Ghosts are not just confined to movie special effects. Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars claim they have had contact with otherworldly entities. In several cases, their paranormal experiences have inspired their acting choices, and one even landed in the hospital.
Sharon Osbourne joked about becoming "possessed" while on a ghost hunt with her son Jack late last year, but it turned out to be no laughing matter when she fell unresponsive and had to be rushed to the hospital.
Jack Osbourne, who hosts Travel Channel’s "Night of Terror," told People he had invited his mom, 70, to the supposedly-haunted Glen Tavern Inn in Santa Paula, California, for a paranormal investigation. The former "Talk" co-host joked, "I'll just get possessed and we'll go home early."
Jack said their team had mostly wrapped shooting at the inn when he decided to send Sharon into a room that purportedly contained an "evil entity" to ask it questions.
HOLLYWOOD GHOST STORIES: KEANU REEVES, KENDALL JENNER AND MORE STARS DETAIL SCARY ENCOUNTERS
"And something weird happened. I can't explain what happened to her," he told "Entertainment Tonight," revealing that her pulse dropped, her breathing was shallow, and she became unresponsive. He told ET his cameraman radioed to him that he was not sure what was happening with Sharon.
Jack added, "Truth be told, I thought she'd had some kind of stroke, or some kind of aneurysm or something, but when they took her to the hospital, she had every test done imaginable and they found nothing wrong with her."
He explained that they felt OK putting the incident in the show because she made a full recovery.
"I mean, she was Christmas shopping two days later," he added of her December 2022 health scare.
"Dallas Buyers Club" actor Matthew McConaughey is not afraid of ghosts and even claimed he stood up to a presence that he dubbed "Madame Bleu," who once haunted a room in his home.
"I was not even under the influence and she was there," the 53-year-old told ScreenSlam while promoting 2009's "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" with co-star Jennifer Garner.
"She wasn't that happy, it didn't seem like she was going to be much fun to hang around or have in my house, so I went ahead and stood my ground."
He said he opened the door to the room Madame Bleu had claimed and told her, "You can move around all you want, but I’m not going anywhere. And for weeks anyone who came over to the house said the same thing, 'There's someone down that hall, there's somebody down that hall.' And I said, ‘I know, I know, I know.’ And I’m not one to say I believe or I don’t believe in ghosts, but people kept coming and I would not tell them, and they’d go ‘There’s somebody…’ And I’m like, ‘I know, I know, I know."
He said he thinks he "outlasted her" and "all of a sudden she got cool and everything was fine, and people quit hearing things and people fell in love with that room, but for a while no one liked the room and all of a sudden loved that room and loved to stay there."
LIKE WHAT YOU’RE READING? CLICK HERE FOR MORE ENTERTAINMENT NEWS
Helena Bonham Carter, an English actress known for her roles in "Alice in Wonderland," "The King’s Speech," "The Corpse Bride" and "Frankenstein," said she once spoke to the late Princess Margaret while preparing to play the royal on "The Crown."
The "Dark Shadows" actress, 57, told British talk show host Graham Norton she was talking with a psychic friend of hers "about something else" when the psychic said, "Margaret's here. Does that mean anything?"
She explained at that point she had been asked to play the princess but had not yet said, "yes."
"If you’ve got the horse’s mouth that’s in the room you’re not going to say, ‘no, actually,’ so I said said, ‘yeah,’ and I asked, ‘Would you mind if I played you?’ And she said, ‘I prefer you,’ … She did say, ‘I think you’re a better idea than the other actor.’" She said she was never told who the other actor was.
"It was a very typical Margaret thing," she added before Norton noted that she had met the princess while she was alive. "I had met her a couple of times. She had a way of sometimes complimenting you and putting you down at the same time. And the fact that she said, ‘Yeah, I think you’re better than the other’ – it was just like you never knew where you were with her."
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT NEWSLETTER
Bonham Carter added, "Then she came through with another note, which was useful, whether it was true because the psychic was fantastically intuitive or there really was the ghost of Margaret telling me I don’t know, but the note was good, and she was like, ‘Get the smoking right.’ And I smoke in a particular way and I always remember that the cigarette holder is as much a weapon for expression as anything else. That was a good note."
Lily Collins, 34, told The Guardian in 2019 that she was convinced she was haunted by some of the ghosts of infamous 1970s serial killer Ted Bundy’s dozens of victims while she was preparing to play his longtime girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer in the 2019 Zac Efron-led "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile."
She told the interviewer she would wake up in her apartment every morning at 3:05.
"I would go downstairs and have a cup of tea, trying to figure out why I had woken up again," she explained. "I started being woken up by flashes of images, like the aftermath of a struggle."
She said after doing a little investigation, "I discovered that 3 a.m. is the time when the veil between the realms is the thinnest and one can be visited" and she said she felt she was being haunted by Bundy’s female victims.
COUPLE'S 2020 TAYLOR SWIFT-TRAVIS KELCE HALLOWEEN COSTUMES BREAK INTERNET FOR PREDICTING ROMANCE
"I didn’t feel scared," she admitted "matter-of-factly," as the interviewer wrote. "I felt supported. I felt like people were saying, ‘We’re here listening. We’re here to support. Thank you for telling the story.’"
"Will & Grace" actress Megan Mullally told Busy Phillips on her talk show in 2018 that she believes the house where she and husband Nick Offerman once lived in Los Angeles was haunted by the spirit of Nicole Brown Simpson and said her ghost did not go away until Offerman learned more about her murder.
"It wasn't the same house, but it was on the same property where had once stood a house that O.J. Simpson had rented for Nicole Brown Simpson," the 64-year-old told Phillips, according to People magazine. O.J. Simpson was acquitted of her murder in 1995 in a controversial trial.
Mullally continued, "We would have in that house, in one corner of the house, like maybe where the bedroom used to be in the old house, we would have all these sounds and weird things all the time. I would be like, 'That's Nicole, and she's pissed because Nick doesn't get it.’"
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
However, she said, "ever since" Offerman watched "The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story" and other documentaries about her murder "no more sounds. "She just needed Nick to understand what happened."