Bill’s dream would have been that his work could at last be appreciated and understood. I know he would have been overjoyed to see his art work reaching a wider audience.” An old house in mid-Wales seemed like a haven to Liz and Bill Rich. But within weeks of their arrival, inexplained happenings turned their enchantment to horror. This is their story – the true story of an experience that has defied all explanation. Mark Chadbourn is a talented horror and science-fiction author and a two-time winner of the British Fantasy Award. Chadbourn grew up in the English Midlands within a mining community. He studied in Leeds and graduated with an Economic History degree. After university, the author worked as a journalist and became such a success that he only wrote for the country’s best newspapers. Once his debut short story earned him a Best New Author award, Chadbourn quit journalism to concentrate on writing his stories. However, even when coming up with gripping novels, Chadbourn has maintained a successful career in screenwriting. His writing career began in 1990 when his first published short story Six Dead Boys in a Very Dark World won Fear magazine's Best New Author award. [4] It attracted the attention of agents and publishers.

Overbally I interviewed twenty-four people who had disturbing, inexplicable experiences in that isolated house. The excellent The Witch Farm podcast by Danny Robins was inspired by Testimony and digs deep into the investigation. 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. Heol Fanog (c) Elizabeth Udall When Bill and Liz Rich moved into an isolated farmhouse, it already had a reputation locally for being haunted. What they found there was far, far worse than their wildest imaginings…and it threatened their sanity and ultimately their lives.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… 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. Loved the book, read it in one sitting. Do you plan to do anything more in the paranormal, non fiction genre? Farewell to the 21st Century Girl (in The British Invasion, edited by Christopher Golden, Tim Lebbon & James A moore, Cemetery Dance) On Prime Evil edited by Douglas E Winter (in Horror Another 100 Best Books, edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, Carrol & Graf)

Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast’ (in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, edited by George Mann, Solaris; also in Year’s Best Fantasy 8, edited by David G Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer, Tachyon) I could go on at length about Mike Flanagan’s tour-de-force. It’s a show that people will be talking about for ages, because of that meaning and depth married to a chilling tale. The scientific community which has provided the framework for our lives since early in the last century tells us this is all there is. We are at the mercy of strictly defined rules which allow no place for the paranormal. The torchbearers of this fundamentalist rationalism are, of course, ignoring the testimonies of everday people. Doctors, lawyers, secretaries, dustbinmen, shop workers and middle managers. 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. The truth is, in the quiet of our lonely rooms we can look deep inside ourselves and know that life is strange. That the rules aren’t so rigid. That things and thoughts and happenings creep around the shadows of our lives yet never enter the light. We would never admit it in public, of course. But in our hearts, we know… But then, if you’re a writer, why wouldn’t you? Story telling is the same all over. Once you’ve mastered the new skill-set for a new medium, you’re drawing on the same natural ability wherever you’re employed: your ideas. 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.

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

All across the USA, people are showing up dead. The deaths don't appear to be connected in any way until one particular death occurs and gets the Secretary of Defense's attention. He arranges for a task force to investigate. 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. A story not just of the supernatural, but of raw human emotions as ordinary people struggled to cope in the face of madness. Of how lives can be unbalanced by the real world and those who claim to be spiritual saviours. And I was angered by how these two people could be treated by the arrogance of those who refused to believe – called liars or fools because they dared to talk about an experience at odds with the scientific rationale. But I like my freedom. It’s been a long time since I was a wage-slave, working as a journalist on the national papers in London. I’m pretty much unemployable now. But I also like to eat. And, you know, have an amazing time travelling the world and being louche in new locales. So the wise thing is to cast my net wide and put my writing to work in different media. Eggs/baskets etc. 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…