In his 2023 memoir, Spare, Prince Harry opened up about a deeply personal and haunting experience—recreating the final moments of his mother, Princess Diana, an act he later came to regret.

Princess Diana died on August 31, 1997, in the early hours of the morning after a devastating car crash in Paris’ Pont de l’Alma tunnel. She was accompanied by her partner Dodi Fayed, driver Henri Paul, and bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones. Of the group, only Rees-Jones survived, though he suffered serious injuries and the burden of that tragic night remains.

The death of Diana, known lovingly as “the people’s princess,” was met with worldwide sorrow. Her two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, were just 15 and 12 years old at the time.

While both princes have publicly shared their grief over the years, Harry revealed in Spare that he once took a drastic step in search of emotional closure. In 2007, while in Paris for the Rugby World Cup semi-final, 23-year-old Harry made a personal decision.

As he recounts: “The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother…”

“I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large. The tunnel is called Pont de l’Alma, I told him. Yes, yes. He knew it.”

But simply visiting the site wasn’t enough. Harry asked the driver to go 65 miles per hour—the speed at which Diana’s car was believed to have been traveling at the time of the crash.

“The exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash.

“Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported.”

Harry wasn’t alone during this drive. He was joined by two others, including someone he calls ‘Billy the Rock.’ Harry notes that all involved agreed to keep the incident private. Billy allegedly warned, “if the driver ever revealed to another human that we’d asked him to do this, we’d find him and there would be hell to pay.”

He continues in the memoir: “Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night.

“Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.”

Describing the moment, Harry wrote: “I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of water orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side.

“Is that all of it? It’s… nothing. Just a straight tunnel.

“[I] always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel.”

Harry then reflects on the emotional impact of the drive, admitting he ultimately wished he hadn’t gone through with it.

“I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really.

“Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.”

Though the experience brought him a form of resolution, it also left him with deeper pain.

“She’s dead, I thought: ‘My God, she’s really gone for good.’

“I got the closure I was pretending to seek. I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it. I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain.

“Instead it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux.”