Author of the week Yvette Fielding
The former child actor and ghosthunting presenter talks us through her new memoir
Vegabeger vega doola ley ula amen,” chants Yvette Fielding in long, drawn-out sounds. She’s demonstrating how she does ancient Kabbalah chanting – something she believes awakens the spirit world.
Ask anyone to name one of Yvette’s TV shows and it’s likely they’ll say Most Haunted. But she did an awful lot before that.
“I started to write my memoir a couple of years ago, but I was really struggling,” she says, fiddling with her Kabbalah bracelet. “And I am a writer, so it wasn’t the writing process. It was talking about myself. When you go back and think about your memories – they can be hard sometimes, particularly if you’ve had a bit of a rum experience.”
As you read Scream Queen, a nod to all the screaming she’s done on TV, it’s clear to see Yvette ’s had quite a time of it. She had lucky breaks, like being the only girl from her drama school to be picked for a role in an 80s’ TV series called Seaview, to becoming the youngest ever Blue Peter presenter. But it wasn’t plain sailing.
Yvette chats openly about the workplace bullying she struggled with for years. She talks about the put-downs being “relentless”.
“I was constantly shaking. They call it workplace anxiety nowadays, but it was really abuse.”
She joined Blue Peter aged 18 and stayed for five years, before finding her home on Most Haunted – the stage show is just as popular as the series was when it was commissioned in 2002. Yvette, 55, is incredibly down to earth and self-deprecating, looking stunning as she chats from her office in Cheshire on Zoom. She admits to being afraid of horror movies, and would hide behind the sofa to watch Doctor Who, so why she first agreed to stay overnight – and be filmed – in a haunted mansion is a mystery. “I know, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” she says. “I’d always been interested but frightened of the ghosts.”
One fateful night, when a friend visited Yvette and her TV producer husband Karl Beattie, they talked about Michelham Priory in East Sussex, and its reputation as one of Britain’s most haunted houses.
“Karl looked at me and said, ‘Would you spend the night alone in a haunted house? We could film it’ – and I told him where to go. And then he said, ‘What if we did it with a camera crew and we’re all in shot?’ So then we sat up all night.
“I genuinely felt from that moment on, we were being pushed. By what, I don’t know. Divine intervention? But there was this passion to make this thing work, like somebody was really pushing us to do this, maybe from the other side.”
Yvette loves all things spiritual, especially Buddhism, and has an office full of crystals. She has always been into tarot cards and palm reading, but is genuinely frightened of the more scary stuff. Karl had also experienced ghostly goings-on previously and believed in the paranormal. And it’s clear as Yvette talks she really believes in it, too.
She regales story after story – in person and in the book – of all the ghosts and incidents they’ve encountered over the years, maintaining “what we do is real”. But at home, she has a very different way of getting in touch with the dead.
“I’m very lucky, because I communicate with my father, who passed over. I know he’s with me and that’s such a huge comfort,” says Yvette, whose dad died of a heart attack 15 years ago.
“There’s nothing to fear when we die. That journey that we go on to the other side is beautiful, and we do see our loved ones again.
“Dad showed me in a very vivid dream what it’s like to die. I always say to people, when they’re having a really bad day, to talk out loud to their [lost] loved ones. It works. If I’m having a rubbish day, I’ll say to my dad, ‘Please help me’ and within an hour or so, whatever I’m doing, I’ll feel marvellous. They’re listening, they’re watching, they’re with you.”
Yvette still buys birthday and Father’s Day cards for her dad, and toasts him with champagne.
“He loves it,” she says. “And I know people will read this and think, ‘Oh my God, she’s lost the plot’ but I don’t care what anybody thinks. I love my dad. I am so blessed. And I want to pass on the messages he gives to me, to people that have lost loved ones.”
Buddhist meditation first enabled her to talk to the dead, she says.
“It’s all to do with vibration and sound,” she says. “I’ll use a Tibetan singing bowl and om, and if I take that into a haunted location and do it for ages, it’s bizarre – some great paranormal activity will kick off.
“I’m certainly not psychic, but I think we all have the capability to be psychic if we tune in. It’s whether we want to open up, and we can do that by meditation.”
Yvette tries to meditate every day in her office, where she has a day bed.
“I’ll close my eyes and go into that state if I can, and see what pictures I get in my mind. Sometimes, I get nothing. I think it depends on what stage you’re at in your life. Whether you’re busy. If you’re stressed, you’re going to get bugger all out of it.
“People often say to me, ‘My loved one has passed over and they haven’t come to me, why is that?’ And and I say, ‘Well, have you put the time in?”
She suggests having an afternoon “nana nap”. “You don’t go into such a deep sleep and I think the spirits find it easier to contact you. You might have this wonderful vivid dream of your loved one, and that is them coming to say hello. Try it.”