TRUE HORROR
Figures lurking at the end of the bed, healthy animals dying on the spot, and a family tormented by strange visions… the horrifying story of the ‘Hellfire Farm’ hauntings
VERY few ghost stories start with an electricity bill sliding through the letter box, but the freaky tale known to locals as "The Welsh Amityville" does.
Mum Liz Sanders nearly lost it when she saw she owed £750 for the quarter - but the real horror set in later, when investigators claimed a Satanic ghost was responsible for running up the charge.
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She had recently moved to a remote farmhouse at the foot of the Brecon Beacons with her husband Bill and his son Damian (whose name should start ringing bells for any horror fans).
But Liz and Bill's new home soon turned into a living nightmare: they claim demonic visions appeared at the foot of the bed, animals started dying all over the farm with no explanation, and weird bursts of light tore through the house in the dead of night.
It was the autumn of 1989 when things started getting creepy, she explains in new Channel 4 show True Horror, a programme so disturbing it comes with a viewer discretion warning.
The show dramatises and retells the trouser-ruining story of Liz's haunting at "Hellfire Farm", a tale which she claims is completely true, and which changed her life forever.
What's happened on True Horror
Episode one tells the story of a series of chilling hauntings at a remote Welsh farm.
Episode two centres on a young mother, whose dead father-in-law appears to have returned as a spirit to steal his grand children.
And episode three recounts a story about two students whose camping trip in the woods turns dark when they lose all power and start hearing screams from the gloom around them.
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A descent into horror
Liz and Bill Rich's move to the valleys started off rosy enough: the now-separated pair had two young children together, Rebecca and Ben, and artist Bill's bright and cheery paintings were flying into galleries faster than he could finish them.
But strange signs soon emerged to suggest that, beneath the surface, something wasn't right.
It started with a £750 electricity bill to cover just a three-month period, with no explanation who - or what - could have been using so much power from the supplier.
Then Liz claims healthy animals all over the farm started dropping dead.
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But it wasn't until she saw brilliant flashes of light tearing through the house that she suspected her power bill could be rooted in something more sinister than a rip-off energy supplier.
She says in the show: "When I went into the barn I would see blue-white lasers.
"I was terrified. You know logically this cannot happen, but it has."
She and Bill were starting to realise that ghost stories don't always start with bumps in the night - sometimes they start with a bill landing on your doormat.
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Visions of darkness
While they were in the house, Liz and Bill claimed to sense strangers' eyes drilling into their backs, even when they knew they were alone.
And one night, Liz says she woke up to see a tall, hooded figure standing guard at the foot of her bed.
"The feeling of being watched is actually more frightening than seeing things," she said. "If something is watching you, you're assuming that its next move is to do something.
"Raw panic would come over me. I knew something was going to happen."
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Meanwhile, children Ben and Rebecca were experiencing visions of their own.
Becca, now an adult, claims on the show that while she was larking around with her brother, they would often be joined by a familiar presence.
She says: "We used to be in the playroom and there would always be an old woman in there.
"She never spoke and she never moved. At that age you just assume it's normal. I don't think we ever told anyone about it."
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The creepiness had been going on for months now, sinister sightings punctuating the cold, dark winter which hung oppressively over the valley.
Worried for their children's safety, Liz and Bill went to their neighbours, acres away down a country road, and before long a swarm of paranormal investigators was poking around the house.
Mark Chadbourn, a journalist who covered the case, says: "It seemed a really nice place there but there was a reputation in the area that the house was haunted.
"When I spoke to a lot of the neighbours, they were not surprised at all by the whole series of events which happened there."
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Farm of horrors
Three months later, another extortionate energy bill arrived, this time for £500.
Meanwhile, Liz and Bill had been hearing the sound of clunking footsteps throughout the house and had seen unsettling humanoid-shapes in the periphery of their vision.
All the while, Liz had been struck by bright lights in the barn, which ghost hunters thought could prove the house had a power-hungry spirit for a lodger.
And the animals were also acting up, with the Rich family's beloved pig becoming aggressive and taking to running in circles around the house.
"Something had gone unhinged with the pig," Liz says, mouth drawn into a grimace.
So the pig was put down and more goats were found curled on the floor in the barn, flies busying themselves around the matted fur.
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Creepiest of all, the visions continued, culminating in Liz seeing a seven-foot figure darting across her kitchen.
And it wasn't just the family who was tormented - a camper in the fields out the back of the house claimed he saw the silhouette of a man looming at the upstairs window all night, even though Liz and Bill could confirm they had been in bed together.
And paranormal expert Mark Chadbourn was also given an uncomfortable taste of what the couple were living with.
"When I was interviewing Bill, he left me alone in his studio," he says. "At that point I started to feel as though someone was watching me.
"Then I thought I felt something touch the nape of my neck."
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Evil artwork
If Liz was struggling to hold it together, Bill was at breaking point.
As the suspected hauntings continued, his paintings stopped selling, and he started spending hours on end locked in his studio.
Increasingly isolated from his family and with money running out, Bill would paint through the night - dark, abstract works which reflected his unease at the house.
Gone were his happy, colourful paintings of animals, replaced by warped depictions of corpses floating in the air brides with blood gushing beneath their veils.
"Bill was affected," Liz explains on the show. "He had a huge personality change."
He became obsessed with the occult, poring over old books about the supernatural, fearing that his family were being mentally tortured by some kind of demon.
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Local priests were summoned, including Reverend David Holmwood, whose widow Patricia appears on the horror doc.
She said: "Things were going terribly wrong. They would wake up and find a hooded man at the end of the bed."
Liz turned to religion to escape the weirdness as Bill became more insular and reclusive.
Mark Chadbourn says: "The more he felt strange things were happening in the house, the more he wanted to work on paintings, which expressed the kind of turmoil he was going through himself.
"They were getting darker and darker and becoming more disturbed."
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Unsurprisingly, Liz wanted out - she was concerned for her husband and thought her whole family could be under threat.
And so after six years of torment, they left the farmhouse, dubbed Hellfire Farm in the Channel 4 show.
Sadly, the couple divorced, and Bill recently passed away without ever getting to the bottom of the mystery.
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Liz and her daughter Rebecca were happy to share their bizarre story on True Horror, and raise the profile of one of Britain's spookiest, if lesser known, ghost tales.
And next time an evil-seeming energy bill flutters on to your doormat, think of the Rich family and hope that the ghosts of Hellfire Farm haven't moved in with you.
True Horror airs on Thursday 19 April at 10pm on Channel 4.
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