I’ve seen proof death is not the end. My late partner’s spirit pushed my new male friend out of bed… then told me what he’s doing in the afterlife: CHARLOTTE CRIPPS

I’m crying my eyes out at the thought of my former partner Alex leaving our Notting Hill home for ever.

‘I don’t want him to go,’ I sob as I hug our golden retriever, Muggles, close to me, making his white fluffy fur all wet, and suddenly feeling panic-stricken at the idea of waving Alex off through the pink front door. 

There is something strangely reassuring about having Alex here. Even though he is dead.

I know how absurd that sounds. I’m not even talking about removing his ashes from the flat.

What I mean is, for many years I have felt his presence here, in this place where he died, and at last – though I know it will be difficult – it is time for him to go.

It was 11 years ago that Alex killed himself, after a bout of depression. We’d been together for ten years and he was the love of my life. Yet since that terrible day, I’ve often wondered if he really left. Is his ‘ghost’ still here? If so, after more than a decade, I need it to move on.

That’s why I’ve called in famous house healer Amaryllis Fraser, a 50-year-old former Vogue model-turned-psychic medium, who refers to herself as an ‘upmarket cleaning lady’. 

She’s more used to clearing ghosts from castles and stately homes – she helped the Duchess of Rutland at Belvoir Castle, and Countess Karen Spencer recently requested her services at her new home, after splitting from Charles Spencer. But ghosts don’t just haunt the aristocracy.

As I’m waiting nervously for Amaryllis to arrive, I have a quiet word with Alex, telling him to hide while she’s here and reappear after the exorcism. Even to myself I sound quite mad – and yet deep down I believe he is listening to me.

Of course he lives on in our children, Lola, nine, and Liberty, seven, though they never met their father. At the time of his death in 2014, I was 38, he was 48 and we were in the midst of fertility treatment. Several years later, I had the girls via IVF with his banked sperm.

Ever since, as joyous as single motherhood has been, my life has been a whirlwind of juggling – of babies, toddlers, work, school – and to be honest that is part of the ­problem. I haven’t had the time to properly process Alex’s death and the idea of him leaving me now – in spirit at least – triggers my grief all over again.

I did have some bereavement therapy when I first got pregnant in 2015, but it takes longer than the 12 sessions I had to heal. Instead I compartmentalised the enormity of what had happened, putting it in a box in the back of my mind. I didn’t get over it, but made Alex a part of the furniture. A ghost. Still with me.

And that means I’m stuck. Now the children are older, I am open to the idea of a new relationship, but Alex looms over everything.

It’s not just psychological. Weird things started to happen soon after he died. First, I had this inexplicable feeling he was in the kitchen with me as I unloaded the dishwasher – a change in the energy around me, and inside me, as though my ‘vibrational energy’, the phrase used by spiritualists to describe your emotional wellness, was changing. A stream of cold air wrapped itself around me.

This has since happened regularly in different rooms.

Then, a few years ago, Alex’s cousin swore blind he’d seen a fleeting figure in the hallway that looked just like Alex. It got more spooky when I tried to move Alex’s mountainous collection of DVDs to the front door to take them to the charity shop.

As I set the last few down, a helium balloon from my daughter Lola’s birthday moved itself across the hallway and perched on top of his favourite film, Dr Zhivago.

There were the flip-flops that thudded to the floor from the top of a cupboard when his name was mentioned in an adjoining room. The light on the mirror in my en-suite bathroom that regularly clicked on and off in the middle of the night when I lay awake worrying about getting pregnant, as I often did – as if to jolt me out of my negative thinking.

Our children tell friends at school that Daddy comes back as a butterfly because they’ve often landed on us and act in a very strange way, jumping from me to the children, and even sitting on Muggles’s head. Is it possible he’s stuck too? Perhaps Amaryllis can help us both to move on.

When she arrives at my front door, bright and breezy with a leather bag full of crystals and a pendulum used for ‘dowsing’, I’m shocked to hear Alex has already been in communication with her.

They ‘spoke’ while she was at the airport, on her way back for our appointment, after a trip to France. He knows she is coming to visit ‘his’ house and confirmed it is him I’ve been feeling all these years. I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

Amaryllis says she can clear ­negative imprinted energy and restore a house’s harmony through a form of Reiki, the Japanese energy healing practice.

She helps spirits move on by communicating with them and her spirit guides, and can also facilitate a release from events that are blocking the positive energy in a home.

Her services help when houses won’t sell, for example. Sometimes, she explains there is a heavy, unsettled or uninviting energy in a house – ‘the echoes of deceased emotions’ – that can be evidence of ghostly activity.

Before I’ve even had a chance to make her a cup of coffee, she reads out a verbatim note, jotted down on her phone, of what Alex supposedly told her at the airport.

‘I know what it’s like not getting things together,’ he said. Immediately my mind goes to his struggle to get back to work after depression. ‘My head got into such a dark place,’ Amaryllis goes on. ‘I was ashamed of the lack of strength I had. The shame is what kills you. A darkness crept over me. A moment of madness. Charlotte anchored me many a time, probably more than she knows. But she knows.’

Amaryllis says he asked her to help me understand ‘there is no such thing as separation when we die’. Even if he moves on from being ‘glued’ to me and the flat, which she senses is the case, we can always stay in touch.

I’ve always been open to the supernatural – I’ve seen clairvoyants and used to read Tarot cards for fun – but this is blowing my mind.

Can I really be expected to believe Alex has been nattering away to her in an airport lounge – and is ready to let go, too? Yet what she tells me rings true in terms of his mindset at the end.

Amaryllis claims to have seen ghosts since she was a child, but only began to develop her psychic abilities aged 18, after a car crash that changed her psychologically and spiritually so that she was more open to conversing with spirits and becoming clairvoyant.

She advises that if people sense a spirit in their own home, and it feels ‘uncomfortable’ and like ‘something is off’, it’s important to stay calm, rather than fearful, and positively state to them: ‘I am aware you’re here in my home. Please look for the light.’ But ghostbusting is generally a far more complex procedure – and best left to the experts, she says.

Now she moves around the kitchen, waving her hands to clear its energy, and occasionally chuckling at whatever she alone is hearing from the spirit world.

‘Through communicating with spirits, I guide them away from the home to another plane,’ she tells me.

My house clearing, she hopes, will give me a blank canvas to begin to create a new life, a renewed sense of peace, and a freedom from grief.

‘It will also help things speed into positivity and clear any adversities that may be present in your life,’ she adds in the peculiar syntax of the spiritualist.

Then she reaches my bedroom door and suddenly comes to a halt. I haven’t told her – or ever mentioned before in anything I’ve written as a journalist – that this is where Alex died. Yet Amaryllis senses it. ‘It’s all in here,’ she says. ‘It feels very heavy.’

To ‘find’ different energies and confirm her gut instincts, she gently swings a pendulum – a necklace-like chain with a gold teardrop shape at the end.

If it starts to whizz around clockwise, it essentially confirms what she’s feeling, and if it goes anti-clockwise, she’s on the wrong track.

This is also the room my 92-year-old father stayed in for six months last year while I looked after him as he came to the end of his life. He’s not here now, says Amaryllis. Alex is.

She asks me to leave the bedroom so she can start clearing it. As I sit in the kitchen for 45 minutes, I feel strangely left out, as if Amaryllis and Alex are having a secret chinwag without me.

Then she calls me into the bedroom where, rather embarrassingly, she’s flung open the doors on my messily hung, rammed-packed wardrobe. Apparently, Alex asked her to find a message inside it.

Lying on top of a pile is a Cinderella T-shirt I sometimes wear in bed, with the words ‘The clock strikes midnight’ on it. That’s the clue, she says. I’m about to start a new relationship – as if a fairytale dream life awaits me.

‘It’s real,’ Alex tells me, through her. He still loves me, he says, but now it’s my time to be ‘looked after, adored and loved’. He is ready to move on, says Amaryllis, but only because I am ready.

Alex asks her to ‘keep her phone on at night’ so she can text me if he has any messages to pass on. ‘You do that for your kids,’ he apparently jokes.

It sounds absurd but it’s the kind of joke Alex would have made. Then it descends even further into farce. Apparently, now Alex has let go, he gets to choose what he wants to do in the spirit world – a sort of job, if you like.

Apparently what he wants to do now is help those who’ve ended their lives to seek the light too.

She tells me Alex will give me a dramatic sign all this is real when she’s gone, in a private moment before the end of the day.

Then she moves around the rest of the flat doing what she describes as ‘lighter dusting after a deep clean’, before sitting down with me at the kitchen table. By this point, I’m feeling very emotional – baffled but I do feel strangely lighter too.

‘Alex wasn’t stuck,’ says Amaryllis, ‘but he was hovering around a lot with you because your vibrational fields were very much attached.’

It will now feel different, she says, and I gulp back tears. It’s going to be strange living here without him.

Yet perhaps I won’t have to. Just because Alex has been helped to another plane, it doesn’t mean I can’t sometimes sense him.

‘It defines a better state of clarity for both your energies,’ says Amaryllis. ‘He’s at one, in a state of peace, which makes it easier to call for him to ask for help.’

Later that day, after Amaryllis has left, my daughter Liberty goes to bed in my bedroom, and I turn off the lights. I’m working in the next-door room, with elder daughter Lola, reading in her bunk bed, when about 15 minutes later, Liberty wakes up and calls out. ‘Mummy, quick, come into the bedroom. The lights have magically turned themselves on!’ I run in. All the spotlights are on at full strength…

The girls are bemused but have no idea of the significance. I quickly text Amaryllis – ‘It’s ­happened, Alex did something dramatic!’ – but, of course, it doesn’t surprise her. She sees it all the time.

A week later, another bizarre episode occurs. A new male friend in my life, who I’ve just met, told me something very strange happened. He felt like he was pulled out of bed by his arms and landed with a thud on his floor, with his bedside table and light falling on top of him. He’d never had anything like this happen before.

I took a gulp. ‘Oh no, is it connected to Alex?’ I secretly wondered. It’s the first time I’ve spent so much time with another man since Alex died – we’ve been spending time with our kids, as both of us are single parents, and getting very close.

I texted Amaryllis, who confirmed, ‘Yes, it is Alex’, who was being protective of me. She told me I must tell Alex I do not need protecting and he must not do that again. I chuckled to myself: ‘He sure still has a sense of humour’. It didn’t really comfort me – I don’t want him scaring off male rivals with his dramatic showy performances, even if he didn’t mean any harm.

I’d wanted him to appear to Amaryllis – and jump out at her from the hallway like a real ghost – to prove he was there, but since the house clearing, I’ve got all the evidence I needed.

I just hope it’s his swan song, and not a regular thing, or I’ll have to get Amaryllis to talk to him. But I’m happy Alex has got my back.

He’ll always be my true love.

And the fact is I do feel better, as if a new era is beginning. Whether what Amaryllis did was real or not, it has been therapeutic. I’m comforted by the thought Alex is somewhere nearby, but I also believe he is no longer connected to me so closely that I’m unable to live my life freely. That feels good. A goodbye at last.

• amaryllisinsight.com
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