Amethyst Realm, a 27-year-old spiritual counselor from Bristol, England has a curious love-life. Appearing on the popular daytime TV show This Morning, she described how she hopes to settle down and perhaps even have a baby someday — with a ghost.
She “met” and fell in love with her current spirit partner on a visit to Australia, while out for a walk in the bush. “It’s the one,” insists Realm. Apparently the ghost hitched a ride back to England on the plane with her, and the couple plan to get married.
She explained to the bemused hosts her plans to start a ghostly family: “I’ve been looking into phantom pregnancies and I believe that a phantom pregnancy is actually a real pregnancy but you have a phantom inside you rather than a real baby.”
However, Realm told This Morning presenter Eamonn Holmes that she hopes to have a physical baby with her phantom husband.
“Maybe this is like a really nice dream that you can go back into and opt into whenever you want,” suggests Holmes.
This is apparently not her first “close encounter” with a spiritual being.
It all began in 2005 while her flesh-and-blood fiancé was working away from home. Realm says that she started to feel the presence of a supernatural being in the spare bedroom. She was not afraid of it, quite the contrary — convinced that this spirit had the hots for her, one evening she decided to make the first move. Dressing up in sexy underwear, she sat and waited.
Realm recalls in the interview that she felt it’s presence just as she was dropping off to sleep. She goes on to explain that what followed was the first of many sexual encounters with a spirit. It wasn’t long before Realm’s fiancé moved out on the grounds that she was having an affair. He had seen the shadowy figure of a man through the bedroom window, reports Amethyst — much to her annoyance as she herself has never seen her lover in physical form.
The relationship lasted for 3 years before Amethyst and her spirit-lover drifted apart.
But for Amethyst, a relationship with a real man couldn’t compare to her spiritual experience and she turned to seeking love from ghosts. Amethyst claims to have had sexual encounters with at least 15 ghosts, including some one-night-stands.
As This Morning presenter Phillip Schofield quipped, for Amethyst it was a case of “Once you go ghost, you can never go back.”
Realm explains that sex with a spirit is on a different level: “Ghost lovers tend to be more sensual and adept than the average bloke. There’s always more of a connection, because the sex goes beyond physical. It’s like any other kind of sex. The main difference is I just can’t see them.”
Hers is not a unique case. Spectrophilia is the term used for a phenomenon of having alleged sexual encounters with ghosts, as well as being sexually aroused by images in mirrors. This occurrence has featured in folklore and myths from many different cultures including Arabic, Celtic, Greek and Hindu.
Amethyst says that she immediately felt a strong connection when she first encountered her current lover, unlike anything she felt in any of her previous encounters.
She gave in to the moment and did not think that it would develop any further as, according to Amethyst, “spirits tend to be quite static.” However, something extraordinary happened. During the flight home, she felt she was not alone, her lover was right beside her.
It seems that her friends and family are quite accepting of the unorthodox relationship. Amethyst told People magazine that “Most of my friends are happy that I’ve found love. If they think I’m mad, they seem to be keeping it to themselves.”
Nine months into their relationship, while the couple were hiking at Wookey Hole caves, her spirit asked her to marry him. This is the first time she had heard his voice. She shared for The Sun: “There was no going down on one knee — he doesn’t have knees. But for the first time, I heard him speak. I could actually hear his voice and it was beautiful. Deep, sexy and real.”
Amethyst is making plans for a Pagan “handfasting” marriage ceremony. They are now choosing a ring that will symbolically be set with an amethyst stone.
Read another story from us: The Mysteries and Ghosts Surrounding Ireland’s Most Haunted Castle
Amethyst is not alone in making headlines for planning a ghostly wedding. Former Captain Jack Sparrow impersonator Amanda Teague from Northern Ireland reportedly married the ghost of a 17th century Haitian pirate, in 2016. She went public with her story at the beginning of 2018 so that people such as herself would not feel alone in pursuing love affairs with spiritual beings.
However, because of the lack of documentation, such as the groom’s birth certificate, and the location (somewhere in the Irish sea) of the ceremony, this cannot be a legally recognized marriage. Too bad.