Testimony

Product Information

I’m currently developing several new series for broadcasters around the world, and working on a film script. Think the spirit of V for Vendetta mixed with Neal Stephenson’s historicism and infused by the spirit of Shakespeare’s Puck. Not just a lightweight adventure novel, this book forces the reader to confront timely issues like the value of torture and the use of evil in the pursuit of good, bringing a level of verisimilitude so fantastic and yet believable, you keep asking yourself if it might be true. People who are not unduly gullible, who live their lives fully in the “real” world yet who have experienced, or know someone who has experienced, something which cannot be explained away by those scientific rules. Combining the best elements of a spy thriller, heroic fantasy and Elizabethan mystery, Chadbourn deftly mixes gruesome brutality, a shadowy world of plots and counter-plots and a vivid cast of characters.

I first heard about the case through a small piece in The Independent newspaper about the baffling power drain, which had been investigated by the local electricity company and independent experts. After university, the author worked as a journalist and became such a success that he only wrote for the country’s best newspapers. I never felt that as a reader I was being pushed in any particular direction regarding what I should think or feel about what was going on. But mostly praise the decision to reclaim horror for all those people who prefer a little meat on old bones. While it is clear that they both don’t like each other, it is amazing how they find common bonds to enable them to work together.THE SPIKE Pilot for a drama serial about the alliance between the police and a reporter djuring a missing child investigation. One of the most striking things about reading Testimony is the moment you realise that the Riches are just normal people. They are just trying to live their lives the best way that they can, yet something is causing them constant grief. 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.

What appeals about the book is the author’s ability to deal in myth and to apply it to a modern story. It includes plenty of people who won’t make it into the podcast because they’ve subsequently died or disappeared. Using my journalistic skills, I tracked down lots of people who’d had something strange happen to them. To read more about the site or if you want a graphic to link to us, see the about page for more details.That’s because I’ve been writing a series of books under the pseudonym I’ve reserved for historical fiction (to avoid confusion among readers, booksellers and marketing people) – James Wilde. Burks was, shall we say, an interesting character who claimed to have direct contact with Anne Boleyn, who apparently was still fuming at Henry VIII and the whole beheading situation almost 500 years later.

When three, four or five are in tune we can be pretty sure we have got as close as we can to the truth of an event. After moving to the Brecons, Bill suffered from dreams plagued by a “beaked or hooked-nose figure” resembling the Egyptian falcon-god Horus. However, he struggled to paint the animal’s back legs, with the limbs appearing slightly broken in the finished piece. We felt like the sequence of events we presented gave the most representative sense of everything that happened. Every religion is based on the supernatural, some force inexplicable by science which shapes our lives.Both Jack and Ruth pass out, and when they come to, they are plunged into a deep mystery that foretells the end of the world. Depression, mental illness, family breakdown, childhood trauma, these are the ghosts that really haunt Hill House – and that is why the series is so affecting. As a journalist, talking to people all the time, you realise most folk are inherently truthful when talking about their experiences; they don’t fabricate. A dozen people of varying degrees of credulity, differing ages, sex and religious persuasion are convinced something beyond the bounds of reason happened at Heol Fanog between November 1989 and June 1995.

As Channel 4’s 'real-life' paranormal show True Horror portrays, the site owned by the Rich family from 1989 was the source of six long years of raw psychological trauma – six years of supposed disembodied footsteps in the night, a mysterious cloaked figure looming in the darkness and a library hiding streams of satanic symbols. The pitches that seem to be going somewhere, and then die at the last – and this is particularly true of the TV world, where only a tiny fraction of what is written actually makes it to the screen. He announced on Twitter that his novel Pendragon was shortlisted for Best Published Novel in the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Award, the result to be announced in September 2018. So on a human level you come to realise that all those who claim a brush with the supernatural can’t be lying. But then, one night, they are visited…and their ordeal really begins, one that defies all explanation.It’s one of those rare accounts of the paranormal that has multiple witnesses – I interviewed twenty-four, many of them unconnected, including a previous resident – all of whom experienced something disturbing in that isolated house just outside Brecon in rural Wales. Overbally I interviewed twenty-four people who had disturbing, inexplicable experiences in that isolated house. Within weeks they were afflicted by a series of inexplicable events, including a massive power drain that took their electricity bills to industrial levels.