Amanda Holden has claimed she was once man-handled by a ghostly clown with a severed head.
The ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ judge was convinced a spectre called Grimaldi tried to play a trick on her while she was rehearsing for her role as Princess Fiona in ‘Shrek: The Musical’ at Drury Lane theatre in London back in 2011 as he blocked her from escaping off out into the wings.
Speaking on ‘This Morning’ – which she is co-hosting with Ben Shephard this week while Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield are on holiday – on Tuesday (24.10.17), she said: "I had a massive ghost experience. When I was doing ‘Shrek: The Musical’ at Drury Lane in the West End. I was Princess Fiona and it was a really odd thing because we were doing a technical rehearsal, which is where you work out where the lights are and everything, there’s no audience there and you’re in your normal clothes and I had stood on the stage with my back to the audience and they were showing me where the green light would come, which would tell me I had to turn into an ogre and to turn into an ogre I had to leg it off stage and put my mask on and be sprayed green.
"Anyway, so I was standing and my dresser was in the wings there and there was someone here [next to her], so I moved out of the way and I turned to Davina [her dresser] and said: ‘Whoever that was, they can’t be there at that minute because I’ve only got two seconds to change.’ And she said: ‘Amanda, there was no one there.’
"And then later on, we read that there is a ghost at Drury Lane called Grimaldi and he likes to move people about. So he was literally playing a joke. I was in my head thinking ‘Oh it was probably me.’ And so that was his joke and it’s happened to a lot of other actors. He was chunky, very tall. It felt like a presence, I felt like I had to go round him."
And, although many people were freaked out by the experience, the 46-year-old actress was keen to build a friendship with the ghost and encouraged Grimaldi to enter her dressing room while she sat in her lingerie – but, much to her disappointment, she never felt his presence again.
She explained: "Then I sat in my dressing room going, ‘Come in Grimaldi, join me, come in!’ He didn’t come back. I don’t think he wanted to see me in my underwear."
And it’s not just Grimaldi who apparently wanders the wings of the theatre, as Amanda has told that there’s another supernatural figure who has led to the cleaners being banned from using lavender.
She added: "There’s another story at Drury Lane – all the cleaners aren’t allowed to use any products that smell of lavender because there is a ghost there in a grey suit who has weeping sores that used to wear lavender to get rid of stench so they banned lavender from the cleaners."
Amanda Holden haunted by dead clown
