Testimony

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Strange faces appear on the floor of a house in a remote village in southern Spain. A ghost plane rises from the depths of Ladybower Reservoir on the Derbyshire Moors. The mummified hand of an English martyr is used to raise a Benedictine monk from a coma on the edge of death. Occasionally, just to keep things interesting, I like to throw a bit of non-fiction into my reading mix. As far as horror fiction is concerned haunted house stories have always been a bit of a favourite of mine so the thought of reading non-fiction that details a genuine haunting seemed like a good fit. This wasn’t a simple haunting. This was human lives pushed to the limit by a malignant force which exhibited a terrifying sentience. A battle not only for the sanity of Heol Fanog’s bewildered, incresingly distressed residents, but ultimately for their very souls. Love and Death at the End of the World (in The Last Continent, New Tales of Zothique, edited by John Pelan, Shadowlands Press) Yet if only we could be sure it wasn’t our extremely powerful imagination playing with us. If only those scientists would tell us we were right all along and then we could stop doubting and questioning and feeling uncomfortable. If only we could be sure…

Bill Rich was haunted by terrifying demons. Some that manifested in his isolated home, as I detailed in my non-fiction book Testimony. And some that were firmly embedded in his psyche, as he always admitted. Far more than a haunting, this story goes to some very dark places indeed. Some have called it the British Amityville, but it’s more than that. I decided to investigate because it wasn’t simply an account of the family at the heart of the disturbing events. Many other people, all of them unconnected, experienced disturbing, inexplicable events in that place. I also work extensively as a screenwriter – 26 hours of produced work for the BBC under my belt to date. I’m currently developing several new series for broadcasters around the world, and working on a film script. My near-future SF series, Shadow State, is in the hands of a US network. My book, Testimony, an investigation into a British Amityville, is being developed for UK and international TV. I have a political thriller and a crime series also in development. It’s a long road from here to any of these projects appearing on a screen near you, and they all might fall at any one of the numerous obstacles. But, you know: paid work.All of it contributed to the art that he laboured over all his life, all of it, in some way, haunted. In the book I wrote about the works he completed during the frightening events that swirled around him in his home, Heol Fanog, and which were influenced by the horrors there. But Bill, who died two years ago, also left a body of work from the years before and after that troubled time. One of his surreal paintings heads this piece. I’ll be popping up on Channel 4 next week in the drama-documentary series True Horror. The first episode on April 19, 10 pm, is a chilling account of the Rich family’s terrifying experiences in an isolated farmhouse, which I wrote about in my non-fiction book Testimony. ( You can read about it here.)

One of the most striking things about reading Testimony is the moment you realise that the Riches are just normal people. They have their share of ups and downs in life, but then doesn’t everybody? They are just trying to live their lives the best way that they can, yet something is causing them constant grief. The effects of the events they experience build into quite a harrowing account. Reading about all the things that happened to them did make me wonder if I would have been able to cope in their place. I suspect the answer would have been a resounding no. Mark Chadbourn is an English fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and horror author with more than a dozen novels (and one non-fiction book) published around the world.

What is The Haunting of Hill House about? Not ghosts, not really. They sweep by on the surface, terrifying and driving the plot, but it’s what they really mean that is truly horrifying. Odd stories. Perhaps unbelievable stories. Yet all of them were reported in British newspapers in the first half of 1995. They are just a tiny drop in the tidal wave of weirdness that sweeps over us every day of the year, all over the globe. Somehow, though, we persist in maintaining the illusion that in this age of high technology there can be no such thing as the supernatural. At least that is the view presented by much of the media. In these kinds of accounts, it’s easy to dismiss them if you’re of a sceptical nature and it’s just a couple talking about what they went through. They’re mistaken, deluded, deranged, lying. When you have so many who haven’t had the chance to talk to each other or who thought they were isolated victims, that becomes so much harder. With those kinds of numbers, rationally you have to accept that something out of the ordinary was taking place there… One of my most enduring and successful books is Testimony, my non-fiction account of a family’s truly terrifying experience in an isolated Welsh house. Now there’s a podcast coming from the team behind The Battersea Poltergeist through BBC Sounds.