It started with the electricity bill. For an ordinary farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons, the annual charges would have come to £8,000. It was the late 80s, way before the current energy crisis. It was impossible by any normal means. In Danny Robins’ new podcast series, this chilling detail spirals into a ghost story that takes the real people at its heart to the “precipice between reality and insanity”. Was something supernatural draining energy from the house?
Landing just in time for Halloween, The Witch Farm is the sequel to Danny Robins’ smash hit The Battersea Poltergeist, which examined creepy real-life happenings in the heart of London. The massive public response to that case inspired ghostly investigation series Uncanny, which took on a different story each week, all submitted by the online community flourishing around the show.
“The Battersea Poltergeist pushed me to the brink of believing that ghosts exist. I would have considered myself a sceptic. And now I consider myself a sceptic who wants to believe and is teetering on that edge of belief,” says Robins.
“I wanted to find a case that could push me over the edge, essentially. Then we found this case and it’s incredible. If the Battersea Poltergeist was described as Britain’s strangest haunting, I feel like this is Britain’s most terrifying haunting. It is like a plunge bath of pure terror.”
Over eight episodes, through a mixture of eyewitness accounts, analysis and dramatic re-enactments starring Joseph Fiennes and Alexandra Roach, The Witch Farm tells Bill and Liz Rich’s story. In 1989, they moved their family to a remote farm in the Welsh mountains. It was “so bloody gorgeous,” Liz tells Robins. But soon things began to go wrong. There was that bizarre demand from the electricity company, and the family started to see and hear things they couldn’t – still can’t – explain.
“There’s everything in this case: poltergeist activity, apparitions, alleged possession, physical injury. It’s so intense with phenomena,” says Danny Robins.