Naked and Afraid star Alexa Towersey reveals she was haunted by evil spirits for decades

EXCLUSIVE

Naked and Afraid star Alexa Towersey says she was haunted by evil spirits who followed her across the ocean from her home country of New Zealand to Australia.

The 44-year-old braved being dropped into the Colombian jungle for 21 days without food, shelter or clothing on the hit Discovery Channel programme.

But the fearless celebrity fitness trainer is still terrified of the possible return of a ghost that has haunted and haunted her for decades.

She says it tried to strangle her as she slept in Auckland and physically attacked her again while she was sharing a flat with a Miss Universe contestant in Sydney’s east.

Towersey, whose clients include singers Delta Goodrem and Guy Sebastian and model Jessica Gomes, now won’t even watch horror films for fear of another demon taking control of her body again.

“I’m not even going to watch a supernatural scary movie,” she said.

“That might be okay for most, but there’s something about my energy that means I’m susceptible, and doing something as innocuous as watching a horror movie could be taken as an invitation.”

Alexa’s trials and tribulations with the supernatural are detailed in a new book called Australian Ghost Stories by journalist and best-selling author James Phelps.

The former iron woman’s first paranormal experiences occurred as a teenager when her family lived in an old house in Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

Alexa has previously revealed that her childhood was marred by her father’s alcoholism and her mother’s manic depression, which led to her once encountering her during a suicide attempt.

The motivational speaker and mental health advocate had her own struggles with the bottle from her teens through her late twenties.

At the age of 15, Alexa had just gotten home from school one day and was standing in the kitchen when she heard what sounded like a door opening and closing.

The sound seemed to come from the second floor, but what alarmed Alexa most was that no one else was allowed home.

Then she heard heavy footsteps, as if someone was coming downstairs.

“That’s when things got crazy,” Alexa told the book’s author. ‘Suddenly I heard not only footsteps but also voices.

‘A bunch. And there was a series of bangs and bangs, like doors and windows opening and closing.”

Alexa walked to the bottom of the stairs where she could hear muffled conversations and see the doors open and close.

The schoolgirl was so shocked that she called her parents and said, “Someone has to come home now because I’m not going back in.”

“I was absolutely terrified,” she told Phelps.

When her parents returned home, they found nothing unusual, but their daughter would be haunted by the events of that day for the rest of her life.

Over the next few weeks, Alexa had even more strange encounters. She once woke up to crying and banging on the wall.

Alexa started to wonder if she was imagining things. Her parents had not believed her first story.

“It got to the point where I was so scared that I said we had to move,” she said. ‘I was terrified.’

The family soon moved to a new home in another part of Gisborne, but Alexa still felt like she was being watched by a menacing force.

Not long after moving in, Alexa was sitting in the lounge when she suddenly sensed something was going wrong.

At that moment, a huge flock of birds appeared out of nowhere and crashed straight into a window.

“One after another, boom, boom, boom, they just burst into the house,” she told Phelps.

This time her parents could see blood and feathers as evidence that something had happened, but they were convinced it was a natural occurrence.

At 17, Alexa left home to go to university in Auckland, but said she was no longer sure she could tell the difference between what was real and what was supernatural.

The student rented an apartment above a cafe and almost immediately sensed that there was malice in it.

“There was an evil energy in the room,” Alexa said.

“This experience was on another level compared to what I had encountered before.”

One night, Alexa woke up terrified and felt like she was being strangled by an invisible force.

“There was something on top of me and it had its hands around my throat,” she said.

Night after night, Alexa went to bed terrified and found herself gasping for breath, praying to God that the pressure around her neck would stop.

One morning after a new girl moved in, she shouted at her roommates and claimed her bed had risen off the floor.

“Sure enough, we walked in and the bed was floating,” Alexa said. “She then told us that for the past four nights she had felt someone get into bed and lie next to her.”

The housemates, who had all witnessed a strange phenomenon, contacted a local church. The next morning, five parishioners showed up with Bibles, crystals and candles.

The amateur exorcists prayed and sang as they walked around the apartment and then chatted for a while.

One of the churchgoers said that the apartment was haunted by an old man whose wife had died in her sleep and that it was his ghost who slept with the new girl.

After more singing, Alexa felt an excruciating pain in her stomach. Two churchgoers made hand gestures as if they were reeling in a fish until some invisible “entities” came out.

“They explained that ghosts often attached themselves to people and followed them,” Alexa said.

‘They suspected that I had picked up that first ghost from the old house in Gisborne and had carried it with me ever since.

“They said the other ghost could have been picked up anywhere, but it was most likely in this house.”

That was the last time Alexa felt any malevolent presence in the flat, but one of her scariest ghostly sightings was yet to come.

Eight years ago, when Alexa was 36 and sharing a unit in Sydney with a Miss Universe contestant, the pair heard strange noises one evening.

They got up and saw something – ‘it wasn’t a person, more of a shadow’ – standing in the hallway outside.

Alexa and her roommate saw the same entity the next night in the same place and at the same time. And more would follow.

“The painting in our bathroom, which was portrait style, was weeping, but it wasn’t wet,” Alexa said.

This time, Alexa called an “energy healer” she knew and he asked her to send him video footage of every room in the apartment, as well as photos of herself.

When the healer looked at the pictures, he told Alexa that there was something on the left side of her face.

“I got a chill down my spine because I had a headache and felt nerve pain on that side of my face,” she said.

As Alexa thought about what the healer had said, she was startled by a sound coming from her room.

“This photo collapsed just after he told me about the presence,” she said.

The healer, who came to the apartment and “helped the spirits cross over,” told Alexa that such entities attached themselves to her because she was “energetically open.”

Since that day, Alexa has avoided further paranormal encounters by distancing herself from all “negative energies.”

“The experiences I’ve had are too many,” Alexa said. “I won’t put myself in situations like that again.”

Alexa, whose episode of Naked and Afraid was shown in Australia on Sunday night, stopped drinking more than 15 years ago after her father died of alcoholism.

She lost 30 pounds during her time in the Amazon and emerged from the jungle a better person.

“One of the reasons I like to take on these enormous challenges is because I want to push my limits, to see where my limits are,” Alexa said.

‘I always thought I was strong, capable and independent. I just proved that I’m exactly the person I thought I was, which is pretty cool.”