Most Haunted’s Yvette Fielding: ‘I’d never do a ouija board in my home – that’s asking for trouble’

Mummified cats, ghostly children, the screaming in the utility room… we visit the ‘First Lady of the Paranormal’ in her eerie house

When arranging interviews of any decent length, the convention in journalism is for the writer to insist the conversation be solely one on one. No eavesdroppers, please, be them publicists or husbands. It just works better that way.
This occasionally involves negotiation. At other times it needn’t be said – the trust and understanding is just there. This is the case when I meet Yvette Fielding, the TV presenter and writer, at her home in rural Cheshire.
As we repair to the sitting room to chat, Fielding’s affable publicist stays in the kitchen with her husband, Karl Beattie, and the photographer. And yet… and yet Fielding simply cannot guarantee we are alone.
“No,” she says, looking up and around at the high ceiling, over to the dark, unlit extremes of the room, and out through the windows into the moonlit October night. She cackles. “I think they can see us, they can hear us, they’re listening to our conversations, yeah.” We’ll just have to hope the ghosts don’t interrupt us, then.
Fielding, 56, has been many things over the years – the youngest-ever Blue Peter presenter, a daytime TV fixture, a novelist, briefly a hairdresser, still the owner of the tea shop at Manchester Cathedral – but those are just her concerns in the realm of the living.
Instead it is for her many activities on other spheres that’s seen her become a household name over the past 25 years. In that territory, she is known as The First Lady of the Paranormal, The Queen of the Night and Britain’s Go-To Ghosthunter.
“I’ve never, ever given myself any of those titles. I’m queen of my own house, that’s about it…” she says. Yes, it’s Hallowe’en, and if something goes bump in the night, there’s nobody better than Fielding to put the willies up us.
“I would normally do a seance for you, but I’m so knackered, because I’m on tour and we do that every single night,” she says, gliding around her vast antique dining table, where she regularly hosts seances for dozens of friends, communing with the dead for up to four hours at a time.
Fair enough, how about a ouija board? She flicks a half black, half silver fringe (a consequence of the skin condition vitiligo, though no one believes her as it’s so on-brand) and looks at me as if I’ve just asked to ritually sacrifice her doting bulldog, Watson. “I would never, ever do a ouija board in my own home. That’s just asking for trouble.”
She’s more than happy to give a tour, though. Fielding and Beattie have lived here, in a 17th-century Tudor hunting lodge with a priest hole, fountains, 11 acres and some stables for their rescued racehorses, for 21 years.
They bought it 12 months after Beattie, a cameraman and producer, asked if she’d be up for being filmed spending the night in a haunted house. That became Most Haunted, which ran for 25 series and 329 episodes on various channels, on and off, between 2002 and 2019, and spawned books, live events and no end of parodies as it crept along.
“We call it ‘The Harry Potter house’,” she says. It’s easy to see why: timber frame, low beams, suits of armour, large oil paintings, a twisting staircase, antique and esoteric props galore. It’s also, obviously, packed with ghosts.
“There’s the cavalier, who was shot against an outside wall, he’s called Richard Deacon. There’s two children, Elizabeth and Master Benjamin. The little girl died in the stream we have running through the land, and the little boy got run over by a stagecoach.”
You can co-exist perfectly happily with ghosts so long as you are benevolent yourself, Fielding says, and I’ve rarely met anybody warmer or more instantly hospitable, so it stands to reason that she’s perfectly fine with this many houseguests. But she’s not finished with the roll call.
What else, what else… “My late mother-in-law saw a man standing, leaning over the top of the bannister up there,” she says, pointing up at a mezzanine balcony. “Karl once saw someone through the window wearing a doublet and hose, but when he gave chase with his air rifle, found no one.”
There is the story of the house-sitters who were pulled out of the bed in her “Green Room” in the middle of the night, then persistently locked out whenever they left. The dark man who stands over people sleeping.
The time Fielding came downstairs to find all the chairs stacked in a pyramid on the kitchen table. The screaming in the utility room. The mummified cat under the bath… Wait, the what?
“We were told never to remove it, otherwise it’s bad luck,” Fielding says, taking out a frame case containing what looks like a moggy run over several hundred times. “This was common practice in the 1600s, to have a dead cat or bird under the floorboards in the house to ward off evil presences and spirits.”
The jury’s out on whether it’s worked, but Fielding did get rid of it once, after a glorious revolution led by her children, William and Mary. “And weird things started to happen in the house, all sorts of strange noises, bumps and accidents. We put the cat back and it all stopped. We refuse to ever take it out now.”
Disturbing the peace is how a lot of hauntings start, she says. People who knock down walls, or move furniture about, or have guests and suddenly change the energy. Even puberty can do it. Her ghosts were most active when the children were teenagers, she says. “It’s been scientifically proven that teenagers have something else going on in the brain, so they’re pushing out different energy, and I believe the spirits react to that.”
Fielding was born in Stockport. Her father worked in drilling; her mother was a housewife. “I wanted to be Madonna, we all did,” she says. So she went to stage school, briefly sang in a band called Idle Hands, and ended up acting in the children’s series Seaview, which led to a call to be a host on Blue Peter in 1987, aged just 18.
“The first year wasn’t happy. I was just a young girl all of a sudden living in London and left to get on with it. I’d never presented before, it was really frightening. No autocue, no earpieces. I’d quite often be sick or running to the loo every five minutes because I was shaking. I was such a mess. There was no training.”
Still, she lasted five years, including interviewing Diana, Princess of Wales and, memorably, screaming her way around a rollercoaster ride in Blackpool. Being a young woman in television in the 1980s meant there were some unsavoury characters about, too.
“But you just got on with things. Somebody said to me the other day, ‘If you knew what you know now and you had a teenage daughter, would you let them go into television?’ I said no, absolutely not. Not showbiz of any kind. That’s only because you see things and you hear things. I’m not going to say [what], but just things that make you go, ugh…”
She met Jimmy Savile in the studio for Jim’ll Fix It. “I remember him taking my hand, kissing it, and looking into my eyes and saying, ‘Look into my eyes and tell me what I’m thinking…’ He was stroking my hand, so I snatched it away and thought, ‘Oh my god, you’re a real creep.’ I just got this really bad vibe.”
Her experience with Rolf Harris, on the set of Blue Peter when she was 18, was worse. “I was left alone with him. He basically grabbed my arse and wouldn’t let go. Horrid. And with everything that’s coming out at the moment to do with [Diddy] and the music industry… Just don’t go near it.” As it happens, William is a musician in LA, but Mary is a medic in the RAF.
She was always interested in the supernatural, spotting her first ghost at her mum’s house in the late 1980s, but it was Beattie who turned it into a career. Most Haunted generally saw her visit a creepy old building thought to be haunted, then she’d spend the night and wait to get scared. Night vision cameras helped – not that they ever really caught anything.
Fielding could always laugh at herself. “I think that’s what it was, the hilarity with the serious, they merged together. And it was real, the reactions. If I’m going to wee myself, I’ll wee myself, you know? It’s the truth.”
It was all harmless stuff, and could have been taken a lot more seriously had she not been accompanied in the early days by Derek Acorah, a self-styled Liverpudlian medium who went everywhere with his invisible spirit guide, Sam, a ghost he met in a previous life 2,000 years ago in Ethiopia.
Acorah would “talk” to the ghosts Fielding investigated. Only – and here was the biggest shock of the early 21st century – it turned out he was faking it. He was rumbled in 2005 when fed up crew members told him to channel the spirits “Rik Eedles” and “Kreed Kafer”, which turned out to be anagrams of “Derek Lies” and “Derek Faker”.
“I think there was a lot of damage done, it was very upsetting. People would laugh at it [after that], but hardened fans absolutely adored it. So it was really hard and still is to get over it,” Fielding says. She, and Most Haunted, carried on without Acorah, but they never spoke again.
“I was just so disappointed. And when you see a person’s true colours, you just think, good luck, crack on. I wasn’t upset or bitter or anything. It’s part of our history.” Acorah died in 2020. Though that shouldn’t necessarily be a barrier to reconciliation, I suppose.
Fielding often talks to the dead at her seance table. Her late father sends messages via “tapping” – making a noise at the correct letter as she runs her hand across the alphabet on her phone. During Covid, Fielding couldn’t stop crying. “My dad came through then, telling me ‘Please don’t cry, everything will be alright. I’m always with you.’ And that was so lovely to hear.”
You must need to be great at spelling to be a ghost, I say. Fielding cackles again. “That’s what Glen, our open-minded sceptic, always says!” But she does “tapping” every night on stage in her live tour, and members of the public experience it for themselves.
“We’re getting first names, surnames, dates they died, and we’ll check those with historical records and they’ll be correct. I wish it would be taken more seriously. One of the big questions we have is ‘What happens to us when we die?’ Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we found out?”
She’s heartened by Gen Z being more open to spiritualism and the like. She has a podcast, Paranormal Activity covering “UFOs, conspiracy theories, the lot. Though I don’t think we should call them ‘conspiracy theories’, it’s research. When the world is in turmoil, we’re all looking for answers, for faith, for something to believe in.”
But she’d like more journalists and scientists to take part in seances and investigations. “A lot of people go, ‘Oh, it’s a load of rubbish, ghosts and things like that.’ But millions upon millions of people around the world have seen and experienced paranormal activity, and we’re not all mad, we’re not all hallucinating. This stuff is real and it is happening.”
And yet we’ve never caught a ghost on camera. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could?” she muses. It’s easy to be cynical, I confess. “Well, exactly. If I was watching a TV show like Most Haunted, I’d probably go, ‘Really? Really?’ And that’s why we launched the Most Haunted Experiences, to have people come live and do it with us. Come along. Bring your camera. See for yourself.”
Readers who believe they live in haunted houses are advised to simply capture as much footage and records as they can, to get the property blessed (she never uses the term “exorcised”) if they wish, but otherwise, to just relax. She hasn’t heard from her ghosts in years now. “I think they’re still here, I just think they’re very happy, and I think that in most cases, a lot of past residents will stay in their homes. When I go, I’ll probably be here.”
And when I go, by which I mean literally leave her house and go back to Crewe train station, she hopes I don’t make her out “to be an absolute nutter.” And I sincerely hope I haven’t, because she’s just a very nice, very funny woman asking a lot of very open questions.
When the time does come for her to pass on, Fielding says, she’d love to see her work continued by another generation. Though in this there seems a contradiction. If all of what she says is true, why would she ever have to stop hosting TV shows, even after she’s dead?
She looks delighted, as if I’m finally getting it. “No, that’s true! I could come through, couldn’t I?” Fielding mulls this over for a second, holds a straight face, then bursts out laughing.
Most Haunted Castles (Andersen Press, £7.99) by Yvette Fielding, illustrated by Hannah Shaw, is out now. Click here to order