The first warning was water.
One day the shower was found running. Marc and Marianne questioned each other, but neither admitted turning it on. In another house that might have remained a minor domestic mystery: an absent-minded moment, a tap not closed properly, an answer waiting to be remembered. In this house, it became the beginning. [3]
Then came the knocks. They searched for somebody inside and found nobody. Objects appeared where they had not been left. A voice was reportedly heard through the baby monitor. A cup was later found outside even though the family said the window was closed and the blind drawn. Each incident was small enough to argue with; together they began to make the familiar rooms feel watchful. [2, 3]
The family are known in the published account by pseudonyms: Marc, Marianne and their young son, Robert. The disturbances were said to have begun in December 2005. By June 2006, Marianne’s mother, June, was worried enough to contact paranormal researcher Darren W. Ritson. [2, 3]
The diary
Ritson first heard about the case on 19 June. The following afternoon he spoke to Marianne and asked her to keep a detailed record. From that point, the haunting gained dates and times. It also gained a vocabulary.
On 5 July, the diary placed Robert’s rocking horse beneath the loft hatch. On 8 July came ladders and a child’s chair. On 9 July, after extensive movement around the house, a child’s magnetic drawing board carried a single word: “DIE”. [2]
A priest blessed the house on the morning of 10 July. Three days later, the family reported that a toy rabbit had been posed with a box-cutter blade. They left. When they returned on 14 July, another drawing-board message was waiting: “CU CU CU”. It might have been nonsense, mockery or something meant to be read aloud. Whatever it meant, it had the rhythm of somebody enjoying the attention. [2]
Ritson and fellow investigator Michael J. Hallowell made their first joint visit on 17 July. The case now had observers from outside the family—and the house, according to their account, performed for them too. [3]
Small things begin to fly
During that first investigation, Hallowell saw a small object cross the child’s bedroom. There was a sharp crack; Marianne reacted as if struck; and a yellow plastic nut from a toy workbench lay on the floor behind her. The investigators later reconstructed a path from the workbench, against a cupboard door and into Marianne. The camera in the room did not capture the nut’s full flight, but the moment convinced them that the case deserved to be taken seriously. [2]
Later visits produced stranger variations. Three coins struck the kitchen floor beneath a shelf holding loose change. The first might have fallen from Marc’s pocket—the authors acknowledged as much—but Hallowell said he watched Marc during the next two drops and saw no suspicious movement. [2]
A pencil was heard or seen reaching a chest of drawers. A night-light left its socket around a corner from the camera. A small toy head was said to descend slowly from a hammock while Hallowell and Marc watched. A heavy table shifted into Ritson’s leg. A digital recorder left in the child’s room was found switched off and its recording erased. The investigators photographed many aftermaths: the object on the floor, the room after the noise, the arrangement discovered when somebody returned. [2]
That distinction matters later. Inside the story, however, it gave the disturbances a peculiar personality. This was not a grand Gothic apparition sweeping down a staircase. It was plastic toys, loose change and household clutter behaving badly. The ordinary scale made it playful—until the playthings acquired blades.
The toys turn threatening
On one visit, the group went upstairs and found several toys arranged around a carving knife. A framed christening prayer had been turned towards the wall. A toy policeman hung by a cord around its neck. The display looked deliberate, but nobody had watched it being assembled. [2]
The investigators’ first response was suspicion. They privately wondered whether Marc had staged the scene and asked Marianne whether he had been the last person upstairs. She said he had, while insisting he was innocent. Their published account never presents a case free from that possibility: they repeatedly considered whether Marc might have created or exaggerated some incidents, even while arguing that he could not explain them all. [2]
Soon afterwards, two large building blocks reportedly fell into the garden from the direction of Robert’s bedroom. The room was supposed to be secured, with a camera trained on its door. The blocks themselves were not filmed leaving it, but the camera’s audio contained an impact that Ritson associated with the fall. A toy pistol then appeared behind a kitchen door; a toy dog was found at the foot of the stairs. The house seemed to be moving pieces whenever attention turned elsewhere. [2]
The voice in the telephone
Then the case changed. It stopped relying only on rooms and objects and began, according to the book, using the telephone.
Silent calls reached the landline. Caller retrieval pointed to Marc’s missing mobile. When Marianne tried to call it, the line appeared busy. An automated text-to-landline voice message followed. Marc’s phone was eventually found and placed on the kitchen table beside the other handsets, where the group could watch it. More voice messages arrived. The investigators said some were attributed to Marc’s number even though he did not touch the phone. [2]
A drawing board can be altered while a room is empty. A toy can be thrown when someone looks away. The telephone claims felt different because they appeared to bring the disturbance into a system outside the house. The display showed a familiar number. The automated voice gave the words sound. Whatever the mechanism, the experience was no longer silent.
The night the house erupted
On Monday 28 August, the account becomes more frantic. Marc and Marianne reported a toy nut thrown down the stairs, furniture moved and stacked, a handset relocating upstairs and a twisted toy flung into the hallway. Calls and threatening texts appeared to come from Marc’s number while his phone was switched off; further messages arrived after its battery had been removed. [2]
Hallowell came to the house. At 6:16pm, he witnessed another message arrive while Marc’s handset had no battery. He examined the phone and partly disconnected its SIM. More texts and automated voice messages followed. The words were crude, personal and violent. The phone lying powerless in the room seemed, to those present, to have become irrelevant to the number using its name. [2]
The physical disturbances continued around them. Knives were photographed where they had landed. A remote control fell. A pan disappeared and returned. A table moved. The refrigerator shuddered. Hallowell and Marianne both reported hearing childlike laughter from Robert’s apparently empty bedroom. When Hallowell forced the door, his camera showed the disorder already inside; it did not show the room being wrecked. [2]
By then, proof was not the family’s immediate concern. They left for June’s house. Marc later called the supposedly empty home and said somebody answered briefly. Marianne received more threatening texts while speaking with Hallowell. The family had escaped the rooms, but once again the threat travelled with the telephone. [2]
Imagine that journey: the front door behind you, another house waiting, someone at the other end of the line—and then the thing you are holding for reassurance tells you that leaving has changed nothing.
When the family returned, some items in Robert’s room had reportedly moved. Marc’s travel pass, missing while they stayed with June, lay in the centre of the bedroom floor. [2]
Beyond the house
On 1 September, the phone story widened beyond Marc and Marianne. At 2:02am Hallowell missed a call displaying the name of his friend Danny. Danny said his locked phone had remained untouched on his car dashboard, although its outgoing log showed Hallowell’s number. He later realised that he had been driving past the case location at the time. [2]
Later that day, the two men were together in Hallowell’s garden when his phone displayed another call from Danny. Danny showed him his own handset, reportedly switched off. After the silent call ended, a voicemail arrived. When retrieved, it was said to contain several minutes of the conversation they had just held in the garden. The alleged haunting no longer needed its house, its family or even its usual telephone. It needed only somebody who had become part of the story. [2]
It comes back
An all-night group vigil ended on Saturday 2 September. Members of the North East Ghost Research Team joined the investigators in the house. Their later statements describe toys dropping into the room, hostile words on the drawing boards and a ceremony conducted around a circle of stones. The most disturbing moment centred on Marc. Several witnesses said scratches appeared across his torso while they watched at close range. They said he did not make the marks himself—and that within minutes the scratches began to fade. [2]
That is one of the case’s strongest scenes because several people claimed to witness it directly. It is also one of its strangest evidential knots: the witnesses belonged to an invited paranormal group, had already been briefed and shown selected footage, and interpreted the marks during a ritual intended to provoke a reaction. Their statements preserve what they believed they saw; without the original continuous video or a medical examination, they cannot settle what caused it. [2]
After the ceremony, the atmosphere was said to lighten. When Hallowell telephoned on Monday morning, Marianne sounded relieved: nothing had happened since the team left. For a few hours, the story appeared to be over. [2]
At 10:15am that same morning, Marianne entered Robert’s bedroom and reportedly found two cigarette lighters standing upright on a chest of drawers. Marc denied leaving them. Crossing the landing, she opened the toilet door and found the Tigger toy sitting on the seat with a carving knife in its hand. She returned the toy and knife to their places. The next few days were quiet. [2]
On 12 September, Marc said the hallway light switch gave him a massive shock and threw him backwards into a wall. The book says an electrician later found the switch in working order and could not explain what had happened. No burn marks were reported, and the switch continued to work. [2]
On 14 September, the domestic rearrangements resumed: Tigger in a blue chair downstairs, an Action Man figure on Marianne’s bed, a baseball cap in the bathroom, Robert’s quilt in the toilet, the chair moved again, a quad-bike headlight switched on and a toy camera thrown down the stairs into Marc’s back. [2]
The following evening Marianne baked a pie and put it in the refrigerator. She saw it there when she fetched milk at 9pm. At 10pm it was gone. Robert was staying with his grandmother; Marc and Marianne said they had remained together in the living room. Then they found crumbs on the dog’s blanket. Bouncer had apparently eaten the pie. The puzzle was the empty dish, which the couple said was still sitting inside the refrigerator where the full pie had been left. The book credits the unseen intruder with feeding the dog. Nobody, however, had watched the pie leave the shelf. [2]
The disturbances then filled the landing and bedroom again. A small toy and a five-pence piece were reportedly thrown at the couple in bed; footsteps climbed a staircase that appeared empty; candles and an ornamental figure were repeatedly discovered in new positions. Marianne said she saw the figure floating at head height before it dropped onto the stairs. Later, a bedroom door seemed blocked from within by a bin, furniture shifted after the couple left, and Marc received two words on his phone: “I’m back”. [2]
On 19 September the house, according to the family’s timed notes, became relentlessly busy. Toys flew or dropped as the couple approached the stairs. Candles formed fresh arrangements. A bedroom was found wrecked and, less than a minute later, apparently restored. Battery-powered toys and a karaoke machine started by themselves. Doors resisted, opened and closed; the kitchen cupboard’s bolt was said to slide back after Marc fastened it. At 5:40pm a drawing board delivered another hostile instruction. By 9:30pm the two landlines were reportedly calling each other from opposite floors. On the fourth call, Marc heard what sounded like Robert’s bedroom door opening—yet found the door closed when he ran upstairs. [2]
The investigators’ account continues beyond the incidents summarised here. In their conclusion, Hallowell and Ritson say the disturbances eventually ceased after the family began switching off electrical equipment at night. They also suggest that smudging and Marc addressing his stress may have contributed, and claim that activity briefly appeared elsewhere before disappearing. Those are retrospective interpretations, not demonstrated causes. [2, 7]
That uncertainty suits South Shields. The case is full of things found after they moved, messages whose sender could not be established and witnesses trying to close the distance between what they experienced and what they could prove. The fear lives in that gap. So does the lore.
Behind the lore of the noisy spirit
The German word poltergeist means “noisy spirit”. The label is associated with reported knocks, moving furniture and thrown objects. In the folklore, a disturbance can make its presence felt without providing a recognisable figure to explain it. [4]
A haunting that follows a person
A conventional ghost story usually belongs to a place: a corridor, a battlefield, a room where somebody died. Poltergeist reports are often described differently. The noise and movement seem to cluster around a household or a particular person, and may continue when that person changes location. That is why researchers often speak of a “focus person” or “agent”. The term identifies where the reports gather; it does not prove that the person causes them. [4, 8]
Surveys of historical case collections find recurring motifs rather than one fixed script: objects displaced or thrown, knocks without an agreed source, furniture moving, voices, apparitions and occasional physical effects on people. The resemblance between cases is the reason the label survives. It is not, by itself, evidence that every case has the same cause. “Poltergeist” may describe a pattern of reported activity, but it does not identify what—or who—caused it. [4]
Three stories behind the noise
The oldest explanation is close to the word itself: an independent spirit, capable of making noise, moving objects and answering its witnesses. This reading suits reports that appear responsive or mischievous. In South Shields, the threatening arrangements, drawing-board messages and telephone claims encouraged the investigators to write about the activity as though it possessed intention. That is an interpretation of the pattern, not a fact established by the pattern.
A second tradition places the source among the living. Twentieth-century psychical researchers used the term recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, or RSPK, for the hypothesis that a person under strain might unconsciously produce physical disturbances. Under this model the “agent” need not know what is happening and may sincerely fear it. Studies and case surveys have reported associations with emotional conflict, family tension and periods of upheaval, but the evidence is retrospective, uneven and disputed. There is no accepted scientific mechanism showing that stress can throw objects, write messages or operate a telephone. [8]
A third explanation is less dramatic but often more useful: individual incidents may arise from practical jokes, deliberate deception, faulty memory, expectation, ordinary movement, technical error or unrelated events later gathered into one story. These possibilities can coexist with sincere fear. A witness can accurately report finding an object in an impossible-looking place without knowing how it arrived there. The responsible approach is therefore claim by claim, rather than choosing one explanation for the entire household.
Why the adolescent girl?
Popular poltergeist lore has a familiar human figure at its centre: a girl around puberty. The Enfield case became the defining British example, with much of the activity associated with twelve-year-old Janet Hodgson; other widely repeated cases have also centred on adolescent girls. Case surveys likewise report a strong concentration around puberty, although boys and adults appear too. [8, 9]
The usual theory is that puberty supplies both emotional pressure and a disruptive kind of energy—psychological in ordinary accounts, psychokinetic in paranormal ones. Family conflict, grief, anger that cannot be expressed and the strain of becoming an adult have all been proposed as ingredients. Those ideas can sound persuasive because adolescence is genuinely turbulent. They can also become circular: an investigator expects a troubled child, looks for hidden conflict and then treats whatever conflict is found as confirmation.
There is a cultural problem here as well. The image of the volatile or deceptive teenage girl has a long history. It can encourage observers to read distress as supernatural power, dishonesty or both. Enfield itself contains the difficulty in miniature: the investigators recorded incidents they regarded as persuasive, while the children also admitted or were caught performing some tricks. That does not automatically dispose of every claim, but it warns against turning a young person into either a psychic engine or the villain of the story. [9]
The pattern South Shields breaks
South Shields stands out because there was no adolescent girl. Robert was a very young boy, while Hallowell and Ritson increasingly treated Marc, an adult man, as the possible focus. Their later account connected the activity with his stress, but the case supplied no psychological measurements capable of demonstrating that relationship. The later academic re-examination acknowledges that this proposed dynamic remains interpretive. [2, 3]
That difference matters. If the poltergeist label can include an adult man, a young boy and famous cases centred on adolescent girls, then age and sex cannot be treated as rules. They may be tendencies within selected reports, clues shaped by family circumstances, or partly products of which cases investigators and publishers have chosen to remember. South Shields does not solve that question; it makes the simple version of the lore harder to maintain.
It also gives the old story modern equipment. In his review, psychical researcher Alan Murdie compared the alleged phone interference with earlier cases, including Rosenheim in Germany in 1967. Reports of bells, electrical faults and communication systems behaving strangely existed before mobile phones. South Shields translated that tradition into caller displays, automated text-to-speech voices, voicemail and a handset that supposedly continued to matter after its battery was removed. [5]
This is the point where encounter and lore meet. The technology dates the story, but it does not make the evidence self-proving. A threatening voice from a telephone feels more objective than a knock in a wall because a network appears to stand between sender and recipient. Without provider records, original files and technical examination, however, the system remains part of the mystery rather than its solution. The noisy spirit had learned a new language—or the people, devices and expectations around it had created a new way for old fears to speak.
What the evidence can tell us
Murdie took a favourable view of the investigation after meeting Hallowell and Ritson in 2009 and inspecting their archive. He reported examining more than 450 photographs, alongside other material, and considered that some supported specific incidents described in the book. His review also identified difficulties with chronology and called for fuller details of certain claims. [5]
The investigators’ own book records sustained doubts about Marc. In a later chapter they say they had not caught him deceiving them and could not see how he could have caused everything, yet still wondered whether he had staged or exaggerated some incidents. When a knife and several toys were found arranged in a threatening display, both investigators initially thought the scene might have been staged and questioned whether Marc had been the last person upstairs. Their later paranormal interpretation does not erase that contemporaneous alternative. [2]
A 2022 paper co-authored by Ritson re-examined sixteen photographs of the drawing-board messages. It brought together two earlier graphology reports with new work by a graphologist and a questioned-document examiner. All four analyses identified Marc as the likely writer or found his handwriting the most similar. Marc acknowledged the resemblance but consistently denied making the messages. [3]
Those findings have limits. The paper distinguishes graphology from the more evidence-based practice of questioned-document examination, and records a small set of comparison samples, uncertainty over whether all messages shared one author, an assumption that the toy’s plastic stylus was used, and limited research on how well handwriting traits survive stylus writing. The original investigation archive has not been made publicly available at the family’s request; non-confidential data from the later analyses were offered to qualified researchers through ISRAE. [3]
Handwriting similarity does not establish who made every message, whether every message had the same author, or why it was made. It cannot explain every reported event. Equally, a photograph of a displaced object cannot, by itself, show how it moved. The evidence has to be considered claim by claim.
The texts require the same care. A message displayed on a handset does not, by itself, establish its sender or how it reached the device. Attributing it to an unseen intelligence requires further evidence. The accounts reviewed for this draft do not establish that origin independently.
The book gives its strongest phone account in Chapter 18. After an initial call was retrieved as coming from Marc’s missing mobile, the phone was found and placed on a kitchen table beside Hallowell’s mobile and Marianne’s mobile and cordless handset. Hallowell says the group watched the phones while further text-to-landline voice messages arrived, and that some were attributed to Marc’s handset despite his not touching it. This reported control is significant, but the published material reviewed here does not include the saved audio, complete handset logs, network-provider records or a technical examination capable of establishing how the messages were generated. [2]
Chapter 26 describes a later and more alarming sequence. Marianne first reported texts bearing Marc’s number while his phone was switched off and then had its battery removed. After Hallowell arrived, another message reportedly reached her at 6:16pm; he examined the powerless phone and partly disconnected its SIM before further texts and automated voice messages arrived. His presence strengthens the account that Marc was not manually using that handset at those moments. It does not establish the messages’ route, originating device or sender, and no provider-side records or independent forensic examination have been published with the account. [2]
The following chapter extends the telephone claim beyond the household. Hallowell and his friend Danny reportedly found a late-night call recorded between their phones even though Danny said his locked handset had remained untouched. During a later conversation in Hallowell’s garden, Hallowell received another silent call displaying Danny’s name while Danny showed him that his phone was switched off. A voicemail then reportedly contained several minutes of their preceding conversation. This gives the account a second named witness outside the family, but no retained audio, screenshots, provider records or independent technical examination have been made available with the published account. [2]
The vigil witnesses
Appendix 2 contains statements from people who attended the September vigil. Suzanne McKay, Claire Smith and Glenn Hall each describe scratches developing on Marc while investigators watched him. Suzanne says she and two colleagues stood as close as physically possible and saw no self-infliction. Claire describes marks appearing on his stomach and back and fading after he entered the ritual circle. Glenn says his camera was fixed on Marc and that three larger scratches appeared in front of him, followed by more marks; he saw none remaining about half an hour later. [2]
The overlap is significant: several named witnesses report the same central occurrence, and Glenn’s statement indicates that a camera may have recorded it. Yet all three belonged to the invited ghost-research team. They had been briefed, some had viewed a presentation of selected case material, and the event unfolded during a ceremony explicitly expected to provoke a manifestation. Without the original uncut video, verified camera angles and lighting, contemporaneous photographs or medical documentation, their testimony strengthens the claim that visible marks were observed but cannot independently establish a paranormal cause.
Other statements vary in evidential value. Marianne’s mother June describes a chair found in a different bedroom after the family said everyone had gone downstairs together. Daniel Jackson’s statement affirms the account but is chiefly a declaration of belief and praise rather than a detailed reconstruction. A later statement by television journalist Bob Whittaker recalls Robert making an unusually complex and unsettling remark during an interview, then endorses Hallowell’s character and methods. The child’s remark remains a single adult’s recollection; the endorsement is opinion rather than corroboration. [2]
What remains after the noise
South Shields is compelling because it places extraordinary claims among ordinary objects. Plastic toys, loose change, a drawing board and a mobile phone do not belong to an ancient castle. Their familiarity sharpens the central caution: an experience may be sincerely described while its cause remains unknown.
The case contains testimony from the family, investigators and invited witnesses; photographs of aftermaths; handwriting comparisons; and a striking series of telephone claims. It also contains evidential gaps, disputed interpretations and incidents whose decisive moment happened beyond the camera. Belief or disbelief cannot repair those gaps. The most honest conclusion is narrower: something frightened this family, the investigators recorded a complex sequence of reports, and the surviving material does not establish one explanation for all of it.
Perhaps that is why the story lingers. The traditional noisy spirit was supposed to announce itself by knocking on walls. In South Shields, it allegedly learned to type, call and leave voicemail. Whether that was a presence, a person, a chain of ordinary causes or some unstable mixture of them, the haunting found exactly the medium a modern household trusts when it wants proof—and turned it into another reason to be afraid.
Sources and further reading
The family names used in this article are the pseudonyms published by the investigators. Reported incidents are attributed as claims; paranormal explanations remain unproven.
[1] Darren W. Ritson, “The South Shields Poltergeist 15 Years On”, Spooky Isles, 2021.
https://www.spookyisles.com/south-shields-poltergeist-darren-w-ritson/
[2] Michael J. Hallowell and Darren W. Ritson, The South Shields Poltergeist, updated Kindle edition, 2020.
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_South_Shields_Poltergeist.html?id=anZCIQAACAAJ
[3] James Houran, Cindy Little, Brian Laythe and Darren W. Ritson, “Uncharted features and dynamics of the South Shields Poltergeist”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 86(3), 2022.
[4] “Poltergeists Overview”, Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research.
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/poltergeists-overview/
[5] Alan Murdie, “The South Shields Poltergeist”, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research review, April 2010.
https://europaranormal.com/the-south-shields-poltergeist/
[6] BBC Radio 4 Uncanny Cold Cases, “The South Shields Family Terrorised By An Invisible Intruder”, 26 May 2026.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdEpax6VRRM
[7] BBC Radio 4 Uncanny Cold Cases, “42 Lock Street”, 2 June 2026.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f75SazVioI
[8] “Psychological Aspects of Poltergeist Cases”, Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research.
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/psychological-aspects-poltergeist-cases/
[9] “The Enfield Poltergeist”, Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research.
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/enfield-poltergeist/