BBC Radio 4, October 24, 2022 and on BBC Sounds

“Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean things are not out to get you.”

There’s a “profound sense of presence” at Heol Fanog as his episode shines a light on our main character, the very real Liz Rich, who takes Danny back to the house she’d rather forget.

That ‘presence’ isn’t a benevolent one as we hear more of the hard footsteps, the shuffling gait and the temperature changes that Liz and Bill experienced. Oh, temperature changes: a room got cold, right? That’s out of the standard ghostly-experience playbook, I hear you cry… sure, but extreme heat too? Focused around the same electricity meter that’s racking up those impossibly high charges?

Liz sounds like the kind of woman who has been there and done that, self-described as ‘wild’ and I’d definitely like to have a pint at a cosy Welsh local with her and put the world to rights. She’s not the sort of person who seems overly credulous, but could the things she and Bill experienced have been feeding each other’s fear? They are both experiencing the same smell, that can’t be in their heads surely?

Cue Ciaran O’Keefe with our word of the day: phantosmia. It is indeed possible to have olfactory hallucinations too – and that makes sense – if you can hallucinate via your other senses, hearing and sight, why not smell too? The logic tracks, as always with Ciaran’s open-minded and no-nonsense approach.

The strangest and saddest element for me that we hear Liz describe, is the death of many of her animals, with many different species suffering, not least Lucinda their pet pig who goes berserk. That’s going to have caused a lot of distress, especially for an animal-lover. With all the stress and fear that will have generated, Evelyn Hollow hits us with the bombshell that the area is “densely populated by stories of witchcraft,” with some of the tales involving “horrible things happening to livestock”. There’s our nightmare fuel for this week, cheers Evelyn! Maybe Liz and Bill aren’t going mad at all – as they learn more about what’s happened at Heol Fanog via their plumber, and reality hits home for Liz.

Verdict: A creeping sense of dread follows us through this instalment as tensions mount. 9/10

Claire Smith