A 2003 pay-per-view special featured psychics who claimed to summon Princess Diana’s ghost, and producers took in an estimated $8 million while critics called the show exploitation.
On March 9, 2003, American viewers could pay $14.95 to watch The Spirit of Diana, an internationally televised program built around self-identified psychics trying to reach the late princess from beyond the grave. Mental Floss later detailed the special’s mix of documentary interviews, a retraced Paris route, two live séances, and a channeling session sold as proof of life after death.
The pitch was simple. Mediums would speak for Diana. Audiences would hear “messages.” Cash would change hands.
Craig Hamilton-Parker, one of the mediums at the center of the show, said producers wanted to prove some form of life after death and saw Diana as a strong subject because of her history of spiritual exploration. The program opened with interviews, then shifted into paranormal claims.
Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker retraced the route Diana and Dodi Fayed traveled before the fatal crash in Paris. They said they sensed last thoughts. Patricia Bankins handled a channeling segment. Documentary voices included biographer Andrew Morton and Mohamed al-Fayed, Dodi’s father.
Hamilton-Parker later said Diana’s spirit had already agreed to participate.
He reported her reply as a clear yes:
"Yes, I’ll do this with you. I’ll be there."
That line, like every other “message” in the special, came only through the mediums. No independent verification appears in the record of the broadcast.
In the first séance, Jane Hamilton-Parker spoke as if channeling Diana and delivered a line about longing for ordinary love.
"All I wanted was a man to walk beside me who loved me."
Craig Hamilton-Parker also claimed a short reassurance aimed at her sons:
"Mum’s alright"
Bankins, in the channeling portion, was described as working through her own spiritual guide rather than Diana directly. The segment still offered answers about then-Prince Charles, Dr. Hasnat Khan, and Dodi Fayed, relationship talk packaged for a paying audience.
None of it was established fact. It was performance framed as contact.
The special leaned hard on Diana’s documented turn toward psychics and healers. Mental Floss noted that her interest in the paranormal likely began in 1986, after Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and then-wife Sarah Ferguson introduced her to an astrologer. In the last decade of her life she spoke with many spiritual advisers.
Biographer Andrew Morton, interviewed for the program, said Diana was eager to believe there was a plan for her life and became a patron of psychics and healers.
Rita Rogers, a prominent consultant to Diana, loomed large in that backstory. Diana visited her weeks before the crash. Hours before the fatal collision, Diana called Rogers from Paris. Rogers warned her to leave the city right away. The next morning Rogers learned Diana was dead. Rogers had earlier claimed she foresaw a terrible car accident in a Paris tunnel tied to a relationship with Dodi, though not that Diana herself would die in it.
Former butler Paul Burrell also said he sometimes felt Diana’s presence. Prince Harry has discussed his own spiritual encounters, including a medium who mentioned a broken Christmas ornament linked to his son Archie. The special treated that whole climate of belief as permission to put Diana’s death on the clock.
In the United States the show ran as pay-per-view. In the United Kingdom it aired on LivingTV, with heavy edits. Many of the most significant séance scenes were cut because they were judged too controversial to pass Britain’s Independent Television Commission guidelines.
Regulators drew a line. Producers still sold the rest.
Estimated gross revenue hit $8 million. Hamilton-Parker said the psychics received only expenses and that profits went to the Prince’s Trust, now the King’s Trust, for youth jobs and business training. That donation claim rests on his account alone in the available reporting.
Public reaction split along a familiar fault line. Critics called the special exploitative, a dead woman’s name, a paying crowd, and unverifiable spirit talk. Participants defended it as an attempt to prove survival after death and to offer comfort. The dispute was not resolved by the broadcast. It still isn’t.
Three years later the same producers mounted The Spirit of John Lennon. The formula had legs. On September 22, 2026, Craig Hamilton-Parker released a follow-up video defending the Diana project and offering fresh predictions about Prince Harry and Meghan. The specific predictions were not detailed in the feature that recorded the video’s existence.
Interest in Diana has not faded. A Prime Video series titled Diana: Her Secret Confessions was described as upcoming. Her brother’s book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister drew renewed attention. Next year will mark three decades since her death. The appetite for her private life remains commercial.
What no one can show is that a pay-per-view séance closed any question about the crash, the afterlife, or the royal family’s grief. Viewers bought a show. Mediums delivered lines. The dead do not invoice.
When television turns a nation’s mourning into a $15 spirit act, the living should keep their wallets shut and their skepticism sharp.
