Lily Collins stepped into her darkest role yet as Ted Bundy‘s girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, in Netflix‘s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and the role had some seriously creepy implications on her life off screen. The 30-year-old actress believes she was visited by the ghost of Bundy’s victims, according to The Guardian.
Collins told the British newspaper that while preparing to play Kloepfer, she’d awaken at 3:05 a.m. every night. She couldn’t figure out, at first, why it kept happening. Collins said before she’d snap out of her slumber, she’d see “flashes of images,” but couldn’t place them.
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“I would go downstairs and have a cup of tea, trying to figure out why I had woken up again,” she recalled. “I started being woken up by flashes of images, like the aftermath of a struggle.”
When this continued, Collins said she decided to do a little digging. She learned that 3 a.m. is prime time to be visited by paranormal. Collins said she wasn’t “scared” about the interactions. Instead, she told The Guardian she felt the victims were there to make sure she felt “supported.”
“I discovered that 3 a.m. is the time when the veil between the realms is the thinnest and one can be visited,” she said. “I didn’t feel scared. I felt supported. I felt like people were saying, ‘We’re here listening. We’re here to support. Thank you for telling the story.’”
Ghosts aren’t the only people with ties to Bundy that Collins met with before starring in the Netflix original film. During an appearance on This Morning, the starlette said she met with the real Kloepfer before she portrayed her in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. She recalled her as “gracious,” revealing that she met her daughter, too.
“She was so gracious, her and her daughter Molly were so gracious and inviting [to] me and giving me material to look at and speaking to me and just allowing me to ask questions,” she said on the British TV program.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile tells the story of Bundy’s years-long killing spree through Kloepfer’s eyes. Zac Efron played Bundy in the film. The film followed Netflix’s documentary, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Both were directed by Joe Berlinger.
The documentary featured interviews with people touched by Bundy’s crimes. Carol DaRonch, who survived an attack by the infamous serial killer, appeared. She recounted the incident in Conversations with a Killer.
“He headed down a side street and then he suddenly pulled over up on the side of a curb up by an elementary school and that’s when I just started freaking out: ‘What are we doing?’ And he grabbed my arm and he got one handcuff on one wrist and he didn’t get the other one on and the one was just dangling,” DaRonch said. “I had never been so frightened in my entire life.”
PEOPLE reported that Bundy was caught and sentenced to death in 1980. He was executed in 1989. During his reign of terror, Bundy killed more than 20 people, all of them women.
