"When you've met evil, you know." Those are the words of Liz Rich, who once lived in a remote farmhouse in the foothills of Bannau Brycheiniog that has been called the most haunted house in Britain.
And if the experiences of married couple Liz and Bill Rich are to be believed, the unwanted label is warranted. More than 30 years after they moved to what was then their new home, Heol Fanog, Liz is still haunted by the things she says she saw and experienced there. Those things include:
- seeing the figure of an old woman sitting silently in the corner of her children's nursery
- a dark figure standing at the foot of her bed
the sound of loud footsteps walking about on the upper floors
- huge electricity bills that had no explanation
- the deaths of their animals
- being told by neighbours that their house was built using gravestones
The couple called in priests and exorcists, and a recent BBC podcast which explored the phenomena detailed a brutal 19th century murder near the house and a suggestion that it had once been the site of witchcraft.
The six years after the Rich family moved into Heol Fanog in 1989 proved to be hellish, with the couple claiming they were terrorised by supernatural forces that drove them to the edge of sanity and almost killed them. Their case has been called The Welsh Amityville. It all began innocently enough with an unexpected high electricity bill landing in their laps just a few months after moving into Heol Fanog, which has since been called Hellfire Farm and The Witch Farm, which is the title of the recent BBC podcast.
Electricity provider Swalec was regularly contacted, with huge power surges taking place on the property without explanation, even when all the lights were off or the family was out, but no one could find the cause. The possibility that someone was somehow managing to steal or divert the electricity was ruled out. And soon after, Liz claimed she started sensing a strange presence in her new home.
"It felt like something was watching you the whole time, and that feeling is even more frightening than seeing things," she told Channel Four for a docudrama in 2018. "But if something is watching you then you have to assume its next move is to do something - and a sense of raw panic would come over me. It's like I knew something was going to happen."
Around the same time she said the pair's two young children, Ben and Rebecca, began to see the figure of an old woman appear in the darkened corners of their playroom, sitting silently and staring intently at them. But, being so young, they simply assumed her presence normal and that their mum and dad had also seen her.
Not long afterwards Bill's personality began to change, and, as summer gave way to autumn and the shadows grew longer, he'd spend more and more time hidden away with his paintings, sometimes working throughout the night. It is one of those paintings that has one of the creepiest stories attached to it. It goes like this: while many of the pets Bill and Liz adopted fell prey to unexpected illnesses or ran away, one animal had a particularly chilling fate.
Bill had been initially delighted to receive a commission from a local couple to paint their favourite horse. But no matter how he tried, Bill just couldn’t get one of the animal’s legs to look right and however he painted it, it would end up looking deformed. After he handed over the painting, the horse, Echo, developed a problem in the very leg Bill had been unable to paint. The horse was soon found dead, in the very same spot Bill had depicted him in the painting. His neighbours burned the painting.
"He had an interest in unexplainable things and was always drawn in some way to the darker side of life," said Liz, adding that, while her husband became more obsessed, she felt ever more threatened and desperate to get out. She said that one night, the couple awoke to the sound of their bedroom door creaking open and, with the deafening rush of blood pulsing in their own ears, could only watch horrified as a blackened, skeletal hand curled its fingers round the latch and slammed it shut again. Turning on the table lamp in a blind panic they were confronted by a hooded figure standing motionless at the foot of their bed.
Bill's son, Laurence, also started acting strangely, becoming verbally aggressive, withdrawn, and, according to Bill, entirely unlike himself.
“Between April and June 1990, Laurence was getting so bad, I mean, unmanageable,” Bill is reported as saying. “He was spitting at me, he was swearing at me…. It was not him. I can’t stress that enough.”
After consulting with spiritualists, mediums, religious people and others, Bill and Liz were informed that there was a history of witchcraft at Heol Fanog, and that a coven had met there in the past. Neighbours also spoke of an old graveyard, near the house, that had previously been disturbed, with some of the stones removed by local farmers and some used in the constriction of Heol Fanog itself.
Evidence was also uncovered of a murder taking place near the house, in 1848, in which an innocent 18-year-old farm worker, James Griffiths, was attacked by 23-year-old Thomas Edwards, who hit him in the back of the head with an axe and then reportedly buried the corpse at a farm near Heol Fanog. He was later hanged for his crime. There doesn't seem to be any satisfactory explanation why the murder took place.
One of the people consulted by the family even suggested the hauntings were linked to Bill’s past and the fact he had once been connected with a man who practiced witchcraft, even once half-heartedly taken part in a ritual before changing his mind.
In 2022, Liz recalled how the farmhouse was exorcised "hundreds of times" and even claimed to have been possessed herself in the property's kitchen. The 63-year-old said: "If you've never experienced anything like this, it must sound like we're making it up - but none of it was made up, none of it."
Being so isolated, Liz said living there was like "being in a bubble" and that the family gradually adapted to an "insidious" feeling: "You could sense something before the real horrors came. Sometimes the house would level out but then something would happen and it would become more claustrophobic and more oppressive like an energy building up.
"I would always try to look for answers. But the problem is when something happens that you can't find a logical explanation for. How can you be standing looking at a door with your eyes and it closes and makes a slamming noise? How can an oil radiator heat itself up when there's no oil in the tank?"
The couple's younger children, Ben and Becca, have also reported seeing an old woman who they said would sit in the corner of their nursery and watch them play. Liz also says she saw the woman through a window as she looked in from the outside, as well as a seven-foot figure with no face.
"It was menacing, strong and sure of itself," Liz said of encountering the figure in a passageway in the house. "It didn't have a face but it was in the form of a kind of human. I don't think it was a ghost but it was something evil, something that had been around for a long, long time."
Liz said her husband was so obsessed that "it got to his brain": "The house ate away at his soul, it took away his self-respect. He was drinking more, he was grumpy and he became someone who was rotten from the inside out. It eventually destroyed him."
The couple separated and Bill has since died. Liz believes that she was possessed in the property, telling The Witch Farm host Danny Robins: "I felt violated, the thought of something, some energy, having the audacity to take your body even for a short period of time." The family eventually left Heol Fanog, moving to Cowbridge, but the property is now occupied by someone else.
"I know people will just think we're weird people and we're making it up all but you'd have to have one hell of an imagination to make all this up. It felt dangerous in that house. The kids always slept with me, I wouldn't let them sleep on their own. I definitely felt very threatened there," Liz said. "When you've met evil, you know it. Ghosts don't scare me now because I've come up against such evil in my life. That's the truth."
A book by Mark Chadbourn, titled Testimony, also covers the family's experiences. Chadbourn is an author and journalist who studied the Rich case.
"The place had a reputation in the area as being haunted and when I spoke to neighbours about it they weren't at all surprised to find out what had happened there," he has said.
"I interviewed priests, ministers, preachers and spiritualists. One believed there was a witches' coven there in the past which performed rituals in the building, while another said devil worship or that an ancient celtic diety had once been summoned on the plot of land."
He even admitted to having been in Bill's studio and feeling something unseen touch the nape of his neck - but Liz's decision to contact baptist minister David Holmwood to exorcise the property left him conflicted.
"David wanted to save Liz and Bill from the devil, who he saw around at all times threatening to steal the souls of the good - some of the things he said I found hard to accept and I think they might have been psychologically damaging to anyone in a vulnerable state."
As Mr Holmwood and religion become an increasing crutch for Liz during that difficult time, Bill further withdrew into himself and his art, creating ever more dark and disturbing images. Unable to persuade Bill to leave his studio, Liz bundled her little ones into the car and drove to her mother's.
Being alone tore Bill apart and he began having "terribly black thoughts of self harm" involving kitchen knives. So a concerned Liz returned, only to find the power had been cut off, final demands for bill payments littering the floor and dozens of manic daubings all over the walls. She also found her husband, standing almost comatose and muttering about dead bodies walking through the house at night.
"There are a lot of people who just float through life and it's all nice, perfect and easy," said Liz tearfully. "I've wished a million times I could have had one of those lives."
The Witch Farm is available to listen to on BBC Sounds. New episodes are released on Mondays and are broadcast on Radio 4 at 11pm Mark Chadbourn's book about Heol Fanog, Testimony, is available to buy. For more information, visit his website here.
