Ghostly author Darren Ritson on Haunted Newcastle

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Ghostly author Darren Ritson on Haunted Newcastle
May 23 2009
by Michael Kelly
ChronicleLive

Has writer Darren Ritson been contaminated by the ghosts he writes about? Mike Kelly fears he might

IT might have been a coincidence but during my chat with ghost-hunter Darren Ritson, I developed a cold.

Spookier still, my nose began to run and body temperature drop when he was talking about a book he is just finishing, called Contagion.

It is based on the theory that people who experience psychic phenomenon can carry it around with them – a form of spirit contamination.

And if anyone in the North East was to be contaminated in such a way it is Darren, who over the last few years has visited castles, buildings, pubs and even the cockpit of an old bomber, to record paranormal goings-on.

His seventh book, Haunted Newcastle, is now out and this time next year he estimates he’ll be on to number 13, including Contagion, which is to have a foreword by well-known occultist Colin Wilson.

Darren, 37, said: “He’s big on Contagion. If you visit a site, sometimes you can take away a bit of the activity with you.”

He got interested in the paranormal as a young lad after two incidents. Firstly, when walking to his home behind the old railway line at Hawthorn Leslie, now St Peter’s Basin, in Newcastle, he says he was followed home by the sound of footsteps of someone who he couldn’t see. Secondly, when he went to France on a school trip aged 13, he spilt a can of Coke on the floor of his dorm and dragged his bedside cabinet over the puddle to hide it.

Darren said: “During the night I heard a banging. When I got up to investigate, I saw the cabinet balancing on one leg and it flew across the room.”

When he got home, he decided to learn all he could about the paranormal. Coincidentally, the first book he bought was about the Enfield Poltergeist, by Guy Lyon Playfair, based on activity in a North London house in the 1970s.

During this time, furniture is said to have moved by itself, knockings on the walls were heard and children’s toys were said to have been thrown around.

I say coincidentally, because Darren’s best-known investigation is into the South Shields Poltergeist after a series of happenings at a house in December 2005.

With barely-concealed glee, Darren, a civil servant based at Longbenton, North Tyneside, said: “The thing about it is that it went on for so long – poltergeist activity usually lasts three months – and we were on it virtually from the start.

“The mother of the girl who lives at the house works with a colleague of mine. She had told him ‘I think my daughter has a ghost’.”

Darren’s fellow ghosthunter Mike Hallowell went to investigate the house in which a young couple and their three-year-old son lived.

He said: “We witnessed endless paranormal phenomena.”

This included doors being slammed and objects appearing our of nowhere, coins, as he says, were “raining out of thin air”.

Over the months they intensified, including threats written on a child’s doodle board and also on the mother’s mobile phone, a rocking horse hanging by its rein from the loft hatch and, it was reported, a toy bunny found with a box cutter in its paws.

Aware there are an awful lot of sceptics, Darren invited friends to the house, who each gave witness statements about what they saw.

The resulting book, The South Shields Poltergeist, includes a short foreword by Playfair.

His latest, Haunted Newcastle, details incidents of apparitions, curses, ghosts and poltergeists.

Darren said: “We could be investigating for another 300 years and people will either believe it or not. You’re not going to believe it if you don’t see it for yourself.”

His fiancee, Jayne Watson, falls into a rare group of people who believe in paranormal activity without seeing it.

Darren explained: “She doesn’t get involved, she’s too frightened.”

Harking back to Contagion, has he ever brought is psychic work back to his home in Wallsend, North Tyneside?

Darren laughs: “No. It’s nice and quiet, just as I like it.”

Haunted Newcastle, by The History Press, costs £12.99.