Living in haunted Grimsby council house was no picnic after

There were strange and ghostly goings-on at a semi-detached council house on Grimsby’s Nunsthorpe Estate back in 1977.

It was, perhaps, not the likeliest place to find supernatural manifestations.

But for John Routledge, his wife Doreen and their four daughters, who lived in the property in Caistor Drive, it was all very real – and very spooky.

All the girls and their mother had been touched by the presence, they claimed, and at times had been kicked and punched in the back, both inside the house and in the garden.

And they all claimed to have seen the apparition.

It’s black, with sort of spikes around its head, and it has red eyes,” the 12-year-old Carol told a visiting reporter at the time.

The family first noticed odd occurrences about two years earlier when they found bedclothes rumpled whenever the house was empty.

Their dog was the first to get the blame, but when they found out that the disturbances took place even when the dog was shut in the scullery, they had to seek another answer.

As time went on the manifestations became more widespread.

Strange knocking and banging was heard. Items mysteriously disappeared, only to reappear elsewhere.

Ornaments were broken and clothes laid out for the children to wear would somehow hang themselves in the wardrobes.

Vicky, 8, told the reporter she had seen her teddy bear apparently jump from one chair to another in the living room and Carol said she had found her teddy bear ripped open and the stuffing spread about her bedroom.

Tina, 13, told how her watch disappeared and was lost for a year before it appeared halfway up the stairs on one of the steps.

Mrs Routledge said: “When it touches you it is really cold, like touching a dead person, and sometimes when it is about there is a terrible smell.

“The rooms get colder and I can feel when it is around.

“I have spoken to it. I was working in the scullery and it threw a towel on the floor. I had had enough and so I told it that I wasn’t going to pick it up and that it could do it itself. When I went back a little later the towel was hanging up again.”

Tina said she had been cooking eggs in the kitchen shortly before the Telegraph turned up to hear the story.

“As I broke them I was putting the shells in a bin. I just looked around and there was an egg shell floating in the air,” she said.

But relief from the strange and disturbing happenings was at hand.

Just a few days after the Routledge family told their story the minister of Calvary Church in Grimsby, the Reverend Fred Grossmith conducted a successful exorcism at the property.

He later said he had felt “very uncomfortable” when he first went into the house and was aware of a tightness and palpitations in his chest which he had experienced before in similar circumstances.

After the exorcism, conducted in the living room, the scene of many of the strange occurrences, the presence was declared to have gone.

A relieved Mrs Routledge said: “It’s like walking into a new house. As soon as the service was over you could feel the difference.