When Harry Price published his first book, Covering Bally Rectory, in 1940, he would have been well aware how sensational and potentially controversial the title would appear.

The most haunted house in England, shot Bally Rectory to fame, cementing the name in history with the likes of Jack the Ripper, the Salon Witch Charles, and later, the Amityville Horror.

At the contents of the book stirred up so many years of controversy is an outcome that was bound to have materialized regardless of the title.

The stories of spectral nuns, monks and horse-drawn carriages, ghostly writings on the walls and secret passages, all set in the spiritualist boom between the wars, tables tipped, planchets moved, bells rang, and eventually the house burnt to the ground.

80 years later, the legend of Bally still lives on, fighting against allegations of fraud all the way.

This is Dark Histories, where the facts are worse than fiction.

Hello and welcome to season 5, episode 16 of Dark Histories, I'm Ben, and I hope this episode finds you well.

This episode has been a long, long, long time coming. I've always wanted to approach Bally, never quite sure how I was going to approach Bally, like sort of the angle and such, and I always sort of just ended up putting it off and putting it off, because I knew firstly that it was going to be a big one, and secondly that I wasn't really sure how I was going to approach it.

But with the new horror film, based on the Bally factory story, I thought it seems like that's a good enough time, isn't it? It's a good enough excuse to brace it and go for it.

So, yeah, a couple of things I want to say before we start this episode. Firstly, obviously this episode features Harry Price heavily.

If you're sort of new to Dark Histories, or it's been a while since you listened to the Rosalie, the Saints of Rosalie episode, you might want to listen to that one first and get a grounding again in who Harry Price is, because I didn't want to sort of go too much into Harry Price's backstory and sort of reintroduce him,

because I did so much of that in the Saints of Rosalie episode. So it might actually be worth going back and listening to the Saints of Rosalie episode before this episode.

If that makes sense, just to give you a bit of a kind of sort of heads up as to who Harry Price actually is. But it's not essential, you just do a bit of a heads up.

I think he also appears briefly in the Diana Southcott's box episode, but that's much more brief. But yeah, the Saints of Rosalie episode might be worth listening to, I don't know, silly thing.

Secondly, there's going to be a live stream on the 23rd of October, and I'm looking for your stories to read out on that live stream.

What I'm looking for in this live stream is I really want to focus on local folklore and sort of urban legends. And obviously with the darkest she's audience being so global as it is, you know, I'd love to hear your local legends and your local urban sort of folklore and urban legends from your area, basically.

So if you've got stories like that, write in and let me know and we'll feature them on the live stream where we'll be sort of going through urban legends and talking about local folklore and stuff.

So that'd be fun to say that that live stream is going to be on the 23rd of October, sort of ironing out the time at the moment on the Discord channel because obviously we've got to try and find time that suits as many people as possible really.

So that we're sort of ironing the time out now, but closer to the date, I'll let everyone know on social media and things like that. And if I'll see if you're on the Discord, you'll definitely know.

But yeah, otherwise, if you would like to get your stories in, forgot to mention, you can do so.

SocialatDarkHistory.com is the email you want to send it to, not the usual contact email because it's easy for me to not lose them in the shuffle.

Basically, if they go to socialatDarkHistory.com. So yeah, email them there or you can also DM me on social media and such if you want.

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