The recording of an episode of the Jeremy Kyle Show entitled ‘I Sleep With Dead People’, was thrown into chaos yesterday as a supernatural spouse terrorised the audience by hurling furniture, sound equipment and TV cameras around the studios. Screaming spectators fled exploding lights and monitors after top TV medium Brenda Spadger’s poltergeist ex-husband learned of a string of affairs she’d had with various spectres, elementals and zombies during their marriage. “At first he just hurled abuse at her – the words ‘Cheating Bitch’ appeared in blood on the studio floor,” explained a member of the sound crew, who witnessed the whole incident. “But when he heard about the extra-marital affairs, he just exploded! First of all this huge tremor passed through the studio floor, followed by these loud knocking noises, then stuff started flying around!” The show’s host tried to calm the irate spirit, shouting from beneath the sound desk that worse things had happened in his own family. “My Great Uncle Frank was an Egyptologist, he came home one day to find his wife inside an Egyptian sarcophagus shagging his mummy – but he didn’t react like this,” he bellowed, before being hit in the face by a flying clipboard. The enraged poltergeist only ceased its violent reaction on threat of exorcism, after a Catholic priest was rushed to the studio. “It was exactly this kind of behaviour which destroyed our marriage,” sobbed the medium – known to millions of viewers through her regular appearances on the popular satellite TV show High Spirits – when the recording resumed. “I’ve never denied that I was forced to seek solace elsewhere – it’s all in my book.” However, Spadger’s best-selling I Married a Poltergeist described only her lesbian affair with a banshee. “The stuff she admitted to on the show came as a complete shock to her husband. He’d had no idea that any of it was going on,” says Maurice Stretcher, Spadger’s co-presenter on High Spirits. “He was particularly upset to hear that she’d had an affair with Big John, her spirit guide, as he’d introduced them – Big John had been one of his closest friends on the Other Side. They’d done purgatory together!” Spadger contends that her dalliance with Big John – the ghost of a 1950s electrician’s mate from Birmingham – didn’t actually count as adultery. “There was no actual penetrative sex, Big John literally entered me in spirit form, took possession of my body and thoroughly groped it,” she claims. “As it was my own hands doing the groping and bringing me off, it surely only counts as masturbation?”

Spadger claims that it was her poltergeist husband’s inability to satisfy her sexually that forced her into seeking solace elsewhere. “That’s the trouble with elementals, their lack of actual physical presence means that relations are ethereal, to say the least,” she reveals. “Apart from a bit of crude groping, the physical side has to be done by proxy.” According to the medium, her husband was forced to manipulate dildoes, vibrators and other sex aids in order to stimulate penetrative sex. However, she quickly found his lack of finesse dissatisfying. “He was so rough, sending the bloody things flying through the air and ramming them into my orifices,” she recalls. “He wasn’t too choosy about what he used, either – kitchen implements, fruit, vegetables, anything which came to hand. I’d be bruised for days afterwards – how I longed for some tenderness and subtlety.” Whilst Spadger received little satisfaction from these activities, her husband’s expressions of his sexual ecstasies rapidly became a problem. “Every time he had an orgasm the walls would shake and all the light bulbs would explode,” she says. “One night all the slates fell off of the roof with an almighty crash! God knows what the neighbours thought!” As Spadger’s reluctance to participate in relations with her husband became increasingly apparent – “I couldn’t bear the touch of his ectoplasm against my skin” – he started to become violent. “It was terrible, he’d hurl things at me – crockery, furniture, even turnips,” she sobs, “That was why I didn’t dare tell him about the affairs with other spirits, for fear of what he might do to me!” The relationship wasn’t always so fraught, as Spadger recalls. “When I first met him at the Regal Bingo Hall haunting in Wrexham he was so sweet – the way he possessed that bingo caller to recite romantic, albeit expletive strewn – poetry to me! That raspy voice he used was so sexy,” she reminisces fondly. “The shower of bingo balls which formed into a heart was another lovely touch – how could I resist such a romantic soul?” The courtship continued, with the poltergeist communicating through recorded voices which spontaneously appeared on cassette tapes. “I’d put Phil Collins in the tape deck as I drove home and instead hear this gravelly voice whispering about what he’d like to do to me when we got home,” she giggles. “I frequently had to pull the car off the road, it made go so weak at the knees!” Eventually the spirit moved in with her, promising to haunt her exclusively. “I really thought that we’d be together forever, in this world and the next,” says Spadger. “But he changed – when I wouldn’t give him what he wanted, he started going astray himself, haunting other women. I know that he was the ‘phantom bottom pincher’ who caused mayhem in that girl’s school in Chester, not to mention the ‘Invisible Groper of East Grinstead’. I’m not stupid!”

Despite her marital experiences, Spadger remains an enthusiastic advocate of relationships across the great divide of life and death. “Whilst there might, as they say, be someone out there for everyone, there’s always a strong possibility that someone could already be dead,” she says. “Spiritual dating gives everybody the chance to quite literally find their soul mate.” Indeed, Spadger’s ‘Singles’ Night Séance’, in which she channels lost souls in search of love to a group of specially invited single viewers, remains the most popular feature of the High Spirits TV show. In spite of allegations by the church that it promotes necrophilia, many of the participants claim to have found true love through the feature. “I could never get on with live women,” explains thirty-two year old sewage worker Tom Widgenfeld, who recently got engaged to the spirit of Mary Coalshovel, a scullery maid who died in 1874. “They were just so demanding, expecting me to change my underwear every day and not bring my work home. My ghost girlfriend is far more accommodating, she doesn’t expect to be taken out anywhere, I don’t have to buy her flowers – except for the odd wreath for her grave, of course – and has no use for expensive clothes and jewellery. Best of all, she only comes when she’s summoned, doesn’t complain about the state of my flat or even when I fart in bed.” The singles séances even survived tragedy when, in 2001, a female participant committed suicide so as to join her lover on the ‘other side’. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether Spadger’s popularity can survive the damaging revelations made on the Jeremy Kyle Show. “There’s a very real risk that even her most devoted viewers will start questioning whether she’s in a position to be advocating relationships across the spiritual realm, when she can’t even keep her own supernatural union together,” opines media commentator Joanne Streetwalker. “The admission that a spirit can’t fulfil the physical side of a marriage is likely to be very damaging – who wants to be hitched for all eternity to a spook who can’t give you the willies?”