It’s been more than ten years since I last spoke to Alex, my late partner and the father of my two children. But now I’m hoping to reconnect to him from beyond the grave.
I know how mad that sounds. How Victorian and ‘woo-woo’. Yet as I pick up the phone to book my in-person 60-minute spirit reading, I am full of hope.
The last real and meaningful conversation I had with Alex was the night before he killed himself in 2014. We sat on the pink sofa in our two-bedroom home in London’s Notting Hill, where I still live, and discussed our new golden retriever puppy, Muggles, who was asleep in his crate.
We talked about how we’d love to have a real log fire one day. We were deep into IVF treatment and I was brewing a special Chinese tea to help it work. Since then, a great deal has happened to me and, yet, sometimes I still find it hard to believe he’s not here.
My mind often swirls with questions for him. Does he know about our children, Lola, now nine, and Liberty, seven, who I had after he died, using the sperm he’d banked at the IVF clinic? Did he know, that morning when I left for work as a journalist, that he’d never see me again? Does he miss me too?
Now I’m hoping Amaryllis Fraser, a 50-year-old psychic medium and former Vogue model, is going to help me find answers. She describes herself as a ‘an upmarket cleaning lady’ in her work ‘space clearing’ – banishing negative energies, and even ghosts, from people’s houses.
‘It’s been more than ten years since I last spoke to Alex, my late partner and the father of my two children. But now I’m hoping to reconnect to him from beyond the grave,’ writes Charlotte Cripps
Amaryllis says she first realised at the age of 19 she could not ignore her calling as a medium and healer. As a child she saw ‘apparitions’ which vanished after a few seconds – but once she worked out that nobody else saw them, she kept it to herself.
After a car crash in her late teens, in which she suffered a head injury, she began seeing more frequent visions and ‘ghosts’, as well as hearing the voices of the deceased.
I’m not sure what to make of it all. I am generally sceptical about this sort of thing, and I don’t want my desperate need to contact Alex to cloud my judgment. But I do so want to speak to him again – and five minutes into our initial phone call, before I’ve even booked the first face-to-face session, something undeniably strange happens.
First, Amaryllis blurts out: ‘Alex is going “whoopee!” that we’ve all hooked up.’ And then: ‘Why is he showing me his shoes?’
Apparently, Alex is pointing at his feet. I should say that Amaryllis claims she can not only see and hear spirits (what’s called clairvoyance and clairaudience), but feel their emotions too (clairsentience).
Now she has a vivid image of Alex, as if she’s watching a film on a pop-up screen in her mind, and he wants to show her his shoes.
I nearly drop my mobile phone.
He was a self-confessed shoe addict. My cupboards are still jam-packed full of designer loafers and trainers. It’s a foible that only I and his close friends and family know about.
It is utterly ridiculous, but it feels like I’ve picked up the phone to Alex himself. It’s just a quip about shoes, but I feel closer to him, like he is somehow here.
‘Was he good-looking?’ Amaryllis asks. ‘Yes, very,’ I say. I am flooded with a strange kind of happiness.
The last time Charlotte talked to her husband, Alex, was the night before he killed himself, when they sat together on the sofa in their Notting Hill discussing their new golden retriever puppy, Muggles, who was asleep in his crate
‘He had a wicked sense of humour – very clever and funny,’ she relays to me.
‘Yes, that’s my Alex,’ I whisper, praying the kids don’t hear me as they watch Bluey in the kitchen.
She is somehow managing to get his character across in a way that I recognise – even his mannerisms and sense of humour.
Then, out of the blue, she tells me exactly how he died and I’m gobsmacked. This is all within five minutes of us talking over the phone.
It’s important to say that although I never told her about Alex, Amaryllis did have my full name. Could she have Googled me?
I’m so suspicious I search through my published work to double check what I’d previously said.
I had indeed mentioned his good looks. But his shoe addiction? Not public. His wicked sense of humour? Nothing comes up.
Although I’ve talked openly about his suicide, I’ve never disclosed private details that she seems to know.
So far, I’m impressed. I just can’t shake off this feeling that it’s him. I know there are fake mediums who exploit vulnerable people, and I know that I want to believe…
In the intervening week between the phone call and our meeting, I feel restless – like I’m counting down the days to a secret rendezvous. Is Alex excited, too?
At times it feels utterly ridiculous, and the only person I tell about my appointment is Alex’s mother Carol.
A week later, Amaryllis welcomes me into her home, which – coincidentally – is just a street away from mine in London.
Dressed in a cashmere jumper and jeans, she has a relaxed, off-duty manner. As she ushers me into her sitting room, she talks about communicating with the dead as if it’s as normal as making a cup of tea.
Amaryllis Fraser, a 50-year-old psychic medium and former Vogue model, describes herself as a ‘an upmarket cleaning lady’ in her work ‘space clearing’ – banishing negative energies, and even ghosts, from people’s houses
‘There was no plan,’ she tells me of that utterly terrible day in 2014. ‘There is no logic – it’s so fast. It was a moment of madness.’
She has written on the top left-hand corner of a piece of paper: ‘I’m so sorry for the loss and pain.’
This is word-for-word what Alex wrote on a note he left for me on the kitchen table. It is impossible for her to know about the contents of the letter, as I have never shared it.
She tells me I was really forgiving and patient with him over something: ‘He kept trying to change – but I keep seeing “relapse”,’ she says.
Alex was a recovering alcoholic who had been sober for many years, but was still plagued by his demons – all information I’ve written about before. Still, she got his suicide note verbatim. My eyes well up. I feel deeply emotional, like I’ve tumbled backwards into all the pain that I thought was long over.
Now she describes both of my children perfectly.
‘Alex is showing me one of them. [She’s] dancing around the kitchen all the time,’ she says.
‘Yes, that’s Lola,’ I reply.
Amaryllis says she’s seeing images of Lola doing ballet. As her twirling around the kitchen is such a common sight, even today, and something she is famously known for among family, I wonder if it’s something I’ve posted on my Instagram – that perhaps Amaryllis has seen? But no.
When later I scroll through my posts, there is only one of Lola in 2021 doing ballet, aged five, like any other little girl, and one of her spontaneously disco dancing in a shop. Clearly, though, she loves dancing – maybe it was a good clue?
‘One of your children is really cheeky and going to get what she wants,’ Amaryllis continues. ‘There’s no messing with her.’ That’s Liberty.
‘If someone says “no”, she’ll get them to say “yes”,’ Amaryllis continues. ‘It’s a gift. Alex says it’s never to be changed.’
She’s spot on. It’s as though she knows Liberty inside out, even though she’s never met her.
Alex, says Amaryllis, is also telling me to stop telling the kids not to make a mess – which is something I’m constantly doing.
‘He wouldn’t like the mess either,’ Amaryllis tells me. ‘But he would encourage that energy of “let’s chuck the paint everywhere”. It’s creative.’
Then she asks: ‘Do you know about your daughter’s tooth yet?’ I look puzzled and tell her no, and we move on. (It’s not until the next day that Liberty’s front tooth starts to wobble, her second ever to fall out.)
I’m starting to feel a little unnerved now, as if Alex is really in the room. The atmosphere feels different – as though a charismatic person with a big presence has walked in. Is there any way she could have got all this from my articles, or my social media?
She would easily know, for example, I’d had two children with him, but not this much. And never about my children’s personalities.
‘[Alex] would get up and do a little jig and make you laugh?’ she asks. ‘Yes, he would.’
‘He’s saying one of “our children” has his eyes.’
‘Yes, brown-green.’ All guessable. But when Alex apparently tells her the names Rebecca and Rupert – my half-sister and her long-term partner – I feel a shiver. They both have different surnames and you would not connect them to us unless you knew them.
‘I don’t usually get names, but it’s confirmation from Alex so that you know you can trust what’s being said,’ she tells me.
I’m allowed to ask her questions, and I start with: ‘Is Alex happy wherever he is?’
‘He is definitely at peace,’ she tells me, ‘in a healing, wonderful, blissful space’.
Indeed, Amaryllis claims to know this place herself. She has had two near-death experiences, including one event after an injection of penicillin to which she turned out to be allergic.
Having entered anaphylactic shock, she then suffered a cardiac arrest, and as she ‘died’, she went down a tunnel which ‘was hugely bright and full of music’. When she woke up in hospital, she felt a huge sense of loss at not being in the ‘euphoric’ place she had seen.
‘If I could sum it up in a few words, it would be pure bliss; a paradise beyond your wildest imagination,’ she says. We can all learn to connect to our deceased loved ones, adds Amaryllis.
Amaryllis tells Charlotte (pictured) there is significant money is coming to her by spring 2026 and that she will meet a romantic partner in February next year, and Alex is adamant she must be open to it
‘The spirits are constantly trying to send us messages. We just need to learn how to be open and decipher the signs.’ They might be a high-pitched noise in one’s ears, she says; a gut instinct something is off; light bulbs flashing; or the TV might start playing up.
‘The electrics are an easy and common way for spirits to try to get our attention.’
We all have spirit guides, too. ‘They work for us,’ she says seriously. ‘If they have more direction from us, they can do a better job.’
But then, frustratingly, just as we seem to be making progress, the reading veers off into what feels like banal astrology.
‘Trust success is coming to you – this is your time,’ says Amaryllis. Significant money is coming to me by spring 2026, she tells me. I will meet a romantic partner in February next year, and Alex is adamant I must be open to it.
This love interest is divorced, has one child, and there’s a connection with America through work or family.
There is more advice about a couple of pressing issues in my life, including my late father’s will and the fallout between me and my half-siblings, which, she adds, Alex is ‘pretty cross’ about.
She tells me she’s using Alex and her spirit guide to bring clarification and guidance, but is not allowed to reveal details about who her spirit guide is because it’s a sacred relationship (other than the fact he was a doctor).
Then she accesses my ‘Akashic Records’, a non-physical ‘library’ of past lives and ‘soul time-lines’ and all of a sudden it’s gone very mystical and off-topic.
And the thing is, I know Alex would have dismissed all of this as a joke. When Amaryllis says she talks to him via ‘a collective form of consciousness’, he’d have rolled his eyes and laughed.
Disarmingly – and confusingly –he says this himself now, via Amaryllis, who tells me: ‘Alex says the whole thing sounds so cheesy.’
By this point, I wish we could get back to just talking to him – but she tells me the connection can be held between them only for so long, and it’s gone.
Amaryllis explains the 60-minute reading, which costs £300, saps her energy. It’s like being on a treadmill for two hours on full speed. But as I leave, I feel different. Despite all the weird stuff, I am upbeat. Hopeful. I am convinced I’ve been in contact with Alex.
Something strange happens after the session, too. When I call his mum to tell her all about it, I suddenly feel a strange physical whooshing sensation in my body.
I tell her I think he’s here with me and, every time I mention something Alex ‘said’, the feeling gets stronger. We end the phone call and she tells me she’s reassured to know Alex is happy.
I’ve had what I think are signs since. A red butterfly landed on my hand, then Lola and Liberty’s head, before fluttering onto our Golden Retriever’s back. The girls were convinced it was their father and told their friend’s parents, ‘Daddy comes to see us as a butterfly’.
When Alex died, for me, it felt to me like a giant full stop. Our decade-long love affair was over and my dreams of motherhood were seemingly left in tatters. I was 40 and a tidal wave of grief and sadness consumed me. Guilt, too. Could I have stopped his suicide?
I also felt angry he’d walked out on me by doing what he did. But now I feel I can let go of all that.
I always wondered if he knew about our girls – and now I know he does. It feels comforting to imagine he is watching over us, and I like the idea I can check in with him. I know it sounds wild, but I don’t care what anyone else thinks. It helped me, made me happy, and I know Alex would have been – and is – glad about that.
- For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit samaritans.org
