Next year will mark 30 years since the tragic death of "the people's princess," Diana Spencer. Her death has been the subject of documentaries and conspiracy theories for decades, but it is gaining renewed attention thanks to her brother’s recent book, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, and an upcoming series from Prime Video titled Diana: Her Secret Confessions.
While she was internationally celebrated during her lifetime, her years of humanitarian work and compassion have now been largely overshadowed by the events of her death and the questions about what caused it. With that in mind, it isn’t surprising that people would turn to unconventional methods to seek answers. However, two purported mediums—Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker—took this phenomenon to another level with the 2003 television special, The Spirit of Diana.
What was The Spirit of Diana?
The Spirit of Diana was an internationally televised event where multiple self-identified psychics and spiritual guides attempted to contact Princess Diana’s ghost. The first third of the program functioned as a documentary, with interviews from her biographer Andrew Morton, her boyfriend’s father, Mohamed al-Fayed, and multiple spiritual advisors that Diana consulted in the last few years of her life. From there, the special took a decidedly paranormal turn as Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker retraced the route Diana and Dodi traveled in the lead-up to their accident, claimed to sense what each person’s last thoughts had been, and then held two live séances and one channeling session.
According to Craig Hamilton-Parker, these spiritual encounters were agreed upon before filming, as he reported Diana’s spirit telling him, “Yes, I’ll do this with you. I’ll be there.” During the séances, the producers gathered groups of people who had known Diana in life, and the mediums seemingly provided information that only Diana could have known. The channeling was more detached, as none of the witnesses had personally known Diana, and the psychic, Patricia Bankins, was reportedly channeling her own spiritual guide, not Diana herself.
Still, the various psychics claimed to provide answers to many of the biggest questions surrounding Diana’s life. In the first séance, Jane Hamilton-Parker spoke for Diana, claiming that she truly did love Dodi Fayed and that she told them, “All I wanted was a man to walk beside me who loved me.” When asked whether her death was an accident or not, Craig Hamilton-Parker claimed that—whether it was staged or not—Diana thought people should move past it. He claimed that Diana’s primary reason for speaking with them was to get the message to William and Harry that “Mum’s alright” and that she loved them.
The channeling was more of a Q&A session than the more social séances, and claimed to provide direct answers to some of the biggest unanswered questions that remained. Patricia Bankins’s spiritual guide portrayed then-Prince Charles as a man who had been unable to properly love his wife, and Dr. Hasnat Khan as a love in Diana’s life but not the love of her life. Fayed received the most attention, with claims that he had been with Diana in a past life and that he was destined to be with her in the afterlife, but the spirit admitted that they likely would not have stayed together if they had survived.
The special debuted on March 9, 2003, and was shown on US pay-per-view for $14.95 and on the cable channel LivingTV in the United Kingdom. However, the UK broadcast cut many of the special’s most significant scenes, because the séances were too controversial to pass Britain's Independent Television Commission guidelines.
Diana’s History with Psychics
Perhaps there is reason to believe that, if a spirit can contact a medium from the other side, Princess Diana's would have done so. She was known to believe in the supernatural and spoke with many spiritual advisors in the last decade of her life. According to those interviewed in The Spirit of Diana, she even claimed to be able to heal others with her touch and predict impending tragedies.
Her interest in the paranormal likely began in 1986, when Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his then-wife Sarah Ferguson introduced Diana to an astrologer. According to biographer Andrew Morton, Diana was eager to believe that there was a plan for her life, and became a patron of a number of psychics and spiritual healers. While some in her life, including Prince Charles, saw this reliance on New Age spiritualists as an embarrassment, others saw it as a potential danger, as there were several frauds who exploited her unhappiness and fueled her paranoia.
The most prominent of her spiritual consultants was Rita Rogers, who Diana had visited only weeks before her death. Rogers herself claimed to have initially predicted Diana’s relationship with Dodi, adding that she warned that he might be involved in a terrible car accident that would take place in a tunnel in Paris. However, she never saw anything to suggest that Diana would even be in the car, much less die there. Still, when Diana called her from Paris mere hours before the fatal collision, Rogers warned the princess to leave Paris right away. She found out about her friend’s death the next morning.
Since then, Rogers has claimed to feel Diana’s presence around her from time to time, as has her former butler, Paul Burrell. Prince Harry has also openly discussed his own spiritual encounters, including an incident with a leopard and at least one consultation with a medium. The woman reassured him that Diana was watching over him, mentioning a Christmas ornament that his son Archie had recently broken as proof that she really was communicating with Diana’s spirit.
Public Criticism for the Séances
Over the years, many people have criticized The Spirit of Diana for being exploitative, using a woman’s tragic death as a way to make a quick buck. The fact that it was a paid program in the United States only added to that impression, as pay-per-view was primarily associated with sporting events and pornography at the time. However, the people involved in the project have continued to stand by their product.
In a follow-up video released on September 22, 2026, Craig Hamilton-Parker claimed that the project was never intended to cause harm. The producers had heard about a consultation he had done with one of Princess Diana’s friends shortly after her death, he said, which prompted them to reach out. They wanted to prove that there was some form of life after death, and they felt Diana was a good subject due to her own history of spiritual exploration. While Hamilton-Parker admitted that there were some moments that were probably in bad taste, he generally felt it was successful, and he even provided some new predictions about Prince Harry and his wife Meghan.
Ultimately, most complaints were about how the money made off of Diana’s death would be used. Despite the uproar, The Spirit of Diana was estimated to have earned a gross revenue of $8 million, prompting the producers to create The Spirit of John Lennon three years later. However, Hamilton-Parker claimed that the psychics weren’t paid beyond their expenses and that all profits were donated to the Prince’s Trust (now the King’s Trust), a charitable organization that provides funding and training for young people trying to find jobs and start businesses.
Like Diana’s death itself, there will likely always be questions about the production of The Spirit of Diana. What gave these psychics the right to speak for Diana in the public sphere? What non-monetary benefits did they receive for leading the séances? Perhaps most importantly, why would Diana choose to share her thoughts through a tacky, pay-per-view special when she clearly had friends and family members that were already seeking her out in other ways?
Perhaps she truly believed that these mediums could give her children the reassurances that she couldn’t. It’s impossible to know if the princes ever sought it out. The Spirit of Diana was not the first celebrity séance, and it will undoubtedly not be the last. Until the matter of the afterlife is more firmly settled, it will have to be a personal choice to see these attempted séances as purely exploitative or as a genuine way to provide comfort to the grieving.