The poltergeist of South Shields

Between late 2005 and summer 2006, in the town of South Shields, in north-east England, a young couple and their child three years were terrorized by a poltergeist haunting their home. The real name of the couple has never been made public, but they are known under the fictitious names of Marc and Marianne.

The story of South Shields Poltergeist

It all started like most of poltergeist cases: the spirit piled chairs on top of each other, moving chest drawers and slamming doors. Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t too long before the ghost found something better to have fun with: playing with the child’s toys.

One night while the couple was in bed Marianne felt something hitting her in the neck. She turned on the light and saw that it was her son’s toydog.

She didn’t even have time to wonder how that could be done that the couple saw another toy flying through the air, trying to hit them. Marc and Marianne took shelter under the covers but soon heard something pulling them off.

Marc suddenly let out a scream of pain and Marianne saw 13 deep scratches on his back, which, strangely, disappeared the next morning.

Despite the spirit had shown it could cause physical harm to the people of the house, it seemed to decide to continue his psychological torture, continuing to move the toys. Once they found a rocking horse hanging from the ceiling byits own reins, while on another occasion there was a stuffed bunny in a chair on top of the stairs with a knife stuck in the legs.

The poltergeist also left threatening messages on the magnetic board of their son, as shown in the picture above. Sometimes even the child would disappear, to be later found in various strange parts of the house.

One of the strange ability of the spirit was to be able to send SMS and emails with threatening messages such as “You’re dead!” even though these messages could never be linked to any phone number or email address.

On another occasion the water tank in the bathroom was filled with blood that vanished a few moments later.

The end of the nightmare

After months of torment and threats the family called a team of investigators, two local paranormal investigators, Michael J. Hallowell and Darren W. Ritson, in July 2006, to put an end to their problem.

This seemed only to anger even more the poltergeist: it began to throw knives at the investigators and themselves saw a silhouette appear in front of their eyes.

The spirit destroyed the investigators’ instruments and began talking through their toys.

Eventually, after several visits by experts, the poltergeist was gone, leaving the family in peace.

What remains today

Hallowell and Ritson told the story of the case in the book The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder, reissued several times, most recently in 2020. For them it is one of the most significant poltergeist cases of the last fifty years, comparable to the famous Enfield poltergeist. In later years they also wrote another book, Contagion, claiming that they themselves had been “infected” by the phenomena.

The book has divided readers, though: many found it gripping, while others criticised the way the sceptics’ doubts are dismissed without being seriously considered. The online controversy was so heated that the two authors even took legal action to defend themselves against false accusations, later retracted. Researcher Alan Murdie, who met them to review the book for the Society for Psychical Research, pointed out that none of the critics had gone to examine the evidence in person.

As in almost every poltergeist case, there is no definitive proof: believers consider it one of the best documented cases, sceptics think of exaggerations or entirely natural explanations.

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