The farmhouse called Heol Fanog, set in the shadow of Pen y Fan in Brecon Beacons National Park, the highest peak in South Wales, in the U.K., became infamous when Liz and Bill Rich, a young couple, moved there in May 1989. Heol Fanog means "Road to the Peaks".

However, their time there was far from peaceful. Heol Fanog can be found on the way to the town of Brecon, just to the north, and the farmhouse has become more commonly known in the media as “Hellfire Farm” or even “The Welsh Amityville” in recent times. Due to the popular BBC Radio 4 podcast by Danny Robins (host of the Uncanny podcast and TV show), it has now been referred to as “The Witch Farm”. The story was also featured in the 2018 drama miniseries on Britain’s Channel 4 called True Horror: HellFire farm.

To reach Heol Fanog, you take the last road on the left out of Brecon and drive until you hit the Beacons. Then, take a right up a road used only by a couple of local farmers to get their sheep down from the hillside, and at the end of it, the farmhouse stands in the middle of nowhere. During the day, it looks like the perfect family home, isolated and with beautiful scenery around it.

"Don't be misled," said Liz Rich. It's not always like this. You can see the weather coming up the valley, terrible storms; it was snowing here only a couple of weeks ago. Sometimes, the mood in the house is so awful that you think the only escape is to kill yourself."

Between 1989 and 1996, the Rich family experienced poltergeist activity, apparitions, possessions and even physical injury. Their home would have more exorcisms than any other house in British history. Liz Rich said years later, "When you've met evil, you know!"

In 2022, Liz recalled how the farmhouse was exorcised "hundreds of times" and even claimed to have possessed herself in the property's kitchen. She 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."

For more background information on Heol Fanog and the surrounding area and its history, log in or become a member of StrangeOutdoors: The Haunting History of Heol Fanog: A Forgotten Pathway to the Unseen: part 1

The Rich family and the events reported at Heol Fanog

Bill and Liz Rich Heol Fanog — Bill and Liz Rich in the garden of Heol Fanog

In 1989, Bill Rich, an artist from England and his Welsh wife Liz, who was pregnant with their first child (Rebecca or Beccy), moved into the old stone property, converted from an even older barn called Heol Fanog "Road to the Peaks", with Bill’s 14-year-old son from his first marriage, Laurence. They had rented it from a man called Phil Holbourn, the son of Marion Holbourn, who had once lived there.

Bill's first marriage ended badly before he met Liz, a herbalist who had spent years battling eating disorders. Bill and Liz married on September 28, 1989, and Ben was born on October 23. The teenager, Laurence, was wary of Liz and unhappy when his mother separated and divorced Bill.

They were drawn to the farmhouse for its picturesque charm and serenity. Their new home was an ancient barn converted into a house in the 1950s by the Holbourns. When they first moved in, it felt like life couldn’t be any better. They had spectacular views, no nosy neighbours to worry about, and the space and freedom of the natural world on their doorstep. It was a perfect place to raise a family and live a peaceful and contented life. As a professional painter, Bill was ecstatic to finally have the space and room to set up his bespoke painting studio.

One day, Bill came across the bar bill for their last meal before moving into Heol Fanog. It was £6.66. Added to this was the receipt from the supermarket they had used to stock up with supplies before moving in, totaling £66.69. Yet things got even stranger when Bill and Liz said a Volvo car had nearly hit them when they were buying house furniture for Heol Fanog. Its number plate was BST 666. A coincidence, perhaps? Or were satanic forces at play?

The Rich family spent their first summer organising and renovating the remote farmhouse and gardens, but as their first winter at the property came around, they started to experience strange and unnerving activity.

Not long after their son Ben was born in August 1989, what should have been a joyous period began to turn a little fraught. Doors began to slam shut without warning, and loud, heavy footsteps were heard running through the house and down the stairs. The personality of Bill’s son, Laurence, began to alter significantly. It could have just been teenage angst, but Bill and Liz became concerned. Extreme hot and cold spots and extremely unpleasant smells were felt within the house.

The house’s electricity meter went haywire, with a surge in energy used at the moments when the phenomena were most intense. Electricity provider Swalec was regularly contacted, and investigations revealed that huge power surges occurred on the property even when all the lights were off or the family was out. The engineer sent to the property could find the cause. He ruled out the possibility that someone somehow managed to steal or divert the electricity as he checked the system thoroughly.

They were shocked when the Rich family got their first electricity bill for this period. It was £750 just for the first three months, the equivalent of £1940 ($2,460) today. This was a huge sum for a painter and one that would be very difficult to pay. But if they didn’t, they risked being cut off by Swalec.

What was the cause of these huge bills? Was it some simple fault with the supply or the meter itself? Or was this a form of paranormal "power drain", with an unseen entity sucking up electricity from the house to fuel its presence?

Then, the animals on the property started to die mysteriously. A pig went mad with disease and had to be destroyed and the goats were all found dead one morning.

During their seven-year tenure at Heol Fanog, Liz’s children would see an old woman who never moved or spoke in their room. , It was later discovered from an old photograph that she looked almost identical to a deceased lady who had lived there previously.

A chance conversation with a local builder revealed that when converting Heol Fanog, they used stones from the nearby old Manor House. He explained that some of those stones could have well been sourced from the ancient graveyard in the garden of the derelict manor.

Laurence’s behaviour got worse and worse. He would spend nights in his room watching horror films and constantly arguing with his father. According to Bill, he became verbally aggressive, withdrawn, and 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.”

He even spat in the face of his grandmother when she visited. Bill would later describe his son’s facial expression at that exact moment as alien to him and “Much older and incalculably evil.”

Exorcism and cleansing

The family decided they had had enough and needed outside help to cleanse the house of these evil spirits. The first exorcist called in was John Aston. He visited the house when Liz appeared to be temporarily possessed. She spoke in a manly voice, her face twisted, and her voice sounded, according to Bill, “crackling and incredibly old, filled with equal measures of hatred and mockery.” Liz remembers nothing about it, but was "glad" as "it was a weird, frightening experience.".

Their next move was to call the Head of the Spiritualist Church in Cardiff, Baptist minster David Holmwood. He met the family and explained to Bill and Liz that Laurence was the centre for poltergeist activity and should be removed from the house for his own safety. He performed a house cleansing, and the couple decided to send Laurence to a nearby boarding school. They felt it was a difficult but necessary decision that added to the family’s financial pressures.

Liz explained, “David was a caring and lovely person, but the house wanted us there, and anyone coming to help was not welcome.” Holmwood said he could perform an exorcism but said, “Spirits won’t leave until you want them to leave!” He insisted on taking away and burning many of Bill’s books and paintings because they acted as a gateway for evil.

During the exorcism, David read Ephesians 6:12, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

After this, the house became a better place to live, and for the following few months, the rich family became Baptists. Between July 1991 and Spring 1993, it appeared the haunting was over.

Then, the atmosphere darkened, and the house again became unsettling and forbidding. Bill’s paintings began to reflect his inner turmoil, getting increasingly disturbed. They depicted brides covered in blood and dead bodies floating through the air. They symbolised a world where everything was broken and damaged. He began to feel the world unravel and the darkness take him over.

Mark Chadbourn, who wrote the 1996 book “Testimony: on the Heol Fanog case, explained, “I found it very hard to accept many of the things David said because I found them quite damaging psychologically to vulnerable people.”

As for Bill, “He told me he had terrible black thoughts. Thoughts of self-harm. He saw a knife on the side and thought I could just end it all by killing myself.”

For a while, the spiritualists' “psychic wall” appeared to work, but when Liz was pregnant with her second child, the sense of a malignant presence in the house returned and became more intense than ever.

Reverend Roy Matthews from Abergavenny’s Holy Trinity Church visited to perform an exorcism. He explained there were four entities in the house: two young men, an old woman, and a demonic being. Yet he was confident he had driven them out by the time he left, and for a time, he was right. For three months, the experiences plaguing the family stopped. Then, out of the blue, things got worse for reasons unknown.

Liz saw the black silhouette of a seven-foot man in the hall and explained it was like coming face to face with pure evil. They’d had enough at this point and fled the house to stay with Liz’s mother in Cowbridge. Realising they had to return to Heol Fanog they reluctantly asked Reverend David Holmwood for help again. Ominously, during his car journey to the farmhouse, an owl hit his windscreen.

Liz said, "It felt like something was watching you the whole time, and that feeling is even more frightening than seeing things. But if something is watching you, 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."

Not long afterwards, Bill's personality began to change. As summer gave way to the fall, he'd spend more and more time hidden away in his studio 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 couldn’t get one of the animal’s legs to look right, and no matter how he tried to paint it, it would end up looking deformed. After he handed over the painting, the horse, Echo, developed a problem with the very leg Bill had been unable to paint. The horse was soon found dead in the very same spot Bill had depicted in the painting. His neighbours burned the painting.

Liz said, "He had an interest in unexplainable things and was always drawn in some way to the darker side of life, 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 ears, could only watch horrified as a blackened, skeletal hand curled its fingers around the latch and slammed it shut again. Turning on the table lamp in a blind panic, they were confronted by a hooded figure staring at them at the foot of their bed.

Finally, famous spiritualist Eddie Burks was called in to help, and he performed two exorcisms that seemed to work. Burks, who made his name in the 1990s paranormal hit show Ghost Hunters, claimed to have direct contact with Henry XIII’s beheaded wife Anne Boleyn.

According to Mark Chadbourn, Burks arrived at the Rich home and soon identified a mysterious “pre-Christian” presence. He claimed that a creature, a powerful evil force conjured by a Celtic tribe, could be disarmed by his “power of imagination.”

eddie burks ghosthunter — Eddie Burks ghosthunter

One exorcism freed human ghosts, and the other was where he exorcised what he called a pre-Christian Celtic nature spirit. After experiencing more exorcisms than any other house in British history, Heol Fanog was finally at peace.

According to reports, Bill “couldn’t see anything”, but he could feel the “tingle in his fingers, the tightness of his chest, the pressure at the base of [his] skull”. After this, a “crackle of power” was blasted through the tape recorder in the room's corner “like a lightning bolt had surged into it”. Bill then noticed the house “grew noticeably brighter” as if “another light source had been illuminated". “I think I will let the thing rest now,” Burks stated, ending the exorcism.

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.

Liz said, "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?

Upon seeing a 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 property is now occupied by someone else, and Liz stated, "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. 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."

Summary of events experienced at Heol Fanog

Strange Noises: unexplained knocking sounds, often rhythmic and persistent, echoing through the house, including loud footsteps walking about on the upper floors.
Poltergeist Activity: Objects moved of their own accord, sometimes violently. Items would disappear and reappear in strange locations.
Apparitions: Liz and Bill claimed to see ghostly figures, including shadowy forms that seemed to watch them. Liz described a particularly menacing figure at the foot of her bed with no discernible face and an old woman sitting silently in the corner of her children's nursery.
Temperature Drops: Rooms would suddenly become icy cold, even in summer, adding to the eerie atmosphere.
Energy Drain: Witnesses and residents reported an overwhelming sense of dread and fatigue, with sudden health issues and emotional changes.
Health issues: Liz and Bill experienced severe mental and physical health issues, which they attributed to the malevolent forces in the house.
Financial issues: During their stay, they encountered financial ruin. Bill, a successful artist, reported that his creative energy was inexplicably drained, leaving him unable to work.
Relationship problems: Their relationship began to deteriorate as the oppressive atmosphere of the farmhouse weighed heavily on them.
Animals: The couple’s pets began behaving erratically, showing signs of fear or aggression without apparent cause. Livestock reportedly died unexpectedly or became sick, which locals linked to the supposed curse on the property.

What caused the Heol Fanog activity?

Fraud

The Rich family experienced significant financial stress during their stay at Heol Fanog. Could they have made up all the stories and misled investigators to convince them that the farmhouse was haunted to gain financially? Liz and Rebecca have said many times in the decades after the events that nothing was fabricated and their experiences were real.

Haunted people Syndrome

Haunted People Syndrome (HP-S) denotes individuals who recurrently report various “supernatural” encounters in everyday settings ostensibly due to heightened somatic-sensory sensitivities to disease states (e.g., marked but sub-clinical levels of distress), which are contextualized by paranormal beliefs and reinforced by perceptual contagion effects. This view helps to explain why these anomalous experiences often appear to be idioms of stress or trauma.

Malevolent spirits

There are many theories surrounding the cause of the haunting at Heol Fanog. Perhaps the farmhouse was built on an extreme crossing of key lines that create dark energy. Some believe a witches' coven was on the site. Local folklore talks of a Celtic tribe that once summoned a powerful natural deity to help them but failed to contain it. There was also talk of a gypsy being murdered at a bridge that crosses a nearby stream and that she cursed the area.

It has been reported that the structure of Heol Fanog may be partly constructed using gravestones from the nearby manor house.

In the 19th century, 18-year-old James Griffiths was beaten to death by 23-year-old Thomas Edwards with an axe and then buried near Heol Fanog. Edwards was later hung.

Speculation has it that Griffiths witnessed satanic rituals at the site and was later killed by Edwards, who the Satanists employed to silence him. They then promised that Edwards would be given a last-minute reprieve from the gallows but failed to keep their word.

There is even a story that in his younger days, Bill would once be initiated into a coven by the famed king of the witches, Alex Sanders, but pulled out at the last minute. Did this attract the attention of dark spirits?

Just before they moved to the farm, Bill, Liz, and Laurence visited the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, where they saw strange blue lights and felt an unsettling presence. Liz reported she saw the same blue lights in their barn at Heol Fanog. Could the seven-foot man with the head of a bird be the Egyptian God Horus? Was he or one of his four sons, Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, or Qebehsenuef, whose role was to protect the dead haunting Heol Fanog?

Witchcraft and Curses

Local legends suggested that the property might have been a site for witchcraft or dark rituals in the past. Some theorized that the land carried a curse which affected its occupants.

Mark Chadbourn, said, "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.

"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 deity 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. Liz's decision to contact Baptist minister David Holmwood to exorcise the property conflicted with his.

"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."

During that difficult time, David Holmwood and religion became an increasing crutch for Liz. 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.

Geological and Environmental Factors

Investigators noted that the farmhouse sat on land with high electromagnetic activity, which can sometimes cause sensations of unease, hallucinations, and physical symptoms. The area is also associated with underground streams, and some paranormal theories suggest such water sources can amplify spiritual activity.

Several teams of investigators visited Heol Fanog, including psychics and paranormal experts. Some mediums reported sensing a dark presence in the house, claiming it was tied to past trauma or rituals. Others believed the land held spiritual energy that was a magnet for paranormal phenomena.

EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) recordings allegedly captured whispers and disembodied voices, and temperature readings showed sudden, unexplained drops in specific areas.

Sleep Paralysis and Psychological Effects

Skeptics propose that the family’s experiences could be explained by sleep paralysis, stress, and the isolation of rural life, combined with a powerful suggestion of the supernatural.

Aftermath

Bill Rich died in 2016 after divorcing from Liz in 2005

The events at Heol Fanog were dramatized in Danny Robins's BBC podcast and series “The Witch Farm”, which combines first-hand accounts with investigative reporting. This series reignited public fascination with the story, offering new perspectives on the terrifying experiences. The Witch Farm stars Joseph Fiennes (The Handmaid's Tale) and Alexandra Roach (No Offence). It was an eight-part series, first broadcast in October 2022, which combined a supernatural thriller set in the wild Welsh countryside with a fascinating modern-day investigation into the real-life mystery behind what has been called Britain's most haunted house.

The farmhouse is now private property, and little is known about its current condition. However, its reputation as "the most haunted house in Wales" continues to intrigue paranormal enthusiasts.

In 2018, Channel Four aired True Horror: Hellfire Farm, starring Amy Morgan as Liz Rich and Adam Leese as Bill Rich.

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