The Witch Farm, BBC 4, BBC Sounds, written and presented by Danny Robbins, Directed by Simon Barnard.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001d6yr

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001ddg1

 

I listened and was intrigued by The Battersea Poltergeist. Danny Robbins has assembled the same team to tackle another caseload, he terms ‘the most haunted house in Britain’. He’s repeating himself. But I wouldn’t want to stay within spitting distance. Or to put it another way, no way would I stay anywhere near that place. I’m not sure if I believe in ghosts. And yes I am a scaredy-cat. I used to read all those kinds of books when I was younger, Colin Wilson and The Occult, Outsiders and all that stuff. I guess we grow out of it.

Like most people I’ve had that hairs-on-the-back-of-your head feeling of something being there. That’s when I scarper. You’ll not get me investigating strange noises in the basement or attic. I’m curious, but I’ll let someone else do the legwork. Danny Robins does a great job. Empiricism is based on the null-hypothesis. Not proving something right. But attacking and nullifying that belief. Last man, or ghostly presence, standing.

I was about twenty when I stayed in an old church hall overnight. There was about four of us. We slept upstairs and before we went to sleep we heard the unmistakable sound of somebody clomping up the stairs. I pulled open the door. And, you’ve probably guessed, nobody there. This happened a few times. I heard it and the people with me also heard it. We were scared, but we were also tired. I fell asleep. I guess they did too. We got used to the idea. We moved on the next morning.

  

 

 

Notes.

Dare you visit Britain's most haunted house? Joseph Fiennes and Alexandra Roach star in a new paranormal cold case from Danny Robins, creator of The Battersea Poltergeist.

Episode 1 & 2.

It’s 1989, rural Wales, a lonely old farmhouse in the shadow of the imposing Brecon Beacons mountains. Young, pregnant Liz Rich and her artist husband Bill rent an isolated farmhouse in the Welsh countryside, with Bill’s teenage son Laurence. They’re hoping for a fresh start, but the house holds dark secrets, and the family’s new life becomes a terrifying ordeal that will change them forever.

 

Their dream home has become a haunted nightmare - but what is real and what is in their minds?

 

Written and presented by Danny Robins, creator of The Battersea Poltergeist, Uncanny and West End hit 2:22 – A Ghost Story, The Witch Farm stars Joseph Fiennes (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Alexandra Roach (No Offence), with original theme music by Mercury Prize-nominated Gwenno. This 8-part series interweaves a terrifying supernatural thriller set in the wild Welsh countryside with a fascinating modern-day investigation into the real-life mystery behind what has been called Britain’s most haunted house.

 

Cast:

Bill Rich ..... Joseph Fiennes

Liz Rich ..... Alexandra Roach

Wyn Thomas ..... Owen Teale

Lawrence Rich ..... Jonathan Case

Electrician ..... Delme Thomas

 

Written and presented by Danny Robins

Experts: Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow

Sound design by Charlie Brandon-King and Richard Fox

Music by Evelyn Sykes

Theme Music by Gwenno

Researcher: Nancy Bottomley

Produced by Danny Robins and Simon Barnard

Directed by Simon Barnard

 

Consultant was Mark Chadbourn, author of the book on the case, Testimony

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001d6yr

Road to the peaks.

Bill artist. Liz, Welsh, 3 months pregnant. Bill’ s son, Lawrence 14 from his first marriage.

Man behind the trees, watching.

Thomas, I Wind. I own the next farm along.  I wouldn’t

Highest of Brecon Becons.

Exoricism, No one works out what’s going on. Early phenomenon. Autumn 1989. Birth of Ben. November 1989.

Someone was here, Liz. I heard it.

First electric bill. £750 for quarter. It should be £100?

Ben asleep.

We heard the door slam, but it never moved.

Paranormal experts. Experts: Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow

The house feels like a Rubic’s cube. History and mythology so dense. Witchcraft.

Kieran, skeptic. Appertions to possession.

Bill, only one to hear. Routine. Dream state.

Next day, Liz. Phantom door banging.

Electrical >not unusual. Haunted environment not unusual.

Entire family hear footsteps. Another sound. Sulfur smell. Manifest regularly. Another smell. Incense. Something links?

Electricity whizzing. Marker.

Checked by electricity board.  You’re going to have to pay bill?

Power surges when intense.

5 times the amount.

Baseline: 1 hour of his washing machine. 31 200 hours. How do you generate that much electricity?

£750 around £8000 today.

Paranormal interfere with electromagnetic field.

November to December.

Bill goes for walk with baby Ben. Gravestone. Used them to build. Your house. Your house is built with gravestones.

Liz. I was terrified.

It was the most disgusting thing I ever came across. It was evil.

Danny meets our star witness – the real-life Liz Rich, to learn more about the frightening reality of living inside what has been called Britain's most haunted house. Back in 1989, we hear how the haunting intensifies, as Bill and Liz feel a sinister presence that appears to be taking over their lives, but is it real, or is it in their heads?

Episode 2. The Watcher.

The Witch Farm reinvestigates a real-life haunting – a paranormal cold case that has been unsolved for nearly 30 years - until now. Set in in the beautiful, remote Welsh countryside, this terrifying true story is told through a thrilling blend of drama and documentary.

I’m watching you, you feel scared.

People often say, I want to live in a haunted house. You bloody well, wouldn’t.

Timeline. One big development. Something that happened in the wake of the first phenomena, the footsteps and smells. Bill and Liz hardly dared talk about.

December 1989, kitchen.

I feel it. You’re being watched.

A (brooding) presence in the house.

Footsteps (i) hard boots (ii) slipper? Shuffling along landing and down the stairs.

Significant temperature changes. Unbearable heat. Brutal cold. Localised. This room. The area around the electricity meter.

Focal point. Power surges coinciding with phenomena.

Electricity supplier: Numerous tests. We are quite satisfied and have never experienced anything like this before.

Desecrated gravestones?

Liz, now in her sixties. You’ve got photos? This was the happier stuff. Something missing. No photos of  Heol Fanog.

I burnt them. I bloody burnt them all. I wanted no memory of that bloody place. I wasn’t bringing it with me.

Before you met Bill? What was young Liz like?

Bloody hell, you wouldn’t have wanted to know me. I was wild. I went to live in Ibiza,  Morocco. Took a motorbike through the Sahara. I’ve got a wild streak and I adore things that are new and exciting.

Did Bill fall into that category?

He was stunning looking. Very gentle. Very kind and very intelligent. I was attracted to him because he was quite weird, I think. Artists are interesting. They’re just different.

So you want to build this life together?

You and Bill and your son Lawrence and this baby and you find this place? It feels as if you fall in love with the house as well?

It was so bloody gorgeous. All in its own grounds. Stuck at the foot of the mountain.

Nearest neighbours half a mile down the hill.

I always wanted to get animals as well. So it was perfect. Even with a barn (and pig?)

But then Liz, there’s a point where it stops being fun?

Yeh.

So we’ve heard how the phenomenon starts. This becomes pretty much a daily occurrence?

Oh, this became normal. And they’re not gentle footsteps. No one’s creeping around. They are loud. They want to be heard. It kept getting braver, whatever it was.  

It wasn’t tangible. That’s the scary bit.

Paradise is quite a different place. How does it feel now?

Frightened. It was as if it was playing. Playing with us. Like cat with a mouse.

Experts: Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow

Evelyn: I found her such an interesting character. Originally, I was concerned she was a person who was just predisposed to being afraid. She had so much stress in her life. But when you actually dig into Liz and her background, I couldn’t believe a woman who had…was readily afraid of some noises in the house.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Liz. And one thing she is not is a scaredy-cat.

She has lived through a level of fear most of us have never experienced?

Ciaran: Absolutely, thing of the environment. Where they are. Brecon Beacons and so isolated. But they are also what they perceive to be a dangerous situation. They are having this experience, while almost being trapped by the environment. I think it would be difficult for almost anybody to be in that situation and not show some level of fear.

Let’s discuss our new phenomena? This sense of presence is so interesting. But as Liz said, that is ‘intangible’.

What’s tangible is these new temperature swings and those smells. Sulphur and incense.    

Evelyn: Yeh, it’s fairly common in most hauntings, people would report sudden plunges in temperature. But the intense heat it interesting. It feeds into the idea there are polar opposites at play in the house, because we’ve had sulphur and incense…It starts to feel that there are more than one personality at play within the house.

That’s fascinating, because we also have two sets of footsteps: the booted ones and the ones in slippers.

Evelyn is suggesting there are almost two personalities, but there are also to human personalities, Bill and Liz? Do you feel we need to look at how their responses are affecting each other?

Ciaran: Yeh. There’s the psychological concept called contagion. And contagion is where somebody has an experience and you have an empathetic experience just because you are close to them. Going back to human evolution, if somebody next to you is feeling fear for a genuine reason, it’s no surprise that you too experience that fear. Because ultimately that could be lifesaving.

So you’re still saying that they could be imagining this? But, surely, they can’t imagine a smell?

Ciaran: Well, there’s this lovely term, one of my favourite words in parapsychology, ‘phantasmial’, (?) It basically means, smelling things that aren’t there. We know there are particular triggers in the brain. It could be brain injury. But also if you are somebody that’s going through absolute extremes. So you’re going through extreme stress. Extreme sleep deprivation. You can also be affected by phantomial.

A detective story? This isolated house and its cast of suspects. One thing we know for sure, is not imagined is that enormous electricity bill. We did our experiment. How impossible that seemed to be and yet…? The electricity board are insisting that Bill and Liz pay it.

Bill had been an artist. Then his work dries up, seemingly overnight?

Liz: Oh, god, it was a nightmare. He was just going down to a darker hole by the minute. It just seemed that whatever way he went. No, no, nothing.

Suddenly you find yourself in a pretty dramatic financial situation?

Liz: It was bleak. Bloody bleak.

And as you all know, just when you think things can’t get any worse. They normally do.

Liz: Lucinda, the pig went mad. She became crazed. Crazy. You get to the point where you think this thing is going to break into the house and go for you. And I was very frightened of her…It went on for five or six weeks.

But she’d been an almost gentle pet?

Liz: Yeh, you could have lain on the floor with her. Tickle its tummy. And to go from that to this…creature that was very dangerous. We had to call for help.

…within a few weeks, all our animals had gone crazy or died. A pig died. Two cats died. A guinea pig died.  A dog died. And a herd of goats, which I actually had six. Died.

This bizarre plague of madness spread to all the animals we had.

Liz, this is not normal. If this was an illness, you wouldn’t normally see it spread species to species? This weird?

Yeh.

Suddenly your paradise, your private little farm feels like something else, entirely.

Liz: There was no happiness in there anymore. It was a hellhole. Absolute hellhole.

Evelyn, we can see the impact this is having on Liz and Bill, but do we really think this thing in the house, the watcher, could be impacting on Bill’s work and the animals?

Evelyn: Here’s the thing. When you are afraid, and things start to mount up, it can feel like you are cursed. And we readily explain that away it is stress. It is tiredness. It is fear. But just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean things aren’t out to get you.

And there’s something else we need to talk about. An  elephant in this room when we use that word, cursed, what we know about the history of this area, where Heol Fanog is.  

Evelyn: One of the things that jumps out is the whole area is densely populated by stories of witchcraft. And when we do start delving into it we do find stories of witchcraft and famine and animals being born deformed. Horrible things happening to livestock. Your also seeing the area around Brecon has almost 40 planes coming down over it. I think basically it’s been described as a plane graveyard. And you’ve also had things like soldiers dying bizarrely in training exercises. The are around Brecon itself has this reputation for feeling cursed. There is this ongoing believe that all of the causes for this bad luck and range of events is because it was such a hotbed for witchcraft. Is it the case that Bill and Liz have inherited these phenomena?  House and land they are on is cursed?

Ciaran: I think this is a classical case of cognitive dissonance. Where if you believe something is happening, anything that supports that theory you listen to or take on board. Anything that refutes or goes against that belief you completely ignore.

We’re focussing on animal deaths. There are animals were nothing happens to them. We’re focussing on this loss of income. But there’s one really important thing that we mustn’t forget. And that’ s what happened in the early 90s. There was a recession. People were watching what they were buying. And businesses were going under. And people would not have been spending money on luxury objects like works of art.   

Liz: The toilet. It actually came up from the floor. And the tiles beneath it rose up. It was almost as if there was something underneath it. Shoving it upward.

So you call a plumber?

[re-enactment drama] Plumber. It’s all fine. Everything in working order.

You think we’ve all  imagined this?

Liz: Yeh, but after the plumber left, give or take half an hour. The tiles had pushed itself up from the toilet again. So I called the plumber back. But as soon as he goes over and goes in, it’s fine.

Plumber: I’ve been here before and something happened. 20 odd years ago, the owner booked me to install a central heating system here. Big job. Radiators in every room. I had this boy with me, apprentice. One day I had to nip down to Brecon to get something. Said I’d have to leave the kid on his own. He refused, point blank. Said he’d rather lose the job, than stay alone.

I asked him why?

He said he felt someone was always watching him.

Normally, I’d tell him to get a grip. But he was bloody scared. I could see it on his face. And I recognised that look—today. On your faces. So is something here?

Liz: I don’t know.

Hang on, I haven’t finished. After I done the job, I got a phone call from the owner, Mrs Holborn. I rush up in the van and she shows me. All the radiators had come off the wall. Every single one. Now, I’m a professional. Make sure I do a good job. I have no idea how it happened. But I go around and check them all. Double check. Triple check. Every room. Next day she calls me. It’s happened again.

How?

Now, my first thought was is she doing it? But why would she? And even if she was, I’m not sure she’d have the strength. Anyway, I put them back on and I’m thinking about my apprentice. And I’m starting to feel a bit funny. Thinking, if there is something here, watching. Did it do this?

Did it ever happen again?

Night after night, she’d find the radiators wrenched off the wall. I still don’t know if I believe in ghosts. But you’re not imagining things. There is something here.

Liz, this is the corroboration we were looking for. Other people have been experiencing these things here too. On one level this is reassuring, you are not going mad. But it also means something else too. This is real.

Liz: Yeh, if you have reality in front of you. You have to face it. You think of everything it’s done so far and you think, what’s next? Are we safe? Are our kids, safe?

[postscript] Evelyn: Apparitions are incredibly rare. There is no longer something in the house, but some one.