Twenty Years of the South Shields Poltergeist
Evidence, ethics, and why a “best attested” poltergeist case remains contested.
December 2025 marks twenty years since the reported onset of the South Shields Poltergeist – a case that has been described as “one of the most violent outbreaks in British poltergeist history” and, more ambitiously, “one of the best attested cases of a poltergeist outbreak on record.” In the latest Fortean Times (FT465), investigator Darren Ritson revisits the case, reflecting on the phenomena, the toll it took on those involved, and the criticism he and his co-author, Michael Hallowell, have faced.
Inspired by the FT article, I’m writing this examination of what’s claimed happened in the South Shields case, the sort of evidence documented, how the case has been treated in both parapsychology and sceptical commentary and, crucially, what the case tells us about the ethics and methods of modern ghost hunting. I’m not interested in calling anyone a liar, or in declaring the whole thing an obvious hoax. I’m interested in what we can reasonably conclude when a case is simultaneously billed as “one of the best attested” and yet largely inaccessible to outside scrutiny.
The Story as Told By the Investigators
In the FT article ‘The South Shields Poltergeist 20 Years On’, Ritson (2025) retells the core narrative of the case - a young couple, Marc and Marianne, and Marianne’s son, Robert, living in a modern house on an estate in South Tyneside, begin to experience odd happenings. Taps running by themselves, objects moving, doors found open, possessions going missing and reappearing in unlikely places. Over time, the activity escalated into loud knocks, voices heard over the baby monitor, and apparitions of a lady as well as a boy called “Sammy” who, Robert insisted, both came to play.
Family members began to witness events too. Chairs and cups allegedly moved by themselves - a cup said to have been in the child’s bedroom was later seen falling outside from above, despite the bedroom window being shut. This is presented as an instance of ‘“matter-through-matter penetration” – solid objects moving through solid barriers – a motif familiar from older poltergeist literature. (Murdie, 2010)
By the time Ritson and Hallowell are called in, in mid-2006, the case is already several months old. On their first visit, they report witnessing multiple object movements under what they felt were controlled conditions - toys sliding from shelves into bins, a plastic nut flying across a bedroom to strike Marianne, a small ball apparently materialising on a bed and found “hot to the touch.” All of this, they state, was captured on video. As the months roll on, the phenomena grows stranger and darker.
Eventually, after almost a year, the activity reportedly tails off. Ritson credits two factors: the family’s emotional exhaustion (he suggests fear is one of the entity’s “fuels”) and a practical measure recommended by a colleague – switching off and unplugging all electrical devices at night, to deprive the poltergeist of “stand-by power” as an energy source. After a short-lived burst of alleged phenomena at the couple’s workplace, the disturbances stop. (Ritson, 2025)
The case is then written up as The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder, first published in 2008 and subsequently reissued. The book, with a foreword by Guy Lyon Playfair, is pitched as one of the most significant poltergeist cases in fifty years. (Xavier, 2009)
From Living Room Haunting to Case Study
In the years since, South Shields has acquired an interesting dual life. On one hand, it has become a staple of books, magazine features, YouTube “top ten hauntings” and TV documentaries, often emphasising its violent and technological aspects. On the other, it has been taken up by parts of the parapsychological community as a valuable data set for theory-building.
Alan Murdie’s review for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research is a good example of the latter. He visited the investigators and examined their archive – he mentions over 450 photographs, film clips, witness statements and other documents. Murdie (2010) concluded that, assuming the events occurred as described, there was a substantial body of material consistent with a genuine poltergeist case. He situates South Shields alongside Rosenheim, Enfield, and other “well-attested” cases, and argues that critics have been too quick to dismiss it without looking at the primary evidence.
More recently, a 2022 paper by James Houran, Brian Laythe and colleagues in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research treats South Shields as one of their flagship case studies. They code up reported incidents, examine temporal and thematic patterns, and discuss the case in the context of what they call “haunted people syndrome” – a cluster of psychosocial and environmental factors associated with recurrent anomalous experiences. (Houran et al., 2022) South Shields also appears in later methodological work as an example of how complex, multi-episode haunting narratives might be turned into structured ‘fact sheets’ for analysis. (Massullo et al., 2025)
Taken together, these treatments give the impression – and I think this is deliberate – that South Shields is not just a spooky story but a serious case that’s documented, archived, and has been scrutinised by sympathetic experts. If you confine yourself to published material, however, a different picture emerges…
What Evidence Can The Rest of Us See?
On the pro side, we have a detailed narrative in the book authored by Ritson & Hallowell (2008), reinforced and summarised in Ritson’s Fortean Times anniversary piece. Additionally, we have Murdie’s testimonial that he has personally inspected substantial archives, and finds them consistent with the book’s claims, as well as the assurance, from both the book and later papers, that footage and photographs exist and have been shown at lectures and to trusted colleagues.
On the publicly accessible side, we have a handful of still images reproduced in print and online, such as reports of a children’s plastic table ‘bent and twisted out of shape’, and the rocking horse found hanging by its reins from the loft hatch. (Ritson 2021, 2025; Boyle 2014) There’s also the widely discussed water-bottle photo and video, that shows a water bottle “mysteriously” balancing on one corner of its base. Once promoted via tabloid coverage, the bottle evidence was later pulled from many sites following ridicule and copyright complaints. (Ritson, 2021; Ritson, 2025; Hallowell, 2010; Boyle, 2014)
That’s essentially it. We are asked to take the rest on trust – either the investigators’ word, or the endorsements of those who have seen more. It is this gap has been a central point of criticism. A 2009 piece on GhostTheory, for example, notes that years after the initial media splash, the only substantive public evidence was the bottle video and some scratch photographs, with the more dramatic material held back pending a TV deal or restricted to paying readers of the book. The author argues, reasonably in my view, that making evidence contingent on publication or broadcast damages the claim that the case is “one of the best-ever documented.” (Xavier, 2009)
In a long and combative response letter, Hallowell (2010) rejects the idea that they’re withholding material for money, stressing that the main constraint is the family’s anonymity and the legal and ethical issues around releasing footage. He also points out (fairly) that the famous bottle clip is not, in their own view, strong evidence – there are possible normal explanations – and that the real weight of the case lies in the cumulative pattern of events.
From a distance, though, the case is marketed as unusually well-documented and evidential but most of that documentation is not available for independent assessment beyond a small circle of believers and parapsychology insiders. Additionally, requests to share even relatively low-risk material more widely (e.g. the bottle clip) have been met with copyright objections and, at least according to one critic, threats of legal action over unauthorised reposting of the water bottle footage. (Hallowell, 2010) You don’t have to assume fraud to see why many people find this unsatisfactory. This is simply not how evidence is usually handled in fields that aspire to be scientific and it raises a lot of healthy doubt.
Anonymity, Ethics, and the Catch-22
Here’s where I want to be very clear: I absolutely understand the desire to keep the family at the centre of the case anonymous. It’s how I work too. When I investigate contemporary haunting claims, I prioritise privacy because the media and online audiences can be cruel, intrusive, and relentless. Homeowners caught in the crossfire of a “good story” can find themselves doxxed, mocked, or flooded with unwanted attention, especially if children are involved.
Ritson and Hallowell repeatedly stress that they promised never to reveal the family’s identity, and that TV companies have pushed them to break that promise in exchange for access or exposure. In his Fortean Times piece, Ritson explicitly frames his refusal to work with those producers as a matter of “ethics over entertainment”, even at the cost of making the case less well known.
However, that creates a genuine methodological problem when the same case is held up as “one of the best attested” poltergeist outbreaks and used as a central data set in parapsychological research. You can’t really have it both ways. If the household must remain private – which is fair – then the evidence has to do more of the heavy lifting. That doesn’t mean naming the family or dumping every second of footage onto YouTube. There are well-established ways to separate the people at the centre of the data (the family and investigators) from the information the data can demonstrate (what happened, when, and how it was recorded).
For example, careful anonymisation of names, addresses, and potentially identifying backgrounds, the use redacted timelines and logs that still preserve sequence and context, and through controlled access to representative clips, audio, and photographs for independent reviewers. Other disciplines have been grappling with this for decades – from social psychology to medicine to criminology (Grinyer, 2002; Allen et al., 2023; Saunders et al., 2015)
If psychical research wants its flagship cases to be taken seriously beyond a small in-group, similar norms around anonymised data-sharing will have to become standard. Whether it’s intentional or not I cannot say, but currently, the ethical shield around the South Shields case also functions as a shield around the data. It must be acknowledged that this limits what anyone outside the trusted circle can conclude, and as a result, it is only natural that people will default to a sceptical position when asked to accept the claims central to the case.
Methodological Questions & “Best Attested” Claims
Even if we bracket the evidence-access problem, there are still questions worth asking about the way the case has been framed and investigated.
➤ Timeline and Documentation
Murdie (2010) notes in his SPR review that the narrative is structured as an unfolding story, in the style of Guy Lyon Playfair’s This House is Haunted, and that this makes the chronology hard to follow at times. He explicitly says more detail on some incidents would be welcome, given how extraordinary they are. This is the person who, to the best of my knowledge, had the most access to the case files.
For a case claiming “one of the best” documentation levels, it would be useful to see a clear, dated, incident-by-incident log, with notes on who was present, what equipment was running, and what was or wasn’t captured.
➤ Investigator Role and Expectations
The investigators are not passive observers. They’re on-call supporters, confidants, sometimes quasi-ritualists (Murdie notes surprise at Hallowell using Native American-derived rituals during the case). That’s understandable on a human level – when terrified people are calling you at 3am, you’re not going to sit there and draft a protocol. But it does mean the investigators are emotionally embedded in the narrative. That’s not a sin; it does, however, need acknowledging when we talk about “best attested” anything.
➤ Ad Hoc Theorising
The eventual so-called solution to stopping the poltergeist – turning off all electrical appliances and unplugging them at night to deprive the entity of stand-by power – sits on top of multiple unproven assumptions. Namely that poltergeists are real, that they draw power from electricity, that stand-by power is especially useful to the entity, and that this, combined with reduced fear, explains the timing of the end of the activity.
Now, it’s one thing to speculate about such mechanisms, but another to present them as if they have real explanatory weight in a field that already struggles with testability. In doing so, the investigators risk the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (“after this, therefore because of this”) - the fact that the activity subsided after they began unplugging appliances does not, by itself, demonstrate that this change caused the phenomena to cease.
➤ Questionable Media Choices
Hallowell (2010) has since stressed that the bottle balancing on its edge is evidentially weak and easily faked; he even notes in the book that he could have knocked it into that position by accident. Yet this is the clip that was initially pushed to tabloids and TV, and it remains the most widely seen piece of South Shields evidence. If your strongest material is too sensitive to show, and your weakest becomes your public flagship, you’re setting up a credibility problem from the start.
None of these points disprove the South Shields case but they do make it harder to sustain the “best attested” label in any robust sense. At best, what we have is a deeply felt, sincerely reported narrative, backed by a private archive that some sympathetic reviewers and co-authors have found impressive – and that the rest of us are asked to accept largely on trust.
Critics, Trolling, and the Space In Between
Ritson is right to say that some of the criticism directed at him and Hallowell over the years has been unkind, and in some cases potentially defamatory. The Bad Thinking blog review of a South Shields TV documentary, for example, is laced with mockery and contempt. (Bad Thinking, 2014)
At the same time, not all critical engagement is trolling. The GhostTheory pieces and comments, for instance, raise specific, substantive issues: what happens when key evidence is withheld? How should we interpret a case whose public face is a single dubious video and a dramatic narrative? What is the line between protecting witnesses and restricting scrutiny?
Those are fair questions, and they don’t magically become unfair because some other people on a different forum were rude. For what it’s worth, I have a lot of sympathy for the bind Ritson describes in his 2025 Fortean Times article. He and Hallowell walked into a situation that, if their account is accurate, was chaotic and frightening and they promised anonymity to a family who were already in distress. They then wrote up what they’d experienced in the way they knew – as a narrative book – and found themselves in the crossfire between believers hungry for proof and sceptics hungry for a debunking.
That doesn’t mean every choice they made was optimal, or that their conclusions are beyond question but it does mean we should aim to examine the work without turning the authors themselves into cartoon villains.
So Where Does That Leave South Shields?
If you start from a sceptical baseline, there are plenty of potential explanations available for the South Shields case - misperceptions, memory distortion, social contagion of fear, ordinary pranks, and, yes, the possibility of deliberate hoaxing by one or more householders or visitors. Poltergeist cases have always been messy mixtures of genuine puzzling events, suggestible context, and occasional theatrics.
If you start from a believer’s baseline, South Shields slots neatly into a lineage of house-bound disturbances, with familiar motifs (raps, thrown objects, person-centred focus), plus some newer flourishes like text messages and baby-monitor voices. You might look at the testimonies and internal consistency and conclude that something genuinely anomalous happened.
My own view, based on what’s available, is that the case is interesting, but the evidential claims are overstated. “Best attested” should imply broad, independent access to raw documentation, clear chronology, and methods that can be examined and replicated. South Shields doesn’t meet that bar. Also, while the ethical dilemma is real it is not insoluble - we don’t need to choose between protecting witnesses and sharing evidence. I’ve shown in this piece how other disciplines manage both. Psychical research could do more to develop anonymisation and data-sharing norms that don’t rely on personal trust in particular investigators, and until then, expect scepticism as a default response.
I also think the parapsychological uptake of South Shields should be read carefully. When researchers use the case as a data source, they are, in practice, treating the narrative as largely reliable and reasonably complete. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but it does mean their conclusions are only as strong as that assumption, and readers should keep that in mind. Turning a witness-led narrative into tables, codes, and graphs adds structure, not independent verification: it is still essentially an exercise in asking “if these reports are accurate, what patterns do we see?”, rather than testing whether those reports are the only or best explanation of what happened.
There’s also a more subtle problem. Once a case has been described as “well attested” and adopted into the literature, later authors tend to treat that label as settled fact, rather than a claim that itself needs scrutiny. South Shields is then cited as an example of documented poltergeist activity, and newer models are built on top of it, even though the underlying evidential record remains largely inaccessible to anyone outside a small circle of individuals. In effect, the community risks building increasingly elaborate theoretical scaffolding on foundations that have never really been stress-tested. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate the work entirely, but it does mean we should be cautious about how much weight we let one opaque case carry.
Perhaps the most useful thing the South Shields poltergeist gives us, twenty years on, is not a proof of anything paranormal, but a case study in how ghost stories become data, and how easily ethics, emotion, and evidence get tangled together.
There is a family at the centre of all this who, by all accounts, went through a period of genuine distress. There are investigators who believe – to this day – that they witnessed something impossible, and who describe paying a personal price for saying so. None of that should be dismissed lightly.
But if you ask the public, or other researchers, to accept large clusters of extraordinary claims largely on trust, and to take “well attested” at face value while most of the underlying record remains private, it shouldn’t be a surprise when people react with scepticism or push back. The controversy around South Shields isn’t just the fault of “armchair debunkers” or “keyboard warriors” - it’s baked into the way the case has been presented and managed. In some ways, that does the case itself a disservice, because it ensures it will always have a slightly mythic, untouchable edge rather than a fully examinable one.
In his Fortean Times piece, Ritson recalls asking Guy Lyon Playfair whether the accusations and doubts ever stop, and being told that they don’t. On one level, that’s simply true: if you work with hauntings and poltergeists, you will always have people who think you’re mistaken, have an agenda, or lying (something I myself face even as a sceptic). On another level, though, there is a gap here that needs acknowledging. If you want sceptics, historians, and curious outsiders to treat your work as more than a good story, you have to meet them halfway – by making as much anonymised evidence, context, and methodology available as you safely can, and by being open about what can’t be shown and why.
South Shields, twenty years on, is a reminder that ethics and evidence standards both matter. Protecting witnesses from exploitation is non-negotiable, so is the right of investigators to tell their story without being harassed - but if we want poltergeist research to be taken seriously beyond a small circle of believers, we also have to accept that extraordinary claims come with an expectation of extraordinary transparency. In that mix, the least we can do is keep our standards for evidence and fairness equally high – for witnesses, for investigators, and for those who dare to ask awkward questions.
References
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Ritson, D. W., & Hallowell, M. J. (2008), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder’, The History Press, Stroud. (Rev. eds 2009, 2020.)
Ritson, D.W., (2021), ‘The South Shields Poltergeist, 15 Years On’, Spooky Isles, 28 May. Available at: https://www.spookyisles.com/south-shields-poltergeist-darren-w-ritson/ (Accessed 29 November 2025).
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Great article! I was not even aware of this case!