Ghost that persuaded Cilla she’d see Bobby again in the afterlife

A spectre on the stairs. A haunting figure looming over her bedside. The extraordinary story of the...

‘True Scousers don’t believe in the spirit world’ ‘Since Bobby died, he’s been looking after me’

CILLA black’S friends have been recalling this week how she did not want to live beyond 75, and she was convinced she would be reunited in the afterlife with her late husband, Bobby, who died in 1999. ‘I know he is waiting for me,’ she is said to have confided. ‘There have been little messages, unmistakable signals, and when the time comes I will be able to thank him for looking out for me.’ Cilla had held a deep belief in the psychic world since 1990, when I was editing the column she wrote for a daily newspaper and a very ghostly experience made her question her inherent scepticism. It was to change her outlook on life . . . and death.

Cilla, Bobby and I would meet for lunch every week to discuss subjects for her to write about. Some very good London restaurants — among them The Ivy, Le Caprice, Simpson’s and The Ritz — would rock with our laughter as we indulged Cilla’s unquenchable thirst for vintage champagne and her endless supply of hilariously indiscreet stories about her showbusiness pals.

Needless to say, not much work got done at these ‘working lunches’! How could it, when the usual intake was three bottles of champagne, as many chocolate profiteroles as she and Bobby could stomach, plus her constant table-hopping to greet the strangers who would wave across the room at her?

One day, however, dining at the Capital Hotel, just behind Harrods, where Cilla and Bobby had been shopping, she was not her usual effervescent self. She seemed tired and distracted, snappy with Bobby, and even our waiter got an irritable tut when he dropped a fork.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she told me. ‘It’s just that I haven’t been sleeping properly for a while. I’m lying awake all night, because I’ve literally seen a ghost at my bedside.’

For me, it was a light bulb moment. My mind flashed back to the previous week when I’d visited her house — a Victorian mansion set behind high walls in 17 acres of Buckinghamshire countryside at Denham.

It was the first time I’d been there. ‘This is a privilege,’ Bobby had told me. ‘Cilla and I are very private people and only our most trusted friends ever get past the gates.’

Indeed, they were so private that Cilla would say only a dozen friends knew their phone number. Even my daily contact with them had to be by fax — on a line the prudent Cilla and Bobby had insisted my publisher paid to have installed.

When Cilla opened the front door to me, I saw someone walking up the stairs behind her. It was a young girl, whom I presumed to be the nanny Cilla employed for her then ten-year- old son, Jack. Her two elder sons, Robert and Ben, were aged 20 and 16 at the time.

The girl’s hair was tucked beneath a mob cap, and she wore an anklelength white dress with a ruffled collar — looking every inch the traditional nanny, and fitting in perfectly with the period style of Cilla’s house. When she turned towards me from the stairs I thought how sad and pallid her face was.

Cilla ushered me into her light and airy green sitting room, where she poured champagne and we gathered round the piano for a sing-song with some backing vocalists who had been rehearsing for one of her TV shows.

Comedian Frankie Howerd, one of her closest friends, was asleep on a sofa in the conservatory.

‘He’s mislaid the keys to his house in London,’ Cilla explained, ‘ so we’re putting him up until he remembers where they are. So far, it’s been three days and he can’t even remember his name, let alone where his keys might be.’

An hour or so later, Cilla and I were in her country-style kitchen, where she was preparing her latest idea for a snack — hot Mars bars wrapped in smoked salmon, a dish, she explained, that was ‘too gross even for the folks back home in Liverpool, but I’m so common I love it’ — when in burst a rosy-cheeked girl in her 20s wearing jeans, T-shirt and a blazer with gold buttons. Cilla introduced her as Jack’s nanny.

Her hair, her looks, her age and her clothes were in great contrast to what I had seen earlier, but I assumed it was because she had changed and put on make-up to go out. And as my first glimpse of her on the stairs behind Cilla had lasted no more than a couple of seconds, I thought no more about it.

She had, after all, seemed solid flesh and blood — there was nothing to suggest otherwise (if there had, I might have run a mile back up the wooded drive!).

But something must have puzzled me subconsciously, because a week later when Cilla confided over lunch that she’d seen a ghost, I instantly realised that I’d seen it, too.

‘Don’t say another word,’ I said. ‘Instead, let me tell you what you saw.’ As I described my sighting, Cilla nodded in agreement.

Bobby added from across the table: ‘ That’s exactly what Cilla told me she’d seen.’

The only difference was that, spookily, Cilla had seen the ghost when she’d awoken in the middle of the night to find the girl staring down at her. I’d seen her in broad daylight, and there was nothing scary or even unusual about her.

‘My first impression was that she looked very unhappy and vulnerable,’ said Cilla. ‘Then I noticed the dress, and thought: “Oh, that looks like a Laura Ashley nightie she’s wearing.” I knew it was a ghost, yet I’d never believed in them before. I’m from Liverpool and true Scousers know there’s no such thing.

‘I wasn’t scared. She gave off an aura of peace and contentment, and we just stared at each other.

‘Then I nudged Bobby, but before he could wake up, and turn over to look, she simply melted away.’

Over the next few weeks the ghost would come and go regularly, always during the night. I suggested to Cilla that she should do some research into the previous occupants of her home, which she had bought in 1970.

She discovered that in the early 1900s a gardener called Thomas Redley and his wife and daughter had occupied servants’ quarters in the grounds.

His wife had died suddenly, and Thomas himself suffered a fatal heart attack soon afterwards. Their daughter, Lilian, then 11, was left an orphan, and three years later, in 1912, she, too, had died, of pneumonia.

Her funeral cortege had left from the house, where she had been working as a maid, and wound its way down to the cemetery in Denham village.

A few weeks later, Cilla told me: ‘Bobby’s also seen Lilian now. He says she gave him goose bumps at first, but he told me that if I’m not scared — and I’m not any more — then he shouldn’t be either.’

Bobby looked at me rather sheepishly. ‘Liverpool blokes aren’t scared of anything,’ he muttered. ‘Not even Manchester United’.

Cilla added: ‘We both think she’s looking for something, or someone . . . her parents perhaps. It must have been terrible for her to have lost them both while she was so young.’

Cilla told no one else about her ghost, but one day a woman came up to her in the Indian restaurant she and Bobby used to frequent in Gerrards Cross, and told her she could sense that Cilla’s house was being haunted by a troubled young girl who hadn’t succumbed to pneumonia, as everyone had been told, but had died in childbirth, and was unable to pass over to the other side until she had found her baby.

‘All you have to do to bring her peace is to gently tell her that her baby has grown up and is now in spirit with her,’ she advised.

‘I’ve got to help this poor girl,’ Cilla told me — but a further search of parish records didn’t yield any confirmation of a birth, only deaths.

This was Cilla’s first paranormal experience, and it l ed to her friendship with several clairvoyants. Ironically, she would joke that if she died first, she would come back and haunt Bobby if he planned to marry anyone she thought unsuitable.

When Bobby died of lung cancer, she was devastated, but said she coped only because of her firm belief that he was still in touch with her. Strangely, the ghostly Lilian disappeared around the same time.

‘Since Bobby’s been gone, I’ve had several little messages from him, so I know he’s looking after me,’ she confided. ‘He advised me from the spirit world that it was time to give up Blind Date, so I did.

‘Gloria Hunniford told me that after her daughter, Caron keating, died, she’d often find a white feather in the most unexpected places. She believed that it was Caron’s way of telling her that she’s all right.

‘So one day I went into the garden, where some of Bobby’s ashes are buried under the willow tree — the rest were scattered at our other homes in Spain, Barbados and on the roof terrace of our flat in Westminster. I told him that if he was supposed to be my guardian angel, I needed some proof. Suddenly, I looked down and there were five white feathers — I could swear they hadn’t been there earlier.

‘It was as though he was saying: “You want feathers, Cilla? Here they are”.’

But not all Cilla’s psychic interests had such positive results. In 2008, she and her eldest son, Robert — who took over from Bobby as her manager — became partners in Cilla’s Destiny Calls, a website and phoneline offering £1.50-a-minute psychic advice to callers.

She didn’t need the money — even though her career had slumped after Blind Date, she was still worth around £15 million — but, as Cilla explained, she believed that messages from beyond the grave would help other bereaved people.

Instead, she ran into a storm of protest from critics who accused her of profiting from the vulnerable. She was also reported to media regulator Ofcom because she plugged the phoneline on so many TV and radio shows.

Although Robert resigned his directorship in 2008, it is unclear whether Cilla did. However, this week callers to the phoneline were still greeted by her recorded voice.

When I heard the shock news of Cilla’s death, my mind went back to her then new-found fascination in the supernatural and one poignant remark she made.

‘I wonder if you realise you’re dead when you’re walking around haunting people,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’ll never know the answer to that until it’s too late. But I’ll take care not to frighten anyone! I wouldn’t want anyone to say that Cilla’s scary!’