The actor Dennis Hopper haunted from beyond the grave: “I told him he had to leave me alone”
Having dedicated decades of his adult life to living in the fastest lane possible, it makes sense that the afterlife wouldn’t be able to contain Dennis Hopper, whether you believe in ghosts or not.
A pivotal figure in the ‘New Hollywood’ movement, the actor and filmmaker’s efforts on either side of the camera were eventually overshadowed by what he got up to away from the industry, which usually involved some form of drug-related debauchery that would have killed a lesser man.
Being bailed out of jail by Willie Nelson, whom he’d never even met before, was the sort of thing that became par for the course with Hopper: describing even a fraction of the things he got up to during his narcotics-addled heyday are usually sentences to have only been constructed once in human history.
It’s easy to exaggerate or assume that some of the star’s most preposterous misadventures are apocryphal, mostly because it’s hard to believe that they all happened to the same guy. And yet, they did, with Hopper blowing himself up with dynamite, snorting the ashes of the deceased, and trying to climb out of a plane in mid-air because he was hallucinating Francis Ford Coppola.
That’s barely the tip of the iceberg for a guy who shot a tree while out of his mind on acid after mistaking it for a bear, convinced himself that he’d wandered into the middle of an armed revolution, and coped with the stress of being inside a house that was being raided by the FBI by doing line after line of cocaine.
Life could barely handle him, so why would death be any different? Despite passing away in 2010, his fourth wife, actor Katharine LaNasa, who he divorced in 1992, didn’t see the last of him for a while. “The ghost of Dennis Hopper would not leave me alone for a really long time,” she said. “We had been divorced a very long time, but I was the last wife that he’d been with that he wasn’t currently divorcing.”
“He visited me first in ways that were scary,” the television veteran and star of The Pitt continued. “He used to come over me in, like, a sweat, and I told him he had to leave me alone. And then he did, and I felt really weird about it.” After having a frank ex-wife to ghost discussion, Hopper and LaNasa finally went their separate ways, despite occupying different planes of existence.
“I walked home in an odd way, and ran into a gallery that had all of his photographs up, and a photograph of him in the very back of the gallery with a fedora on, winking at the camera,” she offered. “So I felt like he was letting me go. And then, shortly after that, in a dream.”
In that dream, Hopper appeared and told LaNasa that he was OK, he wasn’t in any pain anymore, and he was doing alright, all things considered. She “never heard from him again” after that, to draw a line under what must have been a strange period in her life when she was frequently being visited by the ghost of her ex-husband.
