Famous Voice Hearers

Anthony Hopkins – Actor : Born 31 December 1937

In 1993, in an interview in the News of the World, Anthony Hopkins said that he heard strange voices in his head. “I’ve always had a little voice in my head, particularly when I was younger and less assured”, he said. “While onstage, during classical theatre the voice would suddenly say, “Oh, you think you can do Shakespeare, do you?” and he added; “Recently, I was being interviewed on television and the voice inside my head said to me, “Who the hell do you think you are? You’re just an actor, what the hell do you know about anything”
Anthony locates the root of his voice hearing experience in the insecurity he felt as a child, he says “I’ve always had a little voice in my head pulling me down, particularly when I was younger and less grounded … My school days were not always happy and I wanted to get away from Wales and be someone else. I was stupid at school, I just didn’t know what was going on. I thought I was on Mars, I didn’t know what they were talking about.”

Charles Dickens – Author : 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870

The experiences of Charles Dickens were widely publicised by the author himself. He used to tell the tale with relish about becoming so involved with his characters that they actually spoke to him, the best known being the disreputable ‘nurse’ in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs Gamp who, he said, would tell him stories in church during Sunday service and make him laugh out loud, or as the American writer JM Peebles later said “”whispering to [Dickens] in the most inopportune places – sometimes even in church – that he was compelled to fight her off by force”.

Danny McNamara – Vocalist, Embrace : Born 31 December 1970

Embrace topped the charts in 1998 with their album The Good Will Out. Danny McNamara their vocalist wrote on his blog in 2012 … “Between the ages of 19 and 22 I suffered from a horrendous condition called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I won’t go into too much gory detail here but all I will say is that for the best part of three years I was in a living hell … I almost died. I’d spend all day fighting my thoughts, and all night running from imaginary demons and voices.

“Once I locked myself in the bathroom because all I could hear in my head were these awful voices telling me to hurt and kill. I didn’t want to hurt anyone but I’d been fighting my thoughts for months and I’d got to the point where I’d become terrified that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I even somehow had a knife in my hands.

Aged 22, I picked up a guitar for the first time and learned some chords. The illness took a while to lift, but as it did, the demons that kept me up all night just enabled me to spend more time writing. So I sat there with my acoustic guitar and I wrote and wrote and wrote. And as I got better, I wrote even more. The illness that had smashed me to pieces, the horror that had me fighting for air, isolated and trapped behind an ice wall now enabled me to see the world with growing clarity as the ice melted. Colours burned brighter, orchestras played in my head. I felt so alive. Songs poured out of me. As my health came back, I was able to help my dad on the building site by day and then write songs all night. I wasn’t sleeping very much at that time but it felt like I’d wasted the last three years as a walking zombie and I didn’t know how long this new alive feeling was going to last. Well not only did it last, it continued and still continues to enhance every aspect of my life to this day.

Lots of people suffer for months and years in silence because of the stigma attached, or worse still (as was the case with me) because they fear they’re going to be locked up.

I’m really lucky I got help. My mum literally carried me to the doctors in the end, and I’m better now. Not just well, but better. Better than I ever was before.”

Doris Stokes – Spiritualist & Medium : 6 January 1920 – 8 May 1987

The renowned English medium Doris Stokes heard the voice of what she regarded as her spirit guide, the guide was called Ramonov, a Tibetan monk. At first she didn’t know where he came from until whilst watching a travel film on BBC television, she said “It was all about the Table people. Ramonov said “That’s where I come from. Tibet.””
She first heard the voice of her deceased father when she was 13 years old when she herself met a medium. She always understood her experience to be a spiritual one and became a best selling writer, regularly appeared on TV, and had a sell-out show at the London Palladium.

Emanuel Swedenborg – scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic : 1688 – 1772

Emanuel Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. At the age of fifty-six he entered into a spiritual phase, in which he experienced dreams, visions and voices.  This culminated in a spiritual awakening, where he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons, and other spirits. For the remaining 28 years of his life, he wrote and published 18 theological works, of which the best known was Heaven and Hell (1758), and several unpublished theological works.

Dr John Forbes Nash, Mathematician : 13 June 1928 – 23 May 2015

On 11 October 1994 John Forbes Nash, Jr won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in game theory. Nash was 66 and, for most of his adult life he had lived with the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.  Nash’s hallucinations were exclusively auditory, and not both visual and auditory as shown in the film ‘A Beautiful Mind’. In the film during his Nobel acceptance speech in 1994 John Nash says “I take the newer medications”, when in fact he didn’t take any antipsychotic medication from 1970 onwards.
In 1994 John wrote:

“I spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release. And it did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalized that I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research. In these interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality, I did succeed in doing some respectable mathematical research. Thus there came about the research for “Le problème de Cauchy pour les équations différentielles d’un fluide général”; the idea that Prof. [Heisuke] Hironaka called “the Nash blowing-up transformation”; and those of “Arc Structure of Singularities” and “Analyticity of Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data”.

But after my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later 60s I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.

Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort. So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists.” ^[1]

Saint Joan of Arc – Soldier, Christian Saint : 1412 – 30 May 1431

It was at the age of thirteen and a half, in the summer of 1425, that Joan first became conscious her “voices”, and her “counsel” or messengers from God. It was at first a voice, as if someone had spoken quite close to her, but it seems also clear that a blaze of light accompanied it, and that later on she discerned in some way through visions the appearance of those who spoke to her, recognising them individually as Saint Michael (who was accompanied by other angels), Saint Margaret, Saint Catherine, and others.

“The first time that I heard this voice, I was very much frightened,” Joan testified. “When I heard it for the third time, I recognised that it was the voice of an angel … The voice said to me: ‘Go into France!’ I could bear it no longer.”

Whilst Joan was initially scared of the voices, and felt unable to talk to others about them, she began to build a better relationship with them. The voices commanded her to support the French army and recover France from the English. Aged 16, she presented herself to the leader of the army and was ridiculed. A year later, she returned but the leader took her seriously. Dressed as a boy, she went on to lead hundreds of men into battle. Two years later she was tried, burned at the stake as a witch/heretic, and in 1920 declared a Saint of the Catholic Church.

There have been several films about Saint Joan and her image is on the cover of three ‘Hearing Voices’ books by Marius Romme and Sandra Escher.  The photo above shows Joan as played by Milla Jovovich in the 1999 film ‘The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc’.  Perhaps she should be the patron saint of voice hearers!

William Blake – Poet, Visionary, Painter, and Printmaker : 1757 – 1827

William Blake  was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake’s work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts.  Blake experienced visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery.
In a letter to William Hayley, dated 6 May 1800, Blake wrote:

“I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate.”

Winston Churchill – Politician, British Prime Minister : 30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965

Despite his political successes and great speeches Winston Churchill suffered from what he described as his “black dog” – depression, and also heard voices. During World War II, Churchill said his voices would tell him to “sit here” or “sit there?”^[2]

Philip K Dick – Author, Science Fiction Writer : 16 December 1928 – 2 March 1982

‘Do androids dream of electric sheep’ was the title of Philip K Dick’s book, which subsequently became the film, Blade Runner. Several other of his books have made it to the screen including ‘Total Recall’, ‘Minority Report’, ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ and ‘The Man in the High Castle.  Talking about his encounter in 1974 with ‘a transcendentally rational mind’, said:

“It hasn’t spoken a word to me since I wrote The Divine Invasion. The voice is identified as Ruah, which is the Old Testament word for the Spirit of God. It speaks in a feminine voice and tends to express statements regarding the messianic expectation. It guided me for a while. It has spoken to me sporadically since I was in high school. I expect that if a crisis arises it will say something again. It’s very economical in what it says. It limits itself to a few very terse, succinct sentences. I only hear the voice of the spirit when I’m falling asleep or waking up. I have to be very receptive to hear it. It sounds as though it’s coming from millions of miles away”.^[3]‘

Zoë Wanamaker – Actor : Born 13 May 1949

The successful British-American actress Zoë Wanamaker talked about her voice hearing experiences on the Radio 4 programme “Desert Island Discs”:

“It’s like a little person sitting on your shoulder saying ‘No that’s wrong. Don’t do this. Don’t do that…

It’s got in the way when I was working, because my concentration would be tripped by this voice in the back of my head. You think you’re concentrating, but the voices were also saying ‘You’re not concentrating.

I know it sounds like Joan of Arc, but it was a sort of chatter that would be going on while I was on stage.” When asked if the voices had gone she said, “They come back occasionally and have a good chat.”

Robert Alexander Schumann – German composer and pianist : 1810–1856

Robert Schumann was one of the most famous Romantic composers of the nineteenth century, as well as a famous music critic. Many of his musical works were written at the urging of the inner voices that alternatively plagued and blessed him throughout much of his life. His voices brought some of his finest work to him, sometimes fully realised and orchestrated. At times, though, his visions and voices brought him terrible suffering. His wife, the pianist Clara Schumann, described one tortuous night:

“The angel voices had turned into the voices of demons with horrible music; they told him he was a sinner and they planned to cast him into Hades, in short, his condition increased literally into one of nervous convulsions; he shrieked in pain (as he told me later, it took the form of tigers and hyenas tearing at him and trying to grab him) and the two doctors, who fortunately came in good time, were hardly able to hold him… After about half an hour, he was less agitated and said friendlier voices could now be heard giving him encouragement…”

^{[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1994/nash/biographical/ 
[2] Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia, 1990, Hallucinations.
[3] Philip K. Dick’s Final Interview, June 1982 – source: Rod Serling : The Twilight Zone Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, June 1982}