Daisy May Cooper has proved herself to be a brilliant storyteller, having created and co-written the hugely successful BAFTA-winning This Country with younger brother Charlie.
Yet even she has been astounded by the things that have happened to her in real life – from past lives. Ghosts, sounds and signs from beyond have entered her world. And she is so convinced about an afterlife that she’s collated many of her own experiences as well as others in her new book Hexy Bitch.
Beautifully written and researched and with her trademark humour, she seeks to look at what is beyond this mortal plane. “I am convinced life after death absolutely exists,” says Daisy, 38. "Energy doesn’t die – it has to go somewhere. Writing this book has made me a lot less cynical and a lot more open to the possibilities of things.”
In one instance, Daisy recounts seeing a disembodied pair of children’s legs with white PE shorts running around her bedroom. At the time she was living in a new-build house - and has since moved. It’s so mad I saw it,” says Daisy. “I’m shaking even thinking about it now. It was just legs, solid legs and then it kind of blurred. There was no torso, it had shorts on and it wasn’t wearing period costume.
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PA)DESPERATE
“My son [Jack] was on the bed with me and he clocked it. We had these sensor lights on the landing and those came on before it came into the room." Daisy’s first encounter with death and the afterlife happened when she was four years old. Her aunt Alison – her mother’s sister – had died aged just 30, leaving behind two young children.
“Mum was always dragging me to these terrible psychics that were at the back of seedy pubs,” says Daisy. "They were really vague. They would say ‘do you know somebody who has got a caravan?’. There was one guy who looked like Roy Orbison and between giving readings would break out into Frank Sinatra songs.
“My mum was so desperate to make sense of what had happened because it was just so awful and she felt like her sister’s death was so pointless. She never got those answers. It’s the charlatans, the con artists that muddy the water of this. I find that frustrating. It’s horrible because that might be the only experience that somebody has with a psychic.”
And Daisy says it’s when people are at their most vulnerable that they turn to mediums. She recalls being vulnerable herself when she went into hospital with suspected viral meningitis while expecting Jack, now four, with her ex-husband landscape gardener Will Weston (the couple also have a daughter Pip, six, and Daisy has a five-month-old son Benji with new partner DJ Anthony Huggins).
Feeling scared, and looking for signs as she lay in bed, she pressed record on her phone for an EVP (electronic voice phenomenon), in case any spirits had a message for her. When she played it back, she heard a voice. “It’s unmistakable,” says Daisy. “It’s like an ethereal voice that says ‘Don’t be afraid’. I had to get that quote tattooed on my wrist, so that I didn’t forget or ever doubt myself that it did happen.” Daisy’s beliefs were reinforced again this August when she had a sign from her friend Michael Sleggs, who played Slugs in This Country.
He died in 2019 aged 33 and while in palliative care he called Daisy. “Near the end he was so scared of death and then he phoned me and said ‘I’m not scared any more. I saw this being, angelic light at the end of my bed that said ‘within seven days you are going to have a new body at midnight’. He died within seven days at 11.59. It was extraordinary.
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BBC)“Sleggs knew how much I loved this stuff. I even said to him before he died, you’d better come back and give me a sign. I was talking to my mum and brother about it. And then the next day I woke up to the duvet being lifted as if a pair of fingers were picking it up. I watched that for about 30 seconds and then it stopped. I didn’t think anything of it. Then me and my partner were in bed and heard this massive banging on a bedroom door.
“It had a rhythm to it. It was an intelligent knock. What’s so weird is before Sleggs died, we had had loads of deep chats. And he said completely unironically ‘you know what I am really gutted about - that I’m going to miss the Phoenix Festival’, which is this crap, little music festival he loved.
“And this banging was on the same day as that festival. It frightened us as we thought we had been burgled.” In the book Daisy talks about all the other avenues she has gone down including past life regression, a hypnotherapy technique uncovering experiences from previous lifetimes. “I was a Victorian boy. I was sceptical and maybe it is still just a form of therapy, it felt very emotional.” And then there was applying to be a witch during lockdown, which didn’t come to fruition. “I think they may have been swingers, which is a bit annoying. Again it’s the bad people that ruin it for everyone.”
She and her brother Charlie are also in talks with the BBC about a paranormal show called Nightwatch. “I want it to be as honest as it can be and if nothing happens in the show then nothing happens. It’s just going to be me and him covering a location with as many cameras as possible.” She says her brother believes like her and he has had premonitions and dreams of things to come.
In the book Daisy says extroverts and creatives, as well as children, are more susceptible to seeing spirits. “Maybe their brains are wired differently,” says Daisy. “I do believe that everybody has psychic awareness, we just don’t know how to access it. Maybe our brains are protecting ourselves. Children are more receptive because they are born without any prejudices because they don’t have to conform to society.
“I think people are frightened about talking about it. But I do feel that there is more of an openness now towards this stuff. I had a job with Bob Mortimer and he had a near death experience where he saw the tunnels, white lights. He said it was more real than anything he’d ever experienced and he said now he wasn’t afraid.
SIGNS
“End of life nurses say people on their deathbeds do the same thing. Why is it they see relatives who have passed come to them, the reaching up, the light? There is such a taboo around talking about it and people should.”
In other cultures, the afterlife is talked about openly. In Taiwan 95 per cent of people believe in ghosts and they even have an annual ghost month. “I think the Brits are just so cynical and it’s all stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on,” says Daisy. The Eastern world is so much more advanced than us.”
Daisy also says signs like feathers, butterflies and pennies should always be acknowledged. “[Clairvoyant] Tyler Henry put it beautifully. If you are wondering whether it’s a sign or not, it always is. You have no idea the effort that goes into creating this synchronicity, to have a feather land at your feet while you are thinking about somebody.”
And in a moment of art mirroring life, Daisy is about to embark on a role of playing a psychic herself. Hilary Mantel wrote a book Beyond Black and always wanted me to play the role of the psychic.
“We were meant to have a meeting about it and she died a week before [in September 2022]. Her family has allowed us to adapt the book to TV and I’ll be playing the lead. That’s quite surreal. It feels like she is still here to move that along. I just hope we do it justice for her. I need to say ‘if there’s anything you don’t like in the script, you need to smash a plate or something.’
- Hexy Bitch: Tales from My Life, the Afterlife and Beyond by Daisy May Cooper, £22 (Octopus) is out now
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