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

EXCLUSIVE 

Naked and Afraid star Alexa Towersey says she has been tormented by evil spirits which followed her across the ocean from her New Zealand homeland to Australia.

The 44-year-old braved being dropped in the Colombian jungle without food, shelter or clothes for 21 days in the hit Discovery Channel program.

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

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

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

‘I won’t even watch a supernatural scary movie,’ she said. 

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

Alexa’s ordeals with the supernatural are described in a new book called Australian Ghost Stories by journalist and best-selling true crime author James Phelps.

The former ironwoman’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 her childhood was marred by her father’s alcoholism and her mother’s manic depression which led to her once walking in on her during a suicide attempt. 

The motivational speaker and mental health advocate had her own battle with the bottle from her teenage years until her late 20s. 

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

The noise seemed to come from the second storey but what most troubled Alexa was that no one else was supposed to home.

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

‘That’s when it got crazy,’ Alexa told the book’s author. ‘Suddenly I could not only hear footsteps but voices.

‘A bunch of them. And there were a series of thuds and bangs like doors and windows opening and shutting.’

Alexa went to the bottom of the stairs where she could hear muffled conversations and see the doors opening and closing.

The schoolgirl was so freaked out she called her parents and said, ‘Somebody has to come home right now because I’m not going back inside that house’.

‘I was absolutely terrified,’ she told Phelps.

When her parents got 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 couple of weeks, Alexa had even more weird encounters. She once woke to howling and banging on the wall. 

Alexa began wondering whether she was imagining things. Her parents had not believed her first story.

‘It got to a point where I was so scared that I told them we had to move,’ she said. ‘I was terrified.’

The family did soon move to a new house in another part of Gisborne but Alexa still felt like she was being watched by some menacing power.

Not long after moving in, Alexa was sitting on the lounge when she suddenly felt something was about to go wrong.

Just then, a huge flock of birds appeared out of nowhere and smashed straight into a window.

‘One after another, bang, bang, bang, they just hammered into the house,’ she told Phelps. 

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

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

The student rented a flat above a cafe and almost immediately sensed it was filled with malevolence. 

‘There was an evil energy in the place,’ Alexa said. 

‘This experience was on another level compared to what I had previously encountered.’

One night Alexa woke in terror, feeling she was being strangled by some unseen force.

‘Something was on top of me, and it had its hands around my throat,’ she said.

Night after night, Alexa would go to bed terrified and find herself gasping for air, praying to God for the pressure around her neck to stop.

One morning after a new girl moved in she called out to her flatmates claiming her bed had risen from the floor.

‘Sure enough, we walked in and the bed was levitating,’ Alexa said. ‘She then told us that she had felt someone get into bed and lay beside her for the last four nights.’

The flatmates, all of whom had witnessed strange phenomenon, contacted a local church. The next morning five parishioners turned up carrying bibles, crystals and candles.

The amateur exorcists prayed and chanted as they walked around the flat, then talked for a while among themselves. 

One of the churchgoers said the flat was haunted by an old man whose wife had died in her sleep and it was his spirit getting into bed with the new girl.

After more chanting, Alexa felt an excruciating pain in her stomach. Two churchgoers made hand gestures like they were reeling in a fish until a pair of invisible ‘entities’ came out.

‘They explained that spirits often attached themselves to people and followed them,’ Alexa said. 

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

‘They said the other spirit could have been picked up anywhere, but most likely it had been in this house.’

That was the last time Alexa felt any malicious presence in the flat but one of her most frightening spectral 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 night.

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

Alexa and her flatmate saw the same entity in the same place, at the same time, the next night. And there was more to come.

‘The painting in our bathroom, which was portrait style, was crying, 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 each room in the flat, as well as photographs of herself. 

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

‘I got a shiver up my spine because because I had been having headaches and feeling nerve pain on that side of my face,’ she said.

As Alexa was considering what the healer had said, she was startled by a noise coming from her room.

‘This picture had come crashing down 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 any ‘negative energies’.

‘The experiences I have had are too much,’ Alexa said. ‘I won’t put myself in those situations again.’

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

She lost lost 13kg during her stay in the Amazon and emerged from the jungle a better person.

‘One of the reasons I love taking on these massive challenges is that I want to push my boundaries, to see where my limits are,’ Alexa said.

‘I always thought I was strong, capable and independent. I just proved I am exactly the person I thought I was, that’s pretty f***ing cool.’