Daisy May Cooper: 'I received a paranormal visit from late This Country co-star'

"I’m sure it was him," she says. "If anybody was going to come back and let me know there was something after death, it would be him. I mean, even the way he went."

He claimed to have been visited by an angel in his hospital bed who promised him that in seven days he would have a new body by midnight – he died at 11:59pm seven days later. "I made him promise he would come back, and he would definitely do it because he knows it would freak me out and he’d find that hilarious."

The funny side of grief and dealing with loss has been insufficiently covered in celeb memoirs in recent years. But in Cooper’s case it’s perhaps a natural expression of the fascination she has felt for the unexplained since she was four years old and her mother’s sister died in a car crash.

She writes in the book: "When Auntie Alison died, Granny seemed to cross over into another realm. Mum did too… It was this family tragedy that set Mum and Granny on a never-ending quest to find Alison."

And they dragged Daisy with them – to spiritualist church services, the backs of pubs, or sometimes a visit-at-home for an audience with freeloading clairvoyants. "They were basically trading on people’s grief," she says now. "It was so obvious to me at the time that they were taking people for a ride, but I suppose it offered hope where there was none."

There’s a lot of bittersweet in Hexy Bitch, and a lot of wrestling with both the unknowable and the unprovable. But, Cooper maintains, it’s all about keeping an open mind.

"People have experiences they can’t explain all the time – like when I was at school, researching a project about a famous ghost in the Cotswolds around Halloween. I ran into this woman who gave me and my friend palm readings. She said that I was going to become a famous actress."

Perhaps that was the moment she became alive to the possibility of a world outside the prosaic? "Maybe," she laughs. "Shame she didn’t bother to tell me about how bloody hard it was going to be."

A successful career foretold, and, with a higher profile, Cooper began to reach out via social media to other members of what she calls the "para-curious" community to help with Hexy Bitch. The feedback varied in quality, peaking (or troughing, depending on your perspective) with the revelation that one man in his 80s insisted he was having an affair with Jackie Kennedy and that, having been an item in a previous life, she knocked on his door one night to tell him he hadn’t locked it properly.

In the same way that Danny Robins’s Radio 4 show Uncanny has set about detailing the experiences of the public with the undead, the idea is to bring together those with stories to tell but who fear opprobrium for doing so. And if that is the motivation for writing the book, the catalyst was an apparition that came to her while she was in bed with her young son a few years ago.

"It was of the legs, just the legs in PE shorts, of a young boy who ran round my bedroom," she recalls. "It was as real as anything else in my life, solid, but then melted away, and then a feeling of calm washed over me."

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There have been several other inexplicable events in her life – she has "Don’t be afraid" tattooed on her wrist after hearing a female voice telling her precisely that while she was in hospital in 2019 (she recorded it on her phone at the time and I have heard it) – and, consequently, late last year Robins was invited to spend the night at her house to put together The Haunting of Daisy May Cooper, an Uncanny Christmas special.

Cooper has moved house since then, so it’s the strange knocking on her bedroom door that exercises her today. "It was definitely a sign from Slugs," she insists again. "He promised."

This may be an appropriate time to state for the record that, for the first time in my journalistic career, our interview together disappeared/wiped itself at some point after she sent me that recording of a voice telling her "Don’t be afraid". Almost certainly some kind of technological glitch, but unnerving just the same…

Daisy May Cooper's Hexy Bitch is released on Thursday 24th October and is available for pre-order now.

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