Holy smokes! I’m A Celebrity star Reverend Richard Coles has said his late partner David haunted him after his death.
He said that after he died he could smell cigarette smoke - and reckons it was a sign from beyond the grave. Richard, 62, said: “David haunts me too, even now... I sometimes smell cigarette smoke, usually at the bottom of the stairs, which used to enrage me when he was living.
“It is a jarring feeling to be both annoyed that he has broken the rules and relieved that he is still present in these spectral fumes.”
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The couple wed in 2010 but David - also a clergyman and a former A&E nurse - was just 43 when he died of alcoholic liver disease just before Christmas 2019.
It prompted former Communards popstar Richard to pen his last book The Madness of Grief: A Memoir of Love and Loss a few years ago.
He said: “The dead person persists most durably at the edge of things, in the unconscious habits which have accommodated them, impervious to the fact of their death.
“I sometimes think this is what ghosts are, flickers across the edge of sense anticipating the presence of the absent one.
“The first time it happened to me I was in the sitting room and looked to my left.
“I had draped a throw he liked to wear when he was cold over the post at the bottom of the banisters, and it hung there, rather like it did on him when he was bony and pale.
“My eye read it as him, and I saw him, with my mind’s eye, standing on the bottom step at the beginning of his laborious ascent.
“I say my mind’s eye, it was as real as reality and my heart skipped before my mind reasserted the knowledge of his death.”
Elsewhere in his book, former Strictly contestant and BBC radio host Richard said he could feel David’s “presence” in his garden which had been his “domain”.
He added that it “is now his continuing presence, for what he planted is coming up, and every day it is like he has brought me a bunch of flowers, and set me a technical challenge, so I do not have to plunder the finite resource of memory to be with him”.
Rev Coles has previously admitted he felt a ghostly presence in his parish as the vicar of Finedon, Northants. He said it is haunted by a “grey lady and a black lady” and that he “felt someone rush past in distress at a point when there has been no-one there”
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