The ‘Welsh Amityville’?

When a case is referred to as ‘The Welsh Amityville’ you wonder what’s being implied. Is it (a) a case so convincing, so utterly compelling, that it proves the existence of supernatural realities once and for all or (b) a case so riven with weakness and contradiction that it isn’t, as the saying goes, worth the candle? With Amityville it turned out to be absolutely, emphatically, (b). What, then, of the case in question: one which occurred over two decades ago at a place called Heol Fanog, latterly dubbed ‘The Witch Farm’?

I first found myself wondering this during the autumn and winter of 2022 as I listened to The Witch Farm, an eight part BBC podcast series hosted by Danny Robins and purported, as one of the episode titles proclaimed, to be presenting a case worthy to be dubbed ‘The Welsh Amityville.’ As regards all things paranormal Robins has form quite apart from The Witch Farm, having presented the wildly popular Uncanny podcast since 2021, a BBC TV television series, an Uncanny touring roadshow, a book Into The Uncanny and, before the Uncanny ‘brand’ took off, a popular podcast dealing with the famous (or infamous) Battersea Poltergeist. On a roll, Robins unveiled The Witch Farm on 17^th October 2022 and it ran until 5^th December that same year. Some bonus episodes followed but, all told, this baffling case still left many listeners with more questions than answers. Having found myself haunted – pun intended! – by this ‘Welsh Amityville’ I embarked on a sustained process of research and reflection: one which ran for long after the series was becoming an ever more distant memory.

As I will show, this case has much that is relevant to the beliefs, practices and membership of the CFPSS. It also has much to teach us. Indeed, both inside the podcast and elsewhere the reported events at Heol Fanog present a range of issues fundamental to the Fellowship including – but not limited to – Christian ‘input’ into the case, other interventions, inconsistent experiencing (or otherwise) of a variety of paranormal phenomena by various persons within a given location and a number of other key issues at the interface of Christianity and parapsychology. This article will consequently explore the case in detail, going beyond the podcast in a bid to shed fresh light on what remains a baffling case. It will conclude by suggesting a fresh resolution of the ‘person-centred’ versus ‘place-centred’ debate which regularly occurs within discussions of paranormal ‘infestation.’  

Testimony and Heol Fanog

A close look at the credits for The Witch Farm reveals that it had a consultant, Mark Chadbourn, author of a book on the case, Testimony.[1] Chadbourn, a screenwriter and one time journalist, is also a writer of supernatural thriller and fantasy novels, which explains why Testimony is such a gripping read – and why, perhaps, The Witch Farm was such a gripping listen. Indeed, the two contain various similarities. As with the book on which it was based, the podcast interspersed dramatic reconstructions of the events at Heol Fanog with actual testimony from those directly involved, including Liz Rich (of which more later). Because of time constraints, however (he consulted studio ‘experts’ throughout the series, as well as presenting the key twists and turns of the events themselves) Robins was unable during his podcasts to provide the level of detail contained in the book. For anyone interested in getting to the truth behind the events at Heol Fanog, therefore, both are indispensable.

What happened, then? In essence, over a period of several years commencing in late November 1989, a family was terrorised at an isolated house in the shadow of the Brecon Beacons. Phenomena were allegedly many and varied: heavy footsteps, inexplicable smells of sulphur and incense, unexplained electricity drains (leading to massive bills), a repeated sense of an evil presence, a sinister sense of being watched, appearances of black silhouette-like figures, multiple apparitions, terrifying dreams, an unexplained ‘run’ of atrocious luck, and so on. Indeed, the variety of manifestations seems to have been matched only by the range of ‘experts’ invited to rid the house of them: spiritualists, Baptists, laypeople, dowsers, exorcists, various members of the Society for Psychical Research and so on, in a depressing and mostly futile parade. Help sometimes came, but it never seemed to last, plunging the family into ever greater despair.

Whatever might have ultimately been responsible for their woes, one thing is abundantly clear, both from the podcast and the book: the Rich family – Bill, Liz and, during the early stages, Bill’s son Laurence – clearly suffered. From something, at least. In the later stages of the manifestations, even the family dog Beau is claimed to have been affected. Hence, by the end of his recounting of the family’s horrifying nearly six-year ordeal, Chadbourn is bullish. For, in addition to the Riches themselves, he writes, there are ample testimonies from others, including ‘a previous resident, the dog warden [and] all the spiritual leaders.’ ‘Were they all’ he writes, ‘lying, misguided, or the victims of some strange brain defect?’ And he concludes: ‘To say all this was all some delusion is actually more unbelievable than to accept that something terrible and beyond the bounds of reason happened at Heol Fanog…’[2]

A Happy Place?

The truth, as is often the case with alleged paranormal ‘infestations’, may, however, be somewhat more complex. Take, for example, Chadbourn’s multiple-witness cri de coeur, above. What struck me as I read his book were the number of people who had lived in or been associated with Heol Fanog over the years that reported absolutely nothing out-of-the-ordinary. A local historian whom the author consulted about the events claims not to have known of anything unusual about the farm.[3] Chadbourn cites the owner (the Riches rented) as claiming ‘I’ve never heard of anything unusual’ and that ‘I’m not aware of anything strange happening at Heol Fanog. None of the previous residents have said…’[4] A local builder claims, in similar vein, that ‘I’ve never felt any of the bad atmosphere…It just seemed like a normal house to me’[5] whilst the local dog warden reportedly could find nothing wrong with the dog.[6] Most telling of all is the testimony of Bridget Buscombe, a long-time resident of the house for several years before the Riches took up tenancy, who is quoted as saying that ‘I loved that house and felt very happy there’ and that ‘I left there reluctantly and it’s always been my favourite house of all the ones I’ve lived in…If I had the money I’d buy it.’[7]

More recently, prompted by the podcast series, the current residents at Heol Fanog contacted presenter Danny Robins to reveal that not only had the electricity drains failed to occur ‘for the whole of the 21^st century’ but also that the ‘gentle mystery of nature’ was the only mysterious thing about the farm. Asserting that they had been resident at Heol Fanog for the past 25 years, they appeared overall to be more than happy to report no supernatural or other unusual phenomena at all.[8]

Consistent testimony, then (and finding space for such first-person telling is one of the absolute strengths of both Testimony and The Witch Farm podcast). Yet there are ‘twists’, even here. A plumber’s apprentice is reported to have been so unnerved by the house that he refused to work there alone. The dog warden in her testimony talks of ‘what sounded like footsteps running along the landing upstairs’ when the house was empty.[9] And even Bridget Buscombe, long-time and apparently happy resident at Heol Fanog, having told Chadbourn all about her ‘favourite house’, has a ‘postscript’: ‘Having said that, something did happen to me which I couldn’t explain. It was when I was lying in bed one night and there was no one else in the house. I was reading and I suddenly heard a noise so I looked up. I had an old spinning-wheel in one corner and the wheel was going round. Just going round of its own accord. I jumped out of bed and stuffed a piece of paper in the wheel to stop it. Why did it happen? I couldn’t explain it.’[10]

There is clearly counter-evidence to the ‘nothing-out-of-the-ordinary’ testimonies, then; plus, of course, the massive and sustained testimony of the Riches over many years and other material which Chadbourn claims to have but which he has ‘not been able to detail.’[11] (For reasons of space, one assumes).

Which farm, then, is (or was) The Witch Farm? The house of horrors where everything dreadful happens or a lovely place where nothing does? To fully explain what happened at Heol Fanog, I am going to suggest that we need to make (a) a correct choice between two clearly contrasting possibilities and (b) a synthesis of two further, apparently contrasting, possibilities. Much of what follows will be taken up with an attempt to address both (a) and (b).

Terror In The Hope Valley

Reading Testimony, I was reminded of another testimony which I had examined shortly before: unpublished and uncovered during research I was doing for another project. In it, the writer set out a series of terrifying events which took place during a two-week holiday in August 1999 at a holiday cottage she shared with several others in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire’s Peak District. During her time at the cottage, according to the writer, the terrors she experienced were many and varied, including the presence of an evil ‘entity’, terrifying nightmares, unexplained pools of water, apparently inexplicable electrical manifestations, a terrifying pressure on her chest, a sighting of a ‘black blob’ in the garden one night, a terrified pet dog, and so on. A list, in fact, remarkably like that reported by the Riches during their massively troubled time at Heol Fanog. In the Hope Valley case the writer included enough information to enable me to track down the actual cottage which is still in use as a holiday let and I examined customer reviews of it on trip review sites going as far back as I was able: several years, in fact. And what did I find? Not a single mention of anything terrifying, supernatural, or unpleasant at all. I was puzzled, given how clear the writer’s testimony had been. Then I came across the Heol Fanog case and I was puzzled all over again.

Examining Inconsistencies

When confronted by such clear inconsistencies, how might we proceed? One option might simply be to discount supernatural interpretations of events in favour of purely ‘this-worldly’ ones: psychological ones, or such like. In the Heol Fanog case, for example, we might agree with Dr. Ciaran O’ Keefe who, responding to the podcast, suggested a psychological interpretation of the events at the farm, adding family stresses, prior experiences, possible fantasy-proneness and even the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of 1986 as additional – and purely this-worldly – causative factors.[12] We could add to this list similar cases of shared delusional states or instances where faulty recollection has been shown to subsequently bestow on mundane events a very different affective ‘hue.’ Thus, as much as we might sympathise with the Riches for being at the centre of it all, we might gently suggest another way of viewing the events at Heol Fanog. In extreme cases we might even suggest fraud – although there is no hint of this in the case of the Riches.

By direct contrast we might incline toward the opposite point of view: that something overwhelming and clearly paranormal occurs in such odd cases – including the one involving the Riches – and that reductionistic interpretations are simply missing the point. We recall Chadbourn’s own assertion: too much happened to too many over too long at Heol Fanog to entertain any other hypothesis, let alone that the Riches lied. Much more sensible, then – more believable, as he would have it – is to conclude that something genuinely supernatural occurred. Supernatural and terrifying.

What When Nothing Happens?

In short, then, and following Chadbourn’s own lead, we might conclude that a supernatural explanation is to be preferred above any other as regards at least some of the events at Heol Fanog. Or that it isat least reasonable to support such an explanation – to trust the witnesses’ own interpretations of events, in other words – given the sheer weight of evidence that exists in favour of doing this. This allows us, in turn, to address a key question which I have already highlighted: what of those to whom nothing occurred at Heol Fanog? As we have seen, this was a sizeable group. So what should we do with their testimonies? Ignore them as of no consequence or allow them to challenge the contention that there was a supernatural element to at least some of the events reported at the farm? I would like to suggest that a synthesis of two apparently contrasting possibilities, in accordance with aim (b) above, offers the best way to resolve this dilemma.

In Search Of A Synthesis

What might the ‘mechanisms’ be that underlie the troubling supernatural events that occur at places like Heol Fanog? Where might we try to locate them? In seeking a total explanation for any set of allegedly paranormal events at a given location it could be argued that the location itself is significant above all. As is well-known, this is a position most commonly associated with hauntings. Thus, a house as a place is said to be haunted. As a consequence, if you visit that place, you might experience phenomena you wouldn’t experience elsewhere. Contrastingly, it could be said that person-centredness – and not place-centredness – is the important thing. As is also well-known, this is a position often associated with poltergeists. Often, the person – usually one, single, person – at the centre of such phenomena is known as a ‘focus.’ That is, things happen in their vicinity precisely because they are there and attract them: which is frequently claimed in the case of Shirley Hitchings in the Battersea Poltergeist case, as covered by Robins at length. And one thing these foci are often said to have in common is that they are troubled in some way. Often deeply, as in cases where their psychological tensions have no apparent physical outlet and manifest either as ‘something else’ or when the tensions lead the focus – unwittingly – to attract ‘something else.’

Perhaps it is time to collapse the ‘place-or-person’ dichotomy as we seek explanations for at least some paranormal manifestations and seek a synthesis instead. How might this work in the case of Heol Fanog? Well, in the normal run of things, it’s an ordinary house. Nothing much happens there. Some people quite like it. Others love it. Occasionally something odd might happen – as with Bridget Buscombe’s spinning-wheel – but nothing terrifying. But when you add a particular dynamic to the location – a person or group of persons in a particularly troubled psychological state, for example – it is the equivalent of lighting the blue touch paper. A rarity, to be sure, but one that can be sustained and dramatic.

Troubled Souls

Is there any evidence that the Riches embodied such a dynamic? Testimony makes it clear – clearer, even, than the podcast – that they did: but as a family. Indeed, the opening chapters make very clear that when the key dramatis personae of the Heol Fanog case arrived at the house they were a group of troubled persons seeking peace and solace: a perception that is reinforced when certain key pieces of podcast material are added. Early on, for example, Chadbourn asserts that ‘Bill and Liz had found the home at the culmination of a very difficult period for both of them…’[13] In Bill’s case, his wife of sixteen years had recently left him for somebody else. Liz had battled anorexia for many years and had at one point run away to the Mediterranean – ‘I was desperately lonely and screwed up’[14] – only to return depressed and suffering from ringworm and psittacosis. Seeking a cure, and having turned to herbalism as part of the process, she eventually trained as a herbalist, meeting Bill when he sought her services to help cure him of his own depression. At first, Heol Fanog offered a way out from the couple’s previous travails: a fresh start in a new home that provided a much-needed escape from their old one. As Chadbourn tells it, ‘When they heard of Heol Fanog it was a moment of pure serendipity. They were at their lowest ebb, desperate to move out [from their old home], unable to find anywhere…’[15]

By the time the family arrived at the farm Liz was three months pregnant and at first all was well but within weeks of the new baby’s arrival the phenomena started with the sounds of heavy footsteps, odours, and so on. Almost in tandem with this it was Bill’s son from his previous marriage, Laurence, who would begin to show the signs of alienation and disturbance that would lead to his ultimate banishment from the house. Testimony gives ample evidence of this: in particular in its vivid descriptions of his bouts of anger, self-isolation and depression which gradually give way to increasing hostility and ever more troubling behaviour. There is clear evidence of prior tensions with Liz. By page 50 he is punching holes in his bedroom wall and spitting in his grandmother’s and father’s faces. Bill avows complete ignorance of the underlying causes – ‘[I]t was beyond anybody’s understanding…’[16] – but it is difficult to miss the timing of events: when baby Ben arrives Laurence’s decline begins and the troubles start. Bill grasps this – ‘He started to change about the time of the footsteps’[17] – but seemingly fails to grasp the more obvious connection: with the new baby’s arrival the family is changing and poor Laurence is becoming ever more peripheral. Rage follows, in ever-increasing intensity, until he is packed off to a boarding house where his condition – perhaps predictably – improves.

The podcast adds the detail of Bill’s descent into alcoholism but even in the absence of this it is clear that the family at the centre of events were deeply, deeply troubled for large parts of their tenancy at Heol Fanog. Indeed, it would be tempting to conclude that it was these unquiet souls that haunted the house, not the other way round: save, of course, for the fact that so many of the events that occurred over the years appear to have come from somewhere – or something – else and to have added massively to the tensions that already existed.

What Was Really There?

So what was that something else? Given the events as described in both book and podcast, might we be able to say anything about the realities – even the ‘mechanisms’ –  involved? From the detail in Testimony it seems clear that it – whatever it was (or is) – was there well before the Riches arrived. Others noticed it. It even gave Bridget Buscombe what might be said to be a little ‘tease.’ But only when the Riches moved in did things really ‘take off.’ In this context, one of the events that occurred after Laurence left is particularly interesting: not least for the fact that it was one of the most terrifying of all. Liz tells the story in her own words:

‘As I stepped into the hallway, I had a real shock. I saw this black silhouette of a seven-foot man walking just on the inside of the kitchen door, just passing the doorway….I went into the kitchen and it wasn’t there. I knew it wouldn’t be there – that’s why I went in. The figure had been there, certainly – but these things happen so quickly. I’ve never seen any of these face-on for five minutes or so, so you can actually study them and work out pictures. It’s always so quick. It was just black, no detail. Black. All black. Everything. And it was male – just feelings…’[18]

Chadbourn adds: ‘It was as if that apparition had breached some invisible wall. From that moment on, the terror in the house grew rapidly worse.’[19]

Liz’s comment that such encounters were usually ‘so quick’ reflects the fact that she was no stranger to seeing such glimpsed apparitions in and around the farm. This one seems to have stood out because of the detail involved. And it is that detail which bears comparison with other, similar, encounters. Consider, for example, the following description of an experience that occurred in South Dakota on a trailer court at sunset one evening in 1985. Having tuned a car in preparation for a trip, the experient writes:

‘Two trailers down from ours, two women and a man were arguing in front of their trailer. They were so loud that we could hear everything they said. I reached down by my front tyre to grab a ratchet from the toolbox, and I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. What I saw startled me.

I froze…A small black thing was walking down the grass trail behind the trailers. That’s the best way I can explain it. It was maybe 3 ft tall with skinny legs and arms. It had a faceless head, and walked like a human. But it didn’t look like a ghost or anything. It was black, as if there were a hole in the air, as if it were a nothingness swallowing light. I’ve never seen such complete blackness since.

I don’t think it noticed me. I watched in astonishment as it walked up to a tree about as big around as a coffee can and put its arm around the trunk and stood there, watching the people who were arguing. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The thing was so black that it looked as if the tree had a black hole in it. It seemed to be enjoying itself.’

Reflecting on why it could have been ‘enjoying itself’, the writer adds: ‘Maybe it liked anger; maybe it brought anger.’[20]

Aside from the reported height, this description of the figure encountered contains striking similarities to the one given by Liz and reproduced by Chadbourn. In each case there is a figure: walking, featureless, black. A silhouette. Are these the only parallels? We recall the South Dakota writer’s subsequent reflection above: perhaps it liked anger, or brought it. Given the context – the argument is going on before the figure appears –  the former might suggest itself as preferable. Might this have been the case at Heol Fanog, too? Not just in the case of the silhouette, but in respect of the rest of the phenomena also? Could there be a sense in which such things feed on tension, trouble, and disquiet: including the tension, trouble and disquiet they themselves add to the ‘mix’? As we have seen – and as both Chadbourn and The Witch Farm podcast make abundantly clear – there was no shortage of such at Heol Fanog.

Which Farm Was The Witch Farm?

In many cases which interest and/or challenge us as CFPSS members we are presented with what seems an age-old paranormal dichotomy: are places haunted, or are people? As this article nears its end, it is now time to ask: how might the Heol Fanog case help us resolve such a dichotomy? Can it? Given his age, it might be tempting to see Laurence as the sole focus in the Heol Fanog case and to view all of the events as ‘straightforward’ poltergeist phenomena centring on him. However, it is notable from Testimony that the events continued long after he was packed off to live elsewhere. In fact, as we have seen in the case of Liz’s ‘silhouette’ encounter, in many ways they became more intense. But playing the ‘blame game’ does nothing to advance our understanding of what happened at the farm during the troublesome years. To be the catalyst for something is not the same as to cause it: let alone to be the ultimate cause of it. Remember: something was really there at Heol Fanog, and had been well before the Riches arrived. They didn’t ask for it; far less did they want it. In fact, they did everything they could to get rid of it. And in the end, it seems, they did.

In the very last exchange of the original The Witch Farm podcast, in the final moments of the final episode, Danny Robins asks Liz Rich: ‘Why do you think this happened to you?’ Her answer is telling: ‘It’s like making a cocktail, I guess. You’ve got to have certain ingredients for it to work right. And I guess Bill and I were the missing ingredients. I think maybe certain people carry a darkness that other people don’t.’ The omission of any reference to Laurence, here, is interesting, as is the purport of her parting reflection: it was us. We were the missing ingredient. This article has suggested that ‘catalyst’ might be a preferable metaphor to ‘cocktail’ as regards the events that occurred at Heol Fanog but either way the conclusion that ‘person(s) plus place’ has better explanatory value than ‘person(s) or place’ is generally supported from somebody at the very centre of what happened. A synthesis, that is, rather than an either-or.

So which farm was The Witch Farm? The answer appears to have been: it all depends on who was there. For some, it was a quiet place. For others, it was a lovely place. For still others, it was a place of horrors. It could be, by turns, teasing or terrifying. Take your pick. It was all of these. And more.

Notes:

1. Mark Chadbourn, Testimony (Emerald Eye, 2014, 2022)
2. ibid, p. 184
3. ibid, p. 63
4. ibid, p. 56
5. ibid, p. 66
6. ibid, p. 15
7. ibid, p. 56
8. Ciaran O’ Keeffe, ‘Heol Fanog: What Lies Beneath?’, Fortean Times 430, p. 37
9. ibid, p. 153
10. ibid, p. 57
11. ibid, p. 184
12. O’ Keeffe, op cit
13. ibid, p. 13
14. ibid, p. 14
15. ibid, p. 13
16. ibid, p. 47
17. ibid
18. ibid, p. 98
19. ibid
20. David Sutton (ed.), It Happened To Me! Real-Life Tales of the Paranormal, (Dennis Publishing, London, 2012), pp. 120-1

This article first appeared in Fellowship Review, No. 261, Summer 2025, pp. 9 – 20.