There were famously three people in her ill-starred marriage… But now it seems that Princess Diana is the one elbowing in on marital bliss from beyond the grave.
According to her former butler, Paul Burrell, the Princess, who was killed in a crash in Paris’s Pont de L’Alma tunnel in August 1997, is a regular presence in his life with hubby ‘Coop’ - litigation lawyer, Graham Cooper 64.
She has been visiting Paul in his dreams for years and now comes proof, he claims, that her spirit is a frequent visitor to the mock Tudor mansion he and Coop share in Cheshire.
The revelations come as the couple threw open the doors of their home to the ghost hunters of Celebrity Help! My House is Haunted on Discovery Plus. They’d called them in to investigate spectral wafts of tobacco smoke, shadowy figures and bumps in the night…
What Paul, 65, did not expect was to hear Diana’s giggle and a message just for him. One weighty word. “France…” Diana’s message was captured on what the team describe as their EVP recorder, which “enables us to hear beyond the human ear for any nearby spirit contact.”
The voice, they said, said “Sorry” and “France.”
Paul is visibly stunned. “I don’t understand why it would say France other than the fact that the Princess died in France and the fact I went to France to bring her home,” he says.
“I had been introduced to this world before by the Princess,” says Paul. “She was heavily involved in spirituality. Mediums, psychics, astrologers... and I witnessed it from the edges. I watched her and she would giggle afterwards and say ‘you don’t believe, do you?’ and I would say well I’m not sure.”
But then came that tragic last jou
rney in Paris. Diana was gone from this world. But not, believes Paul, from his.
”When you have loved someone in life - and I did love her - and they pass very quickly, a little piece of them remains behind and you carry them with you for the rest of your days,” he says.
“If my Princess wanted to tell me something, I think she would come to me.”
And Diana wasn’t the only senior royal to believe in spirits and ghosts, he claims.
“Our dear late queen always said that there were ghosts and she said ‘I never go to Allt-na-giubhsaich’ - Glassalt, the cottage on the lake in Balmoral - ‘without the corgis because the corgis sense it before I do.
“Their hackles go up and they start to growl so I never go without them and I never stay the night there’. Queen Victoria would stay the night there with John Brown,” he says.
“At the time I thought to myself, my goodness Queen Elizabeth II believes in ghosts and she is a very intelligent woman so there must be something there.
“But I never saw one myself. I never saw one at Kensington Palace, never saw anybody coming down the staircase with their head under their arm. I wasn’t tuned in.”
But his bond with Diana was different and was always going to survive her death, he reckons.
“Feeling closeness with Diana during our life together… I was with her for 10 years and during that time I got so close to her that I realised I was so in tune I knew what she wanted before she asked for it.”
It isn’t obsession, he’s quick to point out, and there is only a single photograph of himself with the Princess on display in his house.
“Just one - that is not a man who’s obsessed,” he says. “I’ve got hundreds of pictures of the Princess but Coop always said to me, ‘you know I’m happy that that has been your past but this is our future so we only have one picture to remind you of your past’.”
But he does still see Diana - in his dreams.
“Very often I’ll wake up in the morning and Coop will say to me ‘where were you last night?’ and I’ll say well you’ll never believe this, we were decorating one of the rooms in Kensington Palace. In dreams when you are not conscious, I believe you can actually reach out to another world.”
It happens around three in the morning, he says - “the time when the veil is thinnest between this plane and the next.”
When the TV show’s psychic, Ian Lawman sees the picture, he becomes emotional, revealing that Diana had consulted him two months before her death.
”I used to read for Princess Diana and that’s the emotion I’ve been feeling in the house,” he says. “She’s trying to get a message to Paul.”
Paul thinks it’s no coincidence. “I think she was responsible for Ian coming here,” he says. “Because he was the connection to that world that brought him into my orbit. I thought that was typical - that’s what she would do. She’d have a joke and a prank about it. I thought she was playing with me. I could hear her giggle and it is unmistakable to me. As if she is having a bit of fun on the other side. And then I remembered she said to me ‘One day you’ll believe what I am telling you’.”
If his mind has been on what lies beyond death, it’s understandable. Paul has just become a grandfather for the first time, to baby Lucca, six weeks. And he has had a terrifying brush with death when a health screen in 2022 ahead of his appearance in I’m A Celebrity South Africa revealed that he had prostate cancer.
“I’ve just been through the worst year of my life,” he says. “I was thinking I would never see this Christmas, thinking I would never see my grandson and that puts things into perspective and you realise that time is running out.
“At 65 I have lived most of my life and I hope there are a few years left and I want to see that little chap grow,” he says.
He also wants to urge other men to get their PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) levels checked.
“Reaching out on Prostate Cancer as I have done this year is a blessing because I do have a platform,” he says. “I can shout and say to men over 50, please go and get a PSA blood test from the doctor. If he refuses to do it, it is your right to have one. Please go and do it. It could save your life.
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“I have had letters and calls from men already who I’ve reached, who have found signs of cancer and their wives said to me ‘you have saved my husband’s life, you have saved a father’. That’s a wonderful gift and I’ve never had it before.”
He was thrilled to see King Charles’s recent groundbreaking announcement of his own treatment for an enlarged prostate.
“I’m so happy that Charles’s is benign,” he says. “An enlarged prostate, many things can be done for that. The more we can talk about it, the more we can bring it out into the open and have discussions about it, the more people will go and get the test…
”So thank you, King Charles, for using your position, the highest position in the land, to tell us about your condition. In the past the royals never talked about their health so I applaud him for bringing it to the attention of his people. That’s a good king.”
Paul is still feeling the effects of his own treatment.
”I am still on this awful hormone treatment which makes me heavier than I should be, more emotional than I should be and less active than I should be,” he says. “But, listen, this is the price you pay to live and I’m happy to pay that price. I really am. I’m grateful mine was found early. I’m grateful that I can see my grandson. I’m grateful that I can have a few more years left. I had a close shave.”
Something Diana will be hating seeing, he says, is the rift between her adored sons, Wills and Harry.
It will be devastating for her. If she can fix it, she will. But I don’t think the powers on the other side are strong enough to fix what’s happening on this plane,” he sighs. “Her boys were meant to travel through this life together but on this plane they chose different paths, different companions, that’s the problem.”
Is this a new Paul Burrell? A more reflective, less bombastic one. Older, wiser, more gratefully zen.
“When the Princess died everyone came to me including Her Majesty, and almost confessed and in a way wanted some kind of absolution,” he says.
‘The Queen said ‘I tried to reach out to her, you know that. You know the things I did for her’.
“Everybody did this. And the only answer I could give people is the fact that when someone dies everything is known. So all good intentions are known and all bad intentions are known and I think that is what you have to live your life by, the fact that if you have to answer one day to someone, you better get your act together and be a real person.
“Remember there is always someone watching and listening…’
The new series of Celebrity Help! My House Is Haunted is available to stream weekly from Thursday (JAN 25), exclusively on discovery+