Mark Chadbourn (2014) Testimony.

I’ve been following Danny Robins’ The Witch Farm on BBC Sounds. But I jumped ahead by reading Mark Chadbourn’s Testimony on which much of the Podcast is based. A small publisher, I’m guessing sales were dead. Now it’s jumped to Number 2 in Amazon’s Supernatural category. Resurrection of a different kind.

Most funerals I go to now are humanist. No overt religious input. No hymns. But sometimes a floating jokey reference to him or her being somebody up there looking down on us. We’re full of contradictions. We say something and do another. There’s that overhang of secular and supernatural and what we’re not quite sure.

Mark Chadbourn said he followed up a report in the Independent about supernatural events at Heol Fanog. The most haunted house in Wales or Britain is usually tagged on.  Bill Rich and Liz, his wife suggested there was something more than that. There was a brooding evil that was trying to harm them. Heol Fanog, in the Brecon area, was an unholy place and they were cursed.

As a reporter, Chadbourn looked for corroboration. He’s interviewed politicians and bare-faced liars, which is the same thing and you don’t have to be a Tory, but that helps. Face value of a face appearing at the window is no value. A strong smell of incense, the stink of sulphur, knocking sounds, footsteps and the appearance of a seven-foot demon. Animals dying, inexplicably. Power surges. The Spirit of Seduction as a beautiful woman, a succubus, trying to tempt Bill.

The author tells the reader, ‘Remember: it is a true story’.

Danny Robins takes a more circuitous route. He employs a resident sceptic to come up with alternative explanations.

We cherry pick. I was brought up Catholic. Grace before meals. Grace after meals. Holy Days of Obligation. No meat on Friday. That rule was slackened and disappeared like the idea of purgatory. Angels and demons fighting over our immortal soul. A bit like Dracula, but not on the telly, but in Heol Fanog. Bible John and his ability to come out with snippets from the Bible wasn’t such an amazing ability a generation ago. It was built in. Now we’re largely a heathen society, but these kinds of cases ask questions of us. Does God exist?

I’m a waverer. Iona is called The Thin Place because of its Columbian background and supposed closeness to heaven. Heol Fanog I believe is its hellish counterpart. In other words, when pushed, I believe what happened to Bill and Rich was down to supernatural events. What I couldn’t work out was why they stayed there for such a prolonged period—November 1989 to June 1995—long enough to have three children. I got it they had no money, no luck and little chance of a council house, but for god’s sake, get real. Move on. Read on.