After writing about paranormal Newcastle and the North-East, Darren W Ritson throws his net wider still to encompass the entire North of England. This is a substantial book, though the author acknowledges he can only skim the surface, and he writes about his passion with an engaging style.
The book is clearly laid out, with separate chapters on different locations, some based on secondary sources, others containing cases which Ritson has investigated personally. The format is a travel guide, working from the east (Newcastle upon Tyne) to the west (Chester) with a miscellaneous chapter rounding up various properties, and another on screaming skulls. He is a native of Newcastle, and his enthusiasm for the area is infectious. After Newcastle he considers North Tyneside, where he now lives, and includes extracts from the SPR’s Journal from December 1892 on ‘The Haunted House at Willington’.
He devotes a chapter to the South Shields Poltergeist, beginning with an emotional outpouring which indicates just how hurtful he has found the personal attacks on his and co-author Mike Hallowell’s probity. This sense of anger continues in the chapter on Preston Hall Museum, Stockton on Tees, where he and Hallowell gave a talk on the case. The brief overview is a useful taster for their book The South Shields Poltergeist: One Family’s Fight Against an Invisible Intruder, subject of a review by Alan Murdie in the April 2010 issue of the SPR’s Journal.
Other places visited include sites in County Durham, Berwick upon Tweed, Yorkshire and Lancashire. The choice is selective, and as is the case with this type of volume, many of the stories he recounts are not subjected to close scrutiny. There is too some repetition from his earlier books which is surprising given the number of properties he might have included. But Ritson is a genial companion as he travels about the region. Peppered among the ghost stories are autobiographical snippets, including the startling information that in his younger days he was a dancer on a television show.
These Amberley books are all of a uniform, and reasonable, price. Ritson’s is very good value at 202 pages, but it is apparent that one way of holding down the costs, apart from failing to provide an index in any of these books, is by skimping on copy editing. A quick read-through of the manuscript would have ironed out the grammatical errors. But it’s a rattling read, with plenty of name checks for the SPR.