Katherine LaNasa, known for her role as a charge nurse on HBO's The Pitt, has revealed that she believes in ghosts — and claims to have been repeatedly visited by the spirit of her ex-husband, late screen legend Dennis Hopper.
In an interview with W Magazine released Tuesday, LaNasa said: “I do believe in ghosts. The ghost of Dennis Hopper would not leave me alone for a really long time. 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.”
She described his initial appearances as frightening: “He visited me first in ways that were scary. He came one time where he was at the Academy Awards and he was in a wheelchair and he fell down and it was super upsetting. He used to come over to me in, like, a sweat, and I told him he had to leave me alone.”
A Ghostly Goodbye
LaNasa, who was married to Hopper from 1989 to 1992, said the specter eventually obeyed her demand to stop visiting. However, she felt uneasy and told a friend. That same day, she took a different route home and spontaneously entered an art gallery — only to find it filled with Hopper's photographs. Hopper was an accomplished photographer in his spare time.
“And [there was one] photograph of him in the very back of the gallery with a fedora on, winking at the camera,” LaNasa recalled. “So I felt like he was letting me go.”
She continued: “And then he came to me shortly after that in a dream. We were both in a cafeteria in Greece and he told me that he was OK and that he wasn’t in pain anymore and he was good. And I never heard from him again.”
Hopper's Legacy
Dennis Hopper, a New Hollywood icon who wrote and starred in the 1969 counterculture classic Easy Rider, died in 2010 at age 74 from complications of metastasized prostate cancer. LaNasa married actor Grant Show in 2012, two years after Hopper's death. The couple met in 2006 on the set of HBO's Big Love and have a 12-year-old daughter, Eloise.
While centuries of research have yielded no credible scientific evidence of ghosts, celebrity sightings remain common. Julia Fox has said her Harlem home is haunted, and Will Smith reportedly encountered a ghost in London.
