Obsession: Radio 4's 'The Witch Farm'

Let’s talk ghosts again!

My dad used to describe the frustrations of being a car mechanic. Customers would bring their cars to the garage and report ‘a funny noise’ which might be difficult to define or locate. When does this noise happen? the mechanics would ask. The customer might say that it happened under such-and-such circumstances, but not all the time. The mechanics would sigh and do their best. Sometimes they would begin work on one problem, only to discover something completely different. If this is how difficult it is to diagnose an issue concerning a lump of steel, plastic and glass with an internal combustion engine in it, an entirely material business, how hard must it be to deal with non-physical stuff you can’t test or measure, matter that’s affected by psychology, history, culture, and circumstances to unknown degrees?

As we noted in respect to Danny Robins’s previous dramatised paranormal investigation radio series, The Battersea Poltergeist, this problem is much to the fore in the one which has just finished on Radio 4, The Witch Farm. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the unfortunate Rich family experienced a bewildering variety of terrifying manifestations at an old house not far from Brecon called Heol Fanog. Over the years they engaged an equally wide range of specialists to find out why these things were happening and to stop them, beginning with the Anglican clergy at Brecon Cathedral who sprayed holy water about to no effect at all; a strange psychic with the unlikely name of Larry Harry who identified witches and other presences at the heart of the problem; a dowser who told them it was all about ley lines gone bad; a Baptist minister who spent two years, on and off, trying to drive demons out of the house; and finally ghosthunter Eddie Burks whose ministrations to the unhappy spirits he described at Heol Fanog seemed to bring positive results that sadly proved only temporary. Eventually the Riches had to leave, the family fell apart, and poor Bill Rich essentially drank himself to death.

Although I’d never heard of it before, this is far from the first time that the story of Heol Fanog has been told, but we are still no nearer a clear explanation. The various rationales, natural or paranormal, for the events at the house are not necessarily mutually exclusive; but that means that it’s hard to exclude any of them and reach a clear judgement about what went on. There’s nothing secure to go on, and in the show Ciaran O’Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow roll their sceptic-versus-believer double act across the ambiguity without resolution. The one absolutely demonstrable, material oddity among all the Heol Fanog phenomena is the abnormally high electricity bills the Riches found themselves paying not long after moving in: that should be a plain matter to investigate, but the electricity company that operated then no longer exists, the question is never really gone into, and, while no natural explanation is offered, neither is it clear why these entities should cause so much electrical disturbance when so many others don’t.

In my very, very limited experience of this area of work the first question one asks oneself is what might be the centre of the event. Some phenomena are definitely place-based; most ghosts, whatever one thinks ghosts are, focus on a particular location and never manifest anywhere else. Many of them play out the same actions and motions whenever they appear, like recordings. Other phenomena are person-based, and what we tend to call poltergeists seem to be of this sort, capable of manifesting in different places a specific individual happens to be. So, when trying to find out what might be going on in any stated case, you would ask the witnesses whether anything of the kind had ever happened to them before, in another setting. When The Witch Farm began, this was the very first question I wanted answered; whatever may have happened to the Riches, Heol Fanog appears to be quiet now and at one point in the drama Liz Rich is told that the previous tenant never experienced anything at all (though visitors to the house claimed to have done). In fact, Heol Fanog is quiet to the point that when Danny Robins goes to visit the location with a dowser he rather implies that they have to creep around the perimeter of the property and avoid annoying the current residents: he doesn’t actually state ‘we contacted them and they told us to get knotted’, but let’s say they don’t seem to have anything to add to the investigation, as they might if they were being plagued by the paranormal themselves.

Despite Heol Fanog’s apparently complex and disagreeable history, that led me to think right from the start that one of the Rich family was crucial to the whole thing and, by the end of the series, it seems that Bill Rich’s one-time involvement with the occult – he began an initiation into witchcraft with Alex and Maxine Sanders, but backed out before it was complete – was at the centre of the events, whether we understand its effects as supernatural or psychological. But in fact I’m coming to wonder whether there’s a third category of phenomena engendered by a person susceptible to disturbance arriving in potentially disturbed surroundings, and that may be what we have in The Witch Farm.

David Holmwood, the local Baptist minister who the Riches are put onto as a potential solution for their problems, interests me. Mr Holmwood worked in industry and his wife Patricia was a nurse before he concluded that he was being called to the ministry in 1971. He served as a student pastor at Stockwood Free Church in Bristol and then went to Fillebrook Baptist Church in east London before they both worked in Brazil. Mr Holmwood’s next posting I can find was in Romsey in 1988, after which he must have gone to Wales. Then he was at Stoke Row in Buckinghamshire, and his last appointment was with the chaplaincy team at Heathrow Airport in the early 2000s – in fact he was there to witness the effects of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. This all seems unspectacular enough if a bit more varied than the average nonconformist minister's career, but The Witch Farm interviews his successor at Jerusalem Baptist in Pentrebach who states that Mr Holmwood had an extensive ministry of exorcism and dealing with the paranormal, at least while he was there.

Of course I had my head in my hands when the show described him as ‘a local vicar’ (he wasn’t), but Revd Holmwood doesn’t do anything an Anglican clergyperson might not, apart from working as a freelancer: Anglicans operate in teams, bringing doctors and psychologists into play as well as spiritual weaponry, but Mr Holmwood doesn’t have anyone else on board except for an American ex-Satanist called Anita. He drives them all to Heol Fanog and during the journey an owl chucks itself against the windscreen of the car in broad daylight, which is very Hammer House of Horror. Curiously he appears – from the drama, anyway – to identify Bill Rich as the focus of the problem quite quickly, but apparently never draws from him the actual reason why this might be so, instead getting him to burn his spooky paintings as he decides they are the way the Devil ‘gets in’. Even if Mr Holmwood’s techniques are not that different from his Anglican counterparts’, his obsessive persistence seems unusual. Not only does he take months readying himself for his oncoming battle with Satan, if we believe the narrative we’re presented with, he spends about two years hanging around at Heol Fanog, intermittently staying there, praying, reading Scripture, and scaring the Riches even more than they are already, until eventually they’ve had enough of him. Nothing that he does has any effect on what they’re experiencing. Coming from a Christian perspective, these techniques are supposed to be powerful and effective, based as they are in the power of God; if they haven’t achieved anything after repeated application, you ought to question whether your entire analysis of the problem is awry.

However we interpret the story of the Rich family, it strikes me that there’s another tale to be told here, that of a Christian minister sucked in by their own interpretation of a set of events which in fact seem to centre on a disturbed, lonely, and guilt-ridden individual. In that way, Revd David Holmwood – God rest his soul – should probably have had reason to be grateful that he was eventually detached from the obsessive power of Heol Fanog.