
Coronation Street star's house in Help! My House is Haunted
Beverley Callard, who played feisty Liz McDonald on the ITV soap for more than 20 years, will take part in the fifth series of Celebrity Help! My House is Haunted.
The Discovery+ show will see a team of paranormal experts help six new spooked stars.
Psychic medium Ian Lawman, tech expert Barri Ghai, and investigator Jayne Harris will aim to 'uncover the chilling secrets that are lurking in their homes'.
And given Beverley's past with spooky goings-on, it will no doubt be a welcome show of support.
Beverley as Liz McDonald in Corrie. (Image: ITV) Just last year, the 68-year-old posted an eerie video from her garden, leaving fans convinced it could be something supernatural.
The actress shared footage from her barn's security camera that showed two strange orbs floating in the air.
Beverley wrote in the Instagram post: "HELP!! What the hell is this? my ring camera in the barn alerted us at 1am this morning.
"What are the two orbs? @jonmmac55 armed with a baseball bat went to investigate!!
"Nothing there, upon returning checked the camera and they were back. OMG! I'm scared. Any help great fully appreciated."
While some fans were quick to reassure Beverley, who now lives in Norfolk, that it may just be cobwebs, others said it could be the 'presence of restless spirits'.
It's not the first time Beverley has shared her thoughts about paranormal activity, telling the Star in 2020 that she could often 'feel the presence' of her fellow former castmate, the late Anne Kirkbride, who played Deirdre Barlow.
In August 2020, Beverley announced that she would remain with the soap for another year and would return sometime in 2021 to film Liz's exit storyline, however, an exit was never filmed.
Nancy Dell'Olio will feature in the new series. (Image: PR)Beverley will join five other celebrities who will have their homes investigated for paranormal activity by the team.
These are Nancy Dell'Olio, Gary Numan, Suzanne Shaw, Beverley Callard, Simon Weston and fellow Corrie star Antony Cotton.
Producers say: 'The show features six new spooked stars, all desperate to uncover the chilling secrets that are lurking in their homes.
Recommended reading:
Coronation Street fans believe Liz McDonald will soon return
Coronation Street Sue Cleaver lands new role days after exit
Coronation Street bosses urged to 'wake up' as show 'worst' it has been in years
'Confronting the eerie and unexplainable phenomena is a team of paranormal experts who dig deep into the history of each location, from historic Highland castles to sprawling Italian masserias, and uncover the dark pasts that could be impacting the hauntings.
'This season will also see Katrina Weidman, a renowned American paranormal investigator, joining the team.'
Previous seasons (1-4) are available to stream now on Discovery+.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Daily Mirror
38 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
Linkin Park's Emily Armstrong halts festival performance to shave fans' hair
Linkin Park's new lead singer, Emily Armstrong, fulfilled a fan's wish by shaving their hair live on stage during a performance at Rock for People in Czechia Linkin Park's new lead singer, Emily Armstrong, delighted one concert-goer by shaving their hair live on stage during one of the band's performances. The New Divide stars were in Czechia for their headline set at Rock for People this week when one fan begged them to shave their hair. In the crowd, the fan held up a sign which read: "Emily, cut my hair!" and halfway through the show, Emily brought him up on stage and produced clippers out of nowhere to fulfil the fan's wish. Emily, ever the barber, gave him an incredible half-mullet, half-buzzcut and told him: "We gotta leave some at the back for the party, baby!" The fan, who originally had long locks, seemed delighted by the results as he turned around to thank the singer. After cutting his hair, Emily held up the sign that the fan brought with him. READ MORE: 'Brilliant' air cooling fan that keeps homes cool during the heatwave slashed from £150 to £40 Last year, when Linkin Park announced Emily as the new singer, the band received a lot of backlash from fans who claimed they were erasing Chester Bennington's memory. The Papercut rockers announced their return last summer following a seven-year hiatus after Chester took his own life in 2017, but the musician insisted that the band would not be "rewritten" following heavy criticism of the move to put Emily front and centre. Mike Shinoda said to BBC Radio 1's New Music Show: "This is intended to be a new chapter of Linkin Park. The old chapter was a great chapter, and we loved that chapter. "It ran its course and now we were faced with a challenge of: 'Well, OK, if you start from scratch with another voice, what do you do?'" Mike explained that he had been writing music with Dead Sara singer Emily since 2019 and that they never planned to "start the band up again". At the end of this month, Linkin Park will be performing at Wembley Stadium. The group will be supported by two incredible acts, first of which is Spiritbox. The Courtney LaPlante-fronted metalcore outfit will be hitting Wembley Stadium for the first time in their career for this night of entertainment. Secondly, JPEGMAFIA will be supporting Linkin Park. The American rapper is a New York local who will no doubt fit right into Linkin Park's repertoire. After London, the band are heading to Germany, Belgium, Poland and France before heading back to the US for dates in New York, Illinois, Tennessee and more.


New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Martha Wainwright, in her own right
'Though I was a 'daughter of' twice over, doors seemed closed to me,' writes Martha Wainwright in her 2022 memoir Stories I Might Regret Telling You, recalling the difficulty she had getting her music career off the ground in the late Nineties. Wainwright – the daughter of the American songwriter Loudon Wainwright III and the Canadian folk artist Kate McGarrigle, and the younger sister of the singer and composer Rufus Wainwright – was born into a family renowned for its musicality. Yet far from the ease with which some might have expected her to glide into stardom, Wainwright found these associations worked against her. This was in 'stark contrast to the attention paid to the 'sons of' musical stars', she writes, naming 'all those boys' she hung out with in New York and Los Angeles: Teddy Thompson (son of Richard and Linda), Sean Lennon (son of John and Yoko), Chris Stills (son of Stephen), Harper Simon (son of Paul). Two decades on from that time, performing at London's Union Chapel in late May to mark the 20th anniversary of her self-titled debut album, Wainwright, now 49, is far from over this early push-back. After opening her set with 'Far Away', on which her voice retains the almost unbelievable balance of childish twee and adult gravel captured on the original recording, and 'GPT', named after Brooklyn's Greenpoint Tavern bar, she explains why it took her the best part of a decade finally to release this album in 2005. 'There was already a lot of Wainwrights in the room, and a couple of cute McGarrigles,' she says to laughs from the crowd – so the industry big shots weren't much bothered by her raw, untethered songs. How could she ever change that? Martha Gabrielle Wainwright was born in New York State in 1976. Her parents were living in Woodstock at the time, but they soon separated, and Martha and Rufus moved with their mother to her native Montreal, where they grew up in a bohemian, folkish family. Wainwright is often asked if her parents 'made' her do music, she writes in her memoir, and the answer is yes. 'But I liked it and I wanted the attention and fun of performing. I was a misfit, and often unhappy, but singing and playing made me feel good.' But she doesn't consider herself 'naturally gifted. I don't hear music in my head… I get intimidated.' No wonder, given her relatives. Loudon Wainwright (now 78) is a Grammy Award-winning songwriter of tracks that have become classics of Americana, including 'The Swimming Song' and 'Motel Blues'. Meanwhile Kate and her sister Anna McGarrigle (Kate died in 2010; Anna still lives in Montreal) are Canadian folk royalty: their self-titled 1976 record was Melody Maker's 'best record of the year', while The McGarrigle Hour (1998, featuring Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt) remains a stalwart of the modern folk canon. This musical prowess continued into the next generation: Rufus Wainwright signed to DreamWorks Records when he was 22, had hundreds of thousands of dollars poured into his 'artist development' and is now a household name for his baroque pop, as well as his soundtrack and opera work. 'Growing up, I never played the piano – how could I with my brother wailing away on it day and night?' Wainwright writes. Numerous aunts and cousins of the Wainwright-McGarrigle clan are musicians too. At the Union Chapel, Martha's cousin Lily Lanken (Anna's daughter) sings backing vocals. But it wasn't just that her family all wrote and played songs; they wrote and played songs about each other – and no one was more candid than Loudon. Martha Wainwright's father was absent for much of her childhood, 'almost denying my existence', she writes. She portrays a man who instead of caring for his family wrote songs about them. When she was 14 and he was 44, Martha was sent to live with Loudon in New York City for 'a year of discontent'. His song 'Hitting You' is based on that year. Over lively guitar he recalls hitting Martha in the car when she was much younger, moving on to how he felt the need to hit her again: 'These days things are awful between me and you/All we do is argue like two people who are through/I blame you, your friends, your school, your mother, and MTV/Last night I almost hit you/That blame belongs to me.' It's brutal. A decade later, Wainwright learnt that another of her father's songs, 'I'd Rather Be Lonely' – which she'd always thought was 'a bit stupid and mean-spirited', and probably about a girlfriend – was actually about that same year with her. She was in the crowd at a Loudon Wainwright concert, having opened for him, when he introduced the next song as being about his daughter, and proceeded to sing: 'You're still living here with me, I'd rather be lonely/All the time I look around/For excuses to leave town/Everybody wants somebody, but I'd rather be lonely.' It's no wonder, then, that when Wainwright came to write, her songs burst out with a wily, frenetic energy, as though charged with resentment for her father's tunes and insistent on making their own mark. Many of the tracks from Martha Wainwright use unusual guitar tunings – 'what I thought were genius tunings,' she says at the Union Chapel, 'now it turns out they're just a pain in the ass' – a lot of piano, and rickety drums. On stage she introduces 'Ball and Chain' as a song of 'desperation, about wanting to be loved and desired', before giving in to its jangling intensity, anchored by her five-piece band. On the fan favourite 'Factory' she sings, 'These are not my people/I should never have come here,' with ferocity. Yet as the song goes on, her vocals, elsewhere hard edged, morph into a beautiful sloppiness, her vowels soft around these words as her body, too, finds an elastic effect, her legs bending and slinking below her guitar. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe If Wainwright's assertion of being withheld the full benefits of nepotism because of her gender is hard to swallow for those of us who will never have the luxury of benefiting from nepotism whatsoever, another of her declarations is undeniable: that unlike Loudon and Rufus, her career has been held back by motherhood. Wainwright is the mother of two teenage boys, their father her ex-husband and former producer Brad Albetta, who comes off particularly badly in the memoir. In London she plays an unreleased track, singing: 'I chose my children over my career/But I still have to feed them and they are dear/And that is why we are here tonight.' Further into the song, she reflects: 'I sound more like my father every day/But I can't call him on Father's Day.' She is being at least partially comedic, the song a wink to the audience who know exactly who her father is – and that he writes about her too. All of this is, of course, part of the appeal. 'She's got her father's wit,' one woman behind me whispers, approvingly. But the song's point is potent: Wainwright is one of many women whose careers have not run as ascendant a course as they might have had they not paused to have children. That hits harder for Wainwright, given her absent father continued to garner renown as a prolific songwriter. Although her family patter occasionally feels like theatrical shtick, it ultimately lends a melancholia to Wainwright's performance, reinforcing her belief that she hasn't found proper success in the context of her family name. 'In so many ways, my career is a failure,' she writes in her memoir. It's immensely sad, because these songs are fantastic. They are jagged, raucous, yet introspective things, and live, her unburdened stage presence and full-bodied guitar-playing makes them all the wilder. Martha Wainwright was acclaimed upon its release 20 years ago, but never placed higher than 63 in the UK charts, and 43 in the US. The six albums she has released since then have been similarly well received by critics without breaking through into the mainstream. But it is a feat to sell out a 900-capacity venue, in a country that is not your own, playing a record that's two decades old. Wainwright's cult listeners don't care that Rufus isn't there to join her on her rendition of her brother's song 'Dinner at Eight' (about Loudon, of course) – yet she still sounds apologetic when she tells them so. They do, however, care for the single encore track, the rambunctious 'Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole', first released on an EP in 2005, included on the debut record, and now performed by Wainwright solo on acoustic guitar. It's the song that made her name, although she doesn't play it often any more. It is typically – and wrongly – described as a song about Loudon. Wainwright admits she once told a journalist it was about her father, which probably didn't help the matter. But really it is about the industry, about 'getting the short end of the stick' in her career, she writes – being that 'daughter of' rather than 'son of'. 'I will not pretend/I will not put on a smile/I will not say I'm all right for you/When all I wanted was to be good/To do everything in truth,' she sings, boldly and then softly. Martha Wainwright will always be a Wainwright. It is up to her whether she chooses to write like one. [See also: Keir Starmer's grooming gang cowardice] Related


Scottish Sun
2 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Hillwalkers stunned after oil worker climbs Ben Nevis in Lord of the Rings armour
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A SCOTTISH oil worker stunned his gym pals when he scaled Ben Nevis in full Lord of the Rings armour. Middle Earth megafan Jamie O'Connell, 35, was meeting with his group from Tough Cookie Fitness to climb to the UK's highest point in May. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 4 Lord of the Rings megafan Jamie O'Connell climbed Ben Nevis in full Gondor armour Credit: Instagram 4 He recreated an iconic scene from the movies at the summit Credit: Instagram 4 He has been a fan since the first film was released in 2001 Credit: Instagram 4 His fellow hikers couldn't believe what they were seeing Credit: Instagram While most of his pals opted for the traditional hiking gear of waterproofs and boots he decided to break out his unique look. He made the full armour from the fictional nation of Gondor, which features in the fantasy series. The Fort William offshore worker shared pics on social media of him scaling the hill in the Gondorian getup, and even posing with signs pointing to the summit. He told The Scottish Sun: 'I don't know why I did it just thought, yeah this is something I wanted to do for a laugh. 'The guys in the gym are used to me now, I'm always making Instagram videos when I'm doing a workout, I've even come in dressed an an orc once. Stomping around like an orc is a good way to get the cardio going." Jamie's metallic ensemble featured chain mail. long metal plates covering his torso, shoulders and the side of his legs, iron gauntlets on his wrists and even a HELMET. He even recreated a scene from the films by lighting a red flare on the summit and bellowing: "The beacons are lit, Gondor calls for aid!" Despite the difficulties of scaling the mountain dressed for a quest, Jamie reckons it was worth it just to see people's reactions. He added: "I'm not going to lie, I didn't enjoy it at the time, but now I can laugh at it. "There were points where I was wanting to turn back, but I was almost halfway there. so I went, ah nah, we'll just see it through. "It definitely wasn't an enjoyable experience but the reactions I got from people made it all worth it." Man braves Storm Eowyn winds in Scots town while dressed as a KNIGHT He added: "It was a really busy day, there must have been around 500 people on the mountain that day. "Almost everyone who walked past stopped to say something about it or make a comment or have a bit of a laugh. "I've also had people message me on social media to say they met me on the mountain and they were glad they weren't actually hallucinating!" Jamie has been a Lord of the Rings fan since the films were first released nearly 25 years ago, and has created his own armour sets from the wildly popular films. He spent around £500 creating the Gondor armour, which is one of six sets he has made over the years, and wears them to Comic-Con conventions when he meets the actors who wore them in the movies. He said: "It was a custom-made job, because I go to Comic-Cons and stuff like that. "Depending on which guests from the Lord of the Rings are there, I'll kind of try and match which costume I'd wear to go and meet them. "If I went to meet Bernard Hill or something like that, I'd wear a Theoden armour but if I went to meet Billy Boyd, another Scottish actor, I'd wear the Gondor armour." Jamie added: "A famous line from the film which has since become a meme is 'one does not simply walk into Mordor'. "But I suppose in my case, one does not simply climb Ben Nevis, I'll do it in Gondor armour."