Daisy May Cooper, the queen of comedy, buys a magnificent new house in the Wiltshire countryside only to discover it’s haunted.
The 37-year-old comic can make a joke out of almost anything, but her three years of otherworldly experiences have scared her.
Daisy rose to prominence as the creator and actress of the classic BBC sitcom This Country in 2021, and she soon found herself on stage at award presentations, delivering jokes about the Sugababes to the globe. (You’ll never change, Daisy. We adore you.)
Daisy, like many others who achieve prosperity, purchased herself a wonderful huge property in the countryside – little did she realise it would be hiding a dark secret.
Daisy told Danny Robins on his successful BBC podcast, Uncanny, “I wanted to see a ghost so much, until it actually happened to me.”
‘The questions it leaves you with are extremely unsettling. It makes me wish I was in your shoes, wondering whether ghosts exist.’
Danny, the podcaster known as ‘the UK’s go-to ghost man,’ has interviewed numerous people who have had unexplainable experiences. Daisy was his most recent Christmas special guest, appearing in The Haunting of Daisy May Cooper. Gripped.
Daisy has never lived in a bigger house; it’s brand new and overlooks a lake.
Daisy didn’t hear or see anything at first, but after they started, the encounters became increasingly uncomfortable.
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It all started when her friend Sarah came to stay, and they went out for takeaway and had a girls’ night, while the comic’s police officer companion remained in one of two vacant rooms on the top floor.
‘She told me in the morning she had heard what sounded like somebody breaking into the house,’ recalled Daisy, adding: ‘She was so frightened she phoned her boyfriend.’
Since then, several other individuals have slept in the same room, and almost everyone has claimed strange occurrences, including hearing voices, smelling cigarette smoke, and even seeing’shadow figures,’ said the Am I Being Unreasonable? star.
Daisy’s two housekeepers on the top floor have told her about the same photos inexplicably being pulled down from the walls and placed in extremely strange locations on the landing.
‘It’s not like they just fall off, it’s like somebody has taken them off and placed them in different places,’ she said.
Daisy awoke another time to find the shower turned on ‘full blast’ with the tap completely repositioned.
‘That’s quite terrifying,’ Daisy recalled, as Danny pointed out to get to the shower you would have to walk past her bed. Yikes.
Daisy, on the other hand, has yet to see anything. That is, until her father, Paul Cooper, who also plays Daisy’s on-screen father in This Country, noticed a guy passing by the window.
‘I would guess 40s to 50s, he looked like a well-to-do person with a short haircut, moustache and country coat,’ said Paul, to went on to explain how there was a security gate and a code was needed to get in, and Daisy wasn’t expecting anyone round that day.
She and Paul rushed outdoors, but the individual had vanished. Having previously experienced a break-in, Paul revealed how he is’very, very vigilant’ to intruders, especially given Daisy’s celebrity, but he felt no adrenaline surge or fear – it was ‘as if he was intended to be here,’ Paul admitted.
Celine Hisley, co-author of Am I Being Unreasonable?, had a similar experience in the guest bedroom when she and her boyfriend both heard a whisper in the night.
Then, Daisy heard footsteps going up the stairs when no one was home, and one day, when she was filming Never Mind The Buzzcocks, she got a text from her housekeeper which said: ‘Just so you know I have seen a Roman walk through your wardrobe and we need more toilet roll.’
Daisy’s answer was to go acquire more toilet paper.
Daisy soon saw something really weird, but it was just the tip of the bone-chilling iceberg.
‘I was with my son and we were in my bed, and we were just watching telly,’ she began.
‘I cant remember what happened first, whether it was the sound or the security light that comes on on my landing, but the sound is actually the thing that scares me the most.
‘It was the sound of feet running on a wooden floor and what I can only describe as a pair of children’s legs, a 7 or 8 year old, and it had these white shorts on, and these legs ran around the bed and me and my son both tracked it for a matter of seconds then it was just gone. It completely vanished.
‘It was the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.’
She continued: ‘It’s so funny and it’s so ridiculous, and I know what people think when I say it and how stupid it sounds, but I saw what I did and the sound of that thing coming in was terrifying. I can’t ever get the sound out of my head. It was horrible.’
The intrigue intensifies when audio study reveals that Daisy’s house location goes back to ancient times. It’s also directly next to an abandoned railway known for conveying injured troops.
In 1959, a child drowned in the surrounding lake, which you can view from the window of the spare room.
Daisy reasoned that the ghosts could seek companionship because many of the properties in the neighbourhood are vacant second homes.
Her main argument is that her experiences – the guy outside, the half-ghost of a kid, and the painting removal – are from the future. She believes it is a family who will eventually move into the house.
‘The pictures taken off the wall could be them deciding whether to take the pictures off the wall and where to put them,’ she said.
Daisy feels’relieved’ to be leaving, but she is also set to move into an ancient 18th century house.
But, as she said: ‘At least there won’t be any running legs in PE shorts.’ She hopes.
