, good versus bad. So it was very easy in that sense, once she'd blanketed this hue over everything in my world and life and everyone's world and lives.

Speaker 11 for me to

Speaker 11 find it selfish when my friends called me, to find it outrageous if my parents said they wanted to see me because they hadn't seen me for three months, to find it despicable that the same friend has called me three times in a row.

Speaker 11 How dare they? They are jutting and jabbing into my life. They are pecking away at my

Speaker 11 work and the journey that I'm on, that I'm trying to do. They are interrupting my healing, and they're all from the head.

Speaker 10 Fipsy pulled away from her parents, her siblings and her friends. She ignored all of their calls.
She stopped answering their messages.

Speaker 10 And over time, the suggestions became darker, more troubling, and harder to ignore. Anne raised the possibility over and over again that Fipsy's parents had sexually abused her when she was a child.

Speaker 11 There were periods where I worried that I was a victim and that I just hadn't seen it yet. Again, with the two sides of my mind.
One side telling me, what if it's true? What if it's true?

Speaker 11 What if it's true? And the other side telling me, no, it's not.

Speaker 10 How did you land on being sure that it wasn't true? Gut instinct.

Speaker 11 Knowledge of myself.

Speaker 11 The fact that I'd never once questioned that before meeting her. The fact that I'd lived a very happy life up until my grappling with my sexuality.
Everything had been great.

Speaker 11 I'd had a lovely childhood.

Speaker 11 You know, with really unconditionally loving parents, that's the sad thing, is that she totally managed to change the way I saw that for a while.

Speaker 10 It's just interesting that

Speaker 10 others

Speaker 10 fell into that trap and you didn't.

Speaker 11 I think my gayness saved me.

Speaker 11 I was starting to get really, really angry about the fact that every time I brought up my original purpose for going to see her, she would bat it out of the court and just continue to talk about my family my mother my father my grandfather my great-grandmother my great great this that and the other and it really started to piss me off how would you bring it up

Speaker 11 i would in a session say something like an you know this thing i'm still worrying about being gay and then she would say fipsy we it's because we still haven't done the work about your mother we still haven't finished the work on your father

Speaker 11 We still haven't finished this, that, or the other. She would just deflect, deflect, deflect.
And so something in me was like, uh,

Speaker 11 excuse me,

Speaker 11 we're still here and you just keep ignoring me. What are you going to do about it?

Speaker 11 So that little inner bit of me, the poor tiny gay bit that was just knocking on the door of my consciousness and was just being fervently ignored, was starting to get pissed off.

Speaker 10 Six months into her time at the cowshed pub, Fipsy was offered a job. Someone wanted her to travel to Austria and paint.

Speaker 11 A big commission. It was a big, big canvas.
And I was asked to depict a scene around the dinner table with three brothers who were all adults.

Speaker 11 So I remember being really nervous to tell Anne that I would be relocating to Vienna for three months because something in my instinct told me that that would anger her.

Speaker 10 Fipsy's instinct was right.

Speaker 10 When she told Anne about this big opportunity, the news did not go down well.

Speaker 11 She was really annoyed with me. She fought against that trip big time.

Speaker 10 Why did she fight against the trip?

Speaker 11 To Anne's mind, me going away for three months was a huge disservice to the work we were doing

Speaker 11 and a huge disservice to her personally because what it would mean for her is that she would have to work triply hard to tap into my energy. And that was selfish of me.

Speaker 11 Even though I was still very devoted to her, I was starting to get annoyed. And I eventually eventually told her, look, I have to go to Vienna.
I've got to go.

Speaker 10 Fipsy bought her ticket and got on the plane. It's a really good thing.
Leaving Anne behind in London.

Speaker 11 It was like the cutting of the umbilical cord because just by virtue of that distance, I didn't speak to her every day.

Speaker 10 Without Anne, Fipsy was free to think.

Speaker 11 And then one day I woke up and I had simply had enough. Enough was enough.
I was done.

Speaker 11 And I just thought, right, I've got to figure this out once and for all. The truth is in me and nobody else, which is important because remember, I thought she had the truth.
She hadn't helped me.

Speaker 11 So I did just that. I sat in the bath.
I made a bath and I sat in it. I have to admit, I rolled a gigantic joint and I sat there for five hours simply visualizing my exoskeleton being broken open.

Speaker 11 My skin, let's say, just my outside self just opening up and for the truth of my sexuality to make itself known to me. And then I woke up the next morning and it was just knowledge and that was it.

Speaker 11 I woke up and just realised I'm gay.

Speaker 11 Guess who the first person was that I told?

Speaker 11 Anne fucking Craig.

Speaker 10 Fipsy called Anne almost immediately. She wanted to tell her more than anyone else that she'd finally arrived at her answer.

Speaker 11 And thus began the rest of my life. Suddenly I was all in love with life again and literally exactly in this period I started souring against Anne.

Speaker 10 Anne didn't seem excited for her. With this new knowledge, Fipsy's dependence on Anne had been broken.
They had an argument in a session when Fipsy challenged Anne over her interpretation of a dream.

Speaker 10 Fipsy stopped going to Anne after that, and stopped calling her as well.

Speaker 10 And then a little while later, Anne called Fipsy to say that she thought they should stop seeing each other.

Speaker 10 That was it.

Speaker 10 It was over.

Speaker 10 In the months after her breakup with Anne, once the initial wave of relief had passed, Fipsy started to really think about what she'd just been through.

Speaker 10 She read a lot,

Speaker 10 and she started comparing her experience to similar testimonies she found online.

Speaker 10 And the more she read, the more she began to think that she hadn't just escaped a rogue healer, but maybe

Speaker 10 she had been brainwashed into something more sinister.

Speaker 10 And a year later, she was sitting at her laptop writing that email.

Speaker 11 Her name is Anne Craig, and she tells people that she breaks them down down and builds them back together.

Speaker 10 To an expert in cults.

Speaker 11 It's okay for me, sure, I must have some leftover trauma. I am sure of that.
But what I am most afraid of is my friends who still go and see her.

Speaker 11 And I'm looking for help, to help my friends who I love.

Speaker 11 I need to coax them into a place of trust, but somehow help them understand that they are victims of a sick, disturbing cult masquerading as a compassionate, kind, and most of all, knowledgeable woman who has contacts with the spirit world and, at the end of the day, always knows best.

Speaker 11 What can I do?

Speaker 10 I've wondered if Phipsy's right.

Speaker 10 Was she sucked into a cult?

Speaker 10 Maybe not a cult like the ones that might come to mind, the Moonies or Jonestown with hundreds of followers. But then they're not all like that.

Speaker 10 Sometimes they exist on a smaller scale. hidden from view.

Speaker 10 What makes them similar and cultish is how the leader exerts their control.

Speaker 10 So let's say Anne was using cult tactics.

Speaker 10 What was it all about?

Speaker 10 Was it sex?

Speaker 10 If it had been a male therapist, that probably would have been my first thought, but there's no evidence so far to suggest that. Was it money?

Speaker 10 She was charging the women around £90 a session, which was a pretty standard London rate for the time.

Speaker 10 Was it power? Perhaps, Perhaps. But to what end?

Speaker 10 The only person who knows the answers to these questions is

Speaker 10 Anne.

Speaker 10 And we do want to get in touch with her.

Speaker 10 But

Speaker 10 some of her former clients are wary about Anne.

Speaker 10 They've been nervous that she might try and talk them out of appearing on this podcast.

Speaker 10 Which is why, for now, Huey is the best way to get closer to the the truth. Because if Fipsy managed to escape Anne's web, Huey became completely entangled in it.

Speaker 10 And in doing so, discovered more about Anne Craig than perhaps anyone.

Speaker 14 Hey, Ryan Reynolds here, wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.

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Speaker 2 This message is brought to you by AT ⁇ T.

Speaker 5 You know, we spend a lot of time here separating fact from claim.

Speaker 6 And when it comes to mobile networks, that distinction matters.

Speaker 5 When ATT makes a claim, it's one you can count on. ATT is America's fastest and most reliable wireless network.

Speaker 8 And that's not opinion, it's data.

Speaker 5 Based on Rootmetrics United States Root Score Report, 1H 2025, tested with best commercially available smartphones on three national mobile networks across all available network types, your experiences may vary.

Speaker 8 Root metrics rankings are not an endorsement of ATT.

Speaker 10 Me and one of my producers went to meet Huey's mum, Sarah, and her stepdad Henry.

Speaker 10 Sarah is the friend of my dad who told him about this story four years ago, where it all started for me.

Speaker 10 Henry picked us up from the local station and drove us to his and Sarah's home.

Speaker 10 They live in an enormous 16th century manor house.

Speaker 10 To get to it, you drive through big gates, past a gatehouse and through the grounds down a long drive.

Speaker 10 The house itself looks out over manicured lawns and topiary, stretching all the way down to a sparkling river below.

Speaker 10 Sarah came out to greet me and producer Immy on the front lawn when we arrived. Wow.

Speaker 10 This is amazing. Amazing.
Amazing.

Speaker 10 How are you?

Speaker 10 How are you feeling?

Speaker 10 A bit vulnerable. Yeah.

Speaker 12 It was so weird.

Speaker 10 Hi, Amy. Hi, Sarah.

Speaker 13 It's so funny.

Speaker 13 Someone I said so confidently to you, you know, I can talk about getting her back, you know, like it's my favourite subject you know and I hadn't gone back until last night and then I started sort of crying and I thought I can't deal with this tonight so I've just been trying to go over it this morning

Speaker 13 it's interesting your life's crying

Speaker 10 before we'd even put our bags down she was offering us plates of homemade cheese biscuits

Speaker 10 the biscuits were followed by a lunch that she and her husband Henry had made for us cold pea soup pheasant stew wine, and pavlova

Speaker 10 all laid out beautifully at a large garden table on the terrace.

Speaker 13 And then this table.

Speaker 13 This fell down. I hope yourself hear me.
Oh, fine, it's the fine.

Speaker 8 I've got this very good guy who does some forestry around here. And he came, he's got this sort of thing, you know, where he sort of milled.

Speaker 10 Sarah, her home, her hospitality exuded warmth and ease of spirit. But as we were setting up our microphones, the weight of this experience for her was clear.

Speaker 10 Go on.

Speaker 13 What am I going to call her? Because

Speaker 13 I hate using her name.

Speaker 13 But if I say that woman, that's going to come across really badly. I always referred to her as AC, but then that doesn't work.

Speaker 10 You don't like to say her name?

Speaker 13 Well, I mean, do you think it's better if I do?

Speaker 10 Yes, probably. If you can.
Yep. All right.

Speaker 10 Why don't you like say it?

Speaker 13 Well, because it makes her human, you know.

Speaker 13 She's got a name.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 13 Whereas she's inhuman.

Speaker 10 When Huey first told Sarah about Anne, Sarah felt optimistic.

Speaker 13 And the main thing I remember her saying was, Mum, she only takes the very special ones.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 at the time I thought, well, you know, obviously, you know, Huey is very special. So obviously she, you know, accept Huey.

Speaker 10 Sarah had benefited from practicing yoga over the years, and she thought, maybe this is a similar kind of thing.

Speaker 13 We all need a bit of help, and you know, yoga was great for me, and this lady maybe will be great for Huey. And her friends were going.

Speaker 10 It was a few months in, though, when Sarah's optimism turned to something else.

Speaker 10 Huey had told her that she was putting on an art exhibition at the cowshed pub and invited her along. Huey's style was true-to-life seated portraits in oil.

Speaker 10 Sarah was really excited to see her latest work.

Speaker 13 And there was this pile of dead bodies. And so the subjects were very sinister and very gruesome.

Speaker 10 Of Huey's paintings.

Speaker 13 Huey's paintings, you know, weren't, you know, lovely portraits anymore.

Speaker 13 There was this pile of dead bodies.

Speaker 10 For a mother, it left a worrying mark, signalled a change, a window into what was going on with her daughter.

Speaker 13 There were two other girls in the cowshed

Speaker 13 who

Speaker 13 their mothers

Speaker 13 were definitely worried about them. And I think one of the girls may have cut off contact with her mother altogether, I think.

Speaker 13 So there was definitely a worry

Speaker 13 that something really odd was going on.

Speaker 10 Something odd was going on.

Speaker 10 Huey was becoming more engrossed in her work with Anne and closer to the root.

Speaker 10 Was there a turning point for you when things stopped being such a positive experience?

Speaker 12 Yeah, which I guess is quite a few months on. And I think in a session it came up that maybe something had happened with a family member.

Speaker 12 And Anne asked me one evening to ask in my dream, you know, what

Speaker 12 happened.

Speaker 12 So that's what I did.

Speaker 12 And I had this dream that that was cryptic to me didn't make sense i was sitting the dream was i was sitting in a flying car and flying above above um the sky and i was holding a teddy bear and she called me and she was like huey i know exactly what's happened to you come for the come for the session

Speaker 12 so i went and did the usual you know had our cup of tea went upstairs sat on the floor chose a colour um and started asking. So

Speaker 12 she would ask, what happened to you? What did this person do? And I'd get nothing. I'd maybe draw things or get a word, a cryptic word.
And after, and the sessions, my sessions were quite long.

Speaker 12 It was sort of like often like three or four hours. And so I was pretty exhausted.
And she said, look, I know what happened. Okay.
I'll tell you what happened.

Speaker 12 Your dream and you holding the teddy bear told me that this person already raped you and that's that was the first time where anything around sexual abuse had come up.

Speaker 10 Huey left the session feeling strange.

Speaker 10 She fell asleep on the bus home and when she woke up her muscles and bones were aching.

Speaker 12 And I think at the time it was like, oh maybe this is this must be real because I'm feeling so much from it. It's hard to remember the details isn't it?

Speaker 12 But I just felt very frightened about going home. I don't know if I should go.
I'm quite scared.

Speaker 12 So a lot of mistrust was coming. She's like, you need to go back for Christmas with your family and this will be the last time that you ever have Christmas with them again.

Speaker 10 So Huey did as instructed.

Speaker 10 Christmases are a big deal in Sarah and Huey's family. There's lots of drinking and dancing and Huey was usually at the centre of it.
But this time she stayed quiet.

Speaker 10 She observed her family from the sidelines, looked for clues to understand who these people really were and what they were hiding.

Speaker 12 And then

Speaker 12 came back from Christmas and that was sort of when, yeah, I

Speaker 12 really started to cut them off

Speaker 12 and that's when the That's when things start to get more unusual, I suppose. I found myself feeling very attached to her and very in need of her because she has these answers that

Speaker 12 I can't access any other way other than through her.

Speaker 12 I don't know what was going on in my brain, but I guess the need to prove that I could be strong meant that I just went along and kind of expelled everyone from my life.

Speaker 12 And around this time, a couple of Anne's clients who had been friends of mine stopped working with her.

Speaker 12 I don't know if it was a really big rejection for Anne, but Anne really sort of ramped up her focus on me, I felt, and I started seeing her once a week and she started saying,

Speaker 10 oh,

Speaker 12 I don't need those women to do this work. I don't need them to get to the light.

Speaker 10 After Christmas, Sarah received a letter from Huey.

Speaker 10 In it, Huey said she needed time out from Sarah and wouldn't be seeing her for a while. Sarah was panicking now.

Speaker 10 So, despite Huey having asked for space, Sarah tried calling her to ask her directly what was going on. Was there something she didn't know?

Speaker 13 And as soon as Huey heard my voice, she put the telephone down and I thought, oh, maybe it was a mistake.

Speaker 13 So I called from the landline. Different number.

Speaker 13 Huey picks it up, hears my voice, puts the telephone down.

Speaker 13 And at this point, I go into complete panic. And I think I'm pretty sure I just come out of the shower.
And I've no idea what sort of undress I was in, but I know I had streaming wet hair.

Speaker 13 And I just ran out of our flat.

Speaker 10 At the time, Sarah was staying in a flat she owns in London. She ran out the door to where she knew Huey was living nearby.

Speaker 13 The door opened and out came Huey. And I can see it like yesterday.

Speaker 13 She saw me,

Speaker 13 she looked very surprised to see me, her eyes sort of you know widened and looked

Speaker 13 amazed, surprised and then they glazed over

Speaker 13 and they just literally glazed over like a zombie and she walked down the steps, got onto her bicycle and I said, Huey, Huey, don't cut me out of your life, don't cut me out of your life.

Speaker 13 And she bicycled away and that was the last time I saw her in six years.

Speaker 10 Coming up on dangerous memories.

Speaker 12 And I just broke down on her floor and was like, please help me. Whatever you do, when you go in there, do not say my name, do not say that you're worse than that.

Speaker 13 Somebody,

Speaker 13 some kind person gave me the number of a private detective.

Speaker 13 And then she told me all the kind of things that they'd found out about Anne and I don't know, just slowly everything was falling into place.

Speaker 12 And I was like, that's my mother. Why is my mother outside Anne's house?

Speaker 10 In the past, Anne Craig has issued categorical denials of any wrongdoing. She has denied responsibility for mentally abusing or psychologically manipulating clients.

Speaker 10 She has said she is the victim of a campaign of harassment.

Speaker 10 If you're looking to speak to a reputable therapist or know someone who is, you can search the Therapist Directory compiled by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy or BACP.

Speaker 10 Only registered members accredited by the Professional Standards Authority are listed, which ensures they meet high professional and ethical standards and are fully trained and qualified.

Speaker 10 Just go to bacp.co.uk.

Speaker 10 If you'd like to get in touch with us about your own experience, you can send us an email. It's dangerousmemories at tortoisemedia.com

Speaker 10 Thank you for listening to Dangerous Memories.

Speaker 10 If you're enjoying this podcast, you can listen to all episodes today by subscribing to Tortoise Plus on Apple Podcasts or by downloading the Tortoise app.

Speaker 10 And you can listen to our previous investigations right here on Tortoise Investigates.

Speaker 10 Or to hear more podcasts from our award-winning newsroom, search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 Dangerous Memories was written and reported by me, Grace Hushallett, and by Gary Marshall. The producer is Gary Marshall.
Additional reporting and production from Imogen Harper.

Speaker 10 Additional editing from Claudia Williams. Fact-checking was by Xavia Greenwood.
Sound design and original composition from Tom Kinsella. The theme music is Far Gone, Don't Leave by Pictish Trail.

Speaker 10 Podcast artwork by Lola Williams.

Speaker 10 The commissioning editor was Basher Cummings.

Speaker 10 The executive producer was Kerry Thomas.

Speaker 10 Tortoise

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