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 who followed her across the ocean from her homeland in New Zealand to Australia.

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

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

She says he tried to strangle her while she slept in Auckland and physically attacked her again while she shared 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, doesn’t even want to watch horror movies for fear of another demon taking control of her body again.

“I won’t even watch a supernatural horror movie,” he said.

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

Alexa’s terrifying experiences with the supernatural are described in a new book called Australian Ghost Stories by journalist and true crime 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 battle with the bottle from her teens to her early 20s.

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

The noise seemed to be coming from the second floor, but what worried Alexa the most was that no one else was supposed to be home.

Then he heard heavy footsteps, as if someone was coming down the stairs.

“That’s when he went crazy,” Alexa told the book’s author. ‘Suddenly I could not only hear footsteps but also voices.

‘A lot of them. And there was a series of knocks and bangs like doors and windows opening and closing.

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

The schoolgirl was so scared that she called her parents and told them, “Someone has to come home right now because I’m not going to go back into that house.”

“I was absolutely terrified,” she told Phelps.

When her parents came home, they found nothing unusual, but the events of that day would haunt their daughter for the rest of her life.

Alexa happily faced being thrown into the Colombian jungle without food, shelter or clothing for 21 days in Naked and Afraid (above), but what really scares her are the ghosts.

Over the next few weeks, Alexa had even stranger encounters. Once he woke up to howling and banging on the wall.

Alexa began to wonder if she was imagining things. His parents had not believed his 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 soon moved to a new house in another part of Gisborne, but Alexa still felt a menacing power watching her.

Shortly after moving in, Alexa was sitting in the living room when she suddenly felt like something was about to go wrong.

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

“One after another, bang, bang, bang, they just hammered their way into the house,” he told Phelps.

This time his parents could see the blood and feathers as evidence that something had happened, but they 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 distinguish between the real and the supernatural.

The student rented an apartment above a coffee shop and almost immediately felt that it was filled with malevolence.

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

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

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

One night, Alexa woke up terrified and felt like an invisible force was strangling her.

“Something was on top of me and had its hands around my throat,” he said.

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

One morning, after a new girl moved in, she called her roommates and told them that her bed had come up off the floor.

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

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

Alexa, whose clients include Delta Goodrem, Guy Sebastian and Jessica Gomes, can’t even watch horror movies for fear of demons taking control of her body again.

The amateur exorcists prayed and sang as they walked through the apartment, then talked for a while among themselves.

One of the parishioners said that the apartment was haunted by an old man whose wife had died in his sleep and that it was his spirit that was sleeping with the new girl.

After more chanting, Alexa felt an unbearable pain in her stomach. Two parishioners made hand gestures as if they were catching a fish until a pair of invisible “entities” emerged.

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

Australian Ghost Stories by James Phelps is published by HarperCollins and is available now

‘They suspected that I had picked up that first spirit from the old house 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 would have been in this house.”

That was the last time Alexa felt a malicious presence in the apartment, but one of her most terrifying 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 couple heard strange noises one night.

They got up and saw something – “it wasn’t a person, but rather a shadow” – standing outside in the hallway.

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

“Our bathroom paint, 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 images of each room in the apartment, as well as photographs of herself.

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

“I felt a chill down my spine because I had been having headaches and feeling nerve pain on that side of my face,” he said.

The 44-year-old is terrified by the return of a ghost like the one she says physically attacked her when she shared a flat with a Miss Universe contestant in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

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

“This image fell apart right after he told me about the presence,” he said.

The healer, who came to the apartment and “helped the spirits cross over,” told Alexa that those 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 energy.”

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

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

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

“One of the reasons I love taking on these huge challenges is because I want to push my limits, 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, that’s fucking great.”