The Witch Farm: Danny Robins follows Uncanny with ‘plunge bath of pure terror’ 

It started with the electricity bill. For an ordinary farmhouse in the Brecon Beacons, the annual charges would have come to £8,000. It was the late 80s, way before the current energy crisis. It was impossible by any normal means. In Danny Robins’ new podcast series, this chilling detail spirals into a ghost story that takes the real people at its heart to the “precipice between reality and insanity”. Was something supernatural draining energy from the house? 

Landing just in time for Halloween, The Witch Farm is the sequel to Danny Robins’ smash hit The Battersea Poltergeist, which examined creepy real-life happenings in the heart of London. The massive public response to that case inspired ghostly investigation series Uncanny, which took on a different story each week, all submitted by the online community flourishing around the show. 

“The Battersea Poltergeist pushed me to the brink of believing that ghosts exist. I would have considered myself a sceptic. And now I consider myself a sceptic who wants to believe and is teetering on that edge of belief,” says Robins. 

“I wanted to find a case that could push me over the edge, essentially. Then we found this case and it’s incredible. If the Battersea Poltergeist was described as Britain’s strangest haunting, I feel like this is Britain’s most terrifying haunting. It is like a plunge bath of pure terror.” 

Over eight episodes, through a mixture of eyewitness accounts, analysis and dramatic re-enactments starring Joseph Fiennes and Alexandra Roach, The Witch Farm tells Bill and Liz Rich’s story. In 1989, they moved their family to a remote farm in the Welsh mountains. It was “so bloody gorgeous,” Liz tells Robins. But soon things began to go wrong. There was that bizarre demand from the electricity company, and the family started to see and hear things they couldn’t – still can’t – explain.  

“There’s everything in this case: poltergeist activity, apparitions, alleged possession, physical injury. It’s so intense with phenomena,” says Danny Robins.  

Though Robins didn’t realise it at first, the detail about the electricity makes the story incredibly relevant today. “It’s a brilliantly timely moment to kick off a case at a time when we’re all genuinely feeling scared about our own energy bills,” he acknowledges. “Bill and Liz are torn between the fear of financial ruin, and the fear of the paranormal forces in the house.  

“Their finances go wrong, their animals die, work falls apart, their children get ill. Everything is going wrong, and there’s that sense of a life spiralling out of control. I think we live in times right now, where all of us feel on that precipice between stability and absolute chaos.” 

Throughout history, interest in ghosts has waxed and waned. It’s often at its height in eras of crisis and national insecurity. Times when we’ve felt death’s cold hand on our shoulders, and a wind of turmoil blowing through society. Previous spikes came after the first and second world wars.  

“I think you can definitely draw parallels between now and those post-war periods. And I think your key ingredients are a sense of chaos and uncertainty. I think we’ve absolutely got that at the moment,” says Robins. 

“We’re closer to death now than we have been since the second world war, really. We’ve got Covid, obviously; we’ve got the war in Ukraine; we’ve got climate change. We’ve got all these things that make us question our mortality.” 

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Danny Robins is open about what drives his interest in the supernatural. It’s fear. But not that the hauntings are real, rather it’s a terror that they aren’t. His “profound horrible fear of death” started in his early 20s when a panic attack began two years of chronic anxiety.  

“I thought every second that I was dying from a heart attack or a brain tumour. Every so often, in my lower moments, it kicks in again, and it’s so strong that I don’t think that it will ever dim,” he says. “The idea that ghosts are real is the antidote to that. And so it’s almost like I’m searching for the antidote to my poison.” 

As well as his collection of spooky hit podcasts, Robins has written a supernatural thriller for the stage. 2:22 A Ghost Story premiered in the West End in 2021, and received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best New Play the following year. After years making comedy programmes, becoming the UK’s go-to ghost guy has been hugely fulfilling.  

“I think for a long time, we’ve not been very respectful of people talking about supernatural experiences,” says Robins. “The tendency is to either laugh at it or to question people’s sanity. But actually, if you take it seriously, it gets to the heart of human existence.” 

The Witch Farm is on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds from Monday October 17.