Mark Chadbourn's Blog: Jack of Ravens, page 4

Testimony New Paperback Edition – Out Now

Testimony new cover

After literally hundreds of requests from listeners of the hit BBC Podcast The Witch Farm, I’m pleased to say the new paperback edition of Testimony is now available.

As you can see above, this one features a new cover – a photo of the truly terrifying Heol Fanog from the time when Bill and Liz Rich were reluctant residents. The paperback is available worldwide in all local Amazon outlets. Here’s the link for the UK version.

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 the artist Bill Rich and his wife Liz moved into Heol Fanog with their young family it was supposed to be an idyllic hideaway. Within weeks they were afflicted by a series of inexplicable events, including a massive power drain that took their electricity bills to industrial levels.

Then the encounters began.

Bill and Liz Rich (c) Elizabeth Udall

What followed was a terrifying experience that pushed Bill and Liz to the brink.

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. As a journalist, I was intrigued enough to get in touch with Bill for a follow-up. I wasn’t prepared for what I found.

The ruined medieval Manor House in the garden with its private cemetery. (c) Elizabeth Udall

If you’re interested in the paranormal, there’s plenty in this book to sink your teeth into. If you’re a sceptic, there’s something here for you too. The debate is the thing.

What really happened?

But at its heart, Testimony is a human story, about two people who found themselves at the heart of something they couldn’t explain, trapped in a place they no longer wanted to be, and preyed upon by those allegedly offering help.

If you like the book, reviews on Amazon would be a great help. And if you can spread the word that the paperback is now available again, please do…if only for the sake of my in-box.

Testimony Paperback – Coming Soon

A new paperback edition of Testimony, the book that inspired the hit BBC podcast The Witch Farm, will be on sale soon.

I’ll post a link on this blog when it’s available.

That should please the literally hundreds of people who have contacted me about it!

Mastodon

I’m now on Mastodon: @chadbourn@mastodon.online

Testimony: A True Story About Terrifying Things

I want to tell you a true story. About ghosts, and things more terrifying than ghosts. I‘m a journalist, fully rooted in the real world. I write about foreign affairs and politics, economics, the arts, science, health, archaeology. Reality and evidence-based. Remember that.

Half of all Americans now believe they live or have lived in a haunted house. Researchers attribute a rapidly increasing belief in the supernatural to the rise of paranormal-related media and a decline in religious affiliation.

I wrote my only non-fiction book Testimony about the most supernaturally-afflicted house in the UK after coming across a newspaper report where a home was experiencing massive energy bills as if the power was being drained away. The owner mentioned in passing some supernatural element which got me interested.

I went in thinking I’d probably at the least end up with a book about the psychology of living in a house believed to be haunted. That view changed pretty quickly. I called the book Testimony because I wanted to build it around the accounts of people who had experiences in that isolated Welsh house, rather than filtering it all through my third party view of events.

Using my journalistic skills, I tracked down lots of people who’d had something strange happen to them. In the end I had 24 interviews. 24 people, many of them unconnected, who’d seen ghosts, dealt with possession, a range of terrifying phenomena, the manifestation of a seven-foot tall beaked figure, more…

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…

There’s a BBC podcast out about the case now, The Witch Farm. So far I’m the only person to have written about it because it was unbelievably difficult to track down the people involved, some of whom are no longer with us or who have vanished.

If you want to reach your own conclusions, or dismiss it out of hand, I suggest you read all those first hand accounts first. You might find it harder than you think.

The ebook of Testimony is available in all local Amazon sites globally, but here are the UK and US links.

The Witch Farm and Testimony

The Witch Farm podcast from the BBC starts today (on BBC Sounds and Radio 4 tonight). If you’re interested in what you hear, check out my investigation in my book Testimony (ebook on Amazon).

It includes plenty of people who won’t make it into the podcast because they’ve subsequently died or disappeared.

Overbally I interviewed twenty-four people who had disturbing, inexplicable experiences in that isolated house.

I marshalled all the skills I’d learned working as a journalist for national media, sometimes tracking former residents of Heol Fanog half a world away.

Not all the interviews made the Final Cut. I might include some of the outtakes here.

The Witch Farm

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.

The Witch Farm, an eight-part series by Danny Robins starring Joseph Fiennes and Alexandra Roach, launches on October 17, but there’s a trailer available now. Give it a listen.

You can find a brief extract of Testimony at this link: “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.”

If you want to pick up the ebook, UK readers should go here.

And US readers should go here.

Blonde

Blonde has been described in some quarters as a horror story. It’s not, not remotely. It is, though, the saddest film ever laid before an audience, a sadness that is so wide and deep and endless it’s possible to drown in it.

The Netflix film belongs wholly to Ana de Armas who blazes with such intense light in every scene, almost every shot, with an intensity that makes it impossible to look away.

Her performance as the receptacle of that sadness captures heart-breaking layers and I would think an Oscar nomination has already been inked in.

But here’s the thing: despite what the publicity material says, it’s not a film about Marilyn Monroe. It’s a story about a symbol that just happens to resemble Norma Jean and her life. It’s there in the personality free title, in writer/director Andrew Dominik’s stylistic tics and flourishes which distance the work from real life and announce that we are not watching human beings here. And it’s in de Armas’ performance, where she plays the symbol that people have come to recognise when they hear the name Marilyn.

The script makes no attempt to capture the essence of the real-life Norma Jean, the humour, the sharp intellect, the kindness. Because The Blonde has a bigger story to tell, a mythological one.

Like every streaming film, I expect Blonde to have disappeared off the radar in a matter of months, never to be discussed again. But for now, if you can bear the emotional weight of sadness and suffering, it’s an interesting oddity and for de Armas it will undoubtedly be career-changing.

Rosemary’s Baby Redux

This is a film I come back to every year, usually at this time, as the season turns. Some old movies are very difficult to watch with current mores. Rosemary’s Baby is one that has grown to meet the times.

It’s a horror story about the patriarchy.

A suffocating, intense portrayal of a gaslit woman battling against dismissive doctors and one of the most loathsome husbands on film, played with rage-inducing slipperiness and manipulation by the excellent John Cassavetes.

Mia Farrow, who has lived this role, is so powerful as a woman besieged by the strictures of a society designed to constrain and depower her.

She fights and fights, but even when it’s hopeless there are sometimes ways to achieve transcendence if you stay true to yourself.

The paranoia in the final half is almost unbearable. There’s no blood, no monsters, only the mundane. And that’s where the real horror lies.

The Korean Culturewave

Can highly recommend the big new exhibition at the V & A Museum in London, Hallyu! The Korean Wave which looks at the hugely influential K-film and TV, K-pop and K-fashion and beauty that has swept the globe since the mid-90s.

Parasite and Squid Game, BTS and BlackPink, Vogue cover fashion designers…it’s a powerhouse that really challenges the global currents of popular culture.

There’s a huge amount the West should learn here.

The dynamic music and art comes at the end of a remarkable trajectory that carried Korea from the hardship of Japanese dominance, getting carved up by the West after WWII and the subsequent proxy war to becoming one of the most technologically advanced and artistically exciting countries in the world.

That transformation comes from daring strategies, technological innovation and a ppalli-ppalli (quick-quick) ethos where speed is of the essence.

This process, called ‘compressed modernity’, has generated paradoxes in South Korean society where cutting edge technology co-exists with centuries-old shamanistic and Confucian ritual.

Hallyu emerges from that tension between the traditional values of 500 years of Joseon Dynasty rule and new 21C norms.

If you get a chance, the exhibition is well-worth a visit. Videos if you do the V & A K-pop dance challenge.

Stories Change The World

Protesters in Iran facing down the terrifying and brutal Revolutionary Guard are putting on Guy Fawkes masks. One more sign of how writing – and stories – infect minds, change them and through that change the world.

When Alan Moore wrote V For Vendetta and used the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol of resistance to oppression, he had no concept of it beyond his story. But now it’s been used all over the world by brave people trying to overthrow tyrants.

The three-fingered salute as a similar symbol has been used by separatist groups for a while, but it gained traction as a symbol of resistance after The Hunger Games. Since then it’s been used in Hong Kong, Myanmar, the Philipines, Cambodia, Thailand and the US.

Stories have power. They change the world.