Hi, we're your host's Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling.

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Hello and welcome to After Dark.

Now today, because we've been talking about folklore over the last month,

we are talking about the dark side of English folklore.

And to begin, I'm not sure I'm paid enough for this,

but we're going to start with a story from Maddie's childhood.

Picture this. We're standing on the hillside outside the Staffordshire town where I'm from. It's a pretty enough place,

though unassuming. As Jane Austen said, admittedly about another spot altogether,

it's a place of little consequence, except to those fortunate enough to have grown up there.

Today, you describe it as a market town. Its architecture is mostly 19th century, a ring of imposing,

though strangely beautiful, silk mills, stands sentry around its centre, flanked by rows of terraced houses.

There's history here, muddled over the years, with a little rumour and myth-making too. There's the church on the hill,

supposedly sitting on miles of hidden tunnels, the purpose of which remains something of a mystery.

There's the house in which the artist William Morris briefly lived, and a few doors down,

another believed to have given respite to the Bonnie Prince Charles Edward

Stewart during his march south from Scotland in the 1745 Jacobite Rising.

Then there's a pub haunted by a headless woman, quietened in death by a group of townsmen

whose secrets she sold to the highest bidder.

...