John Kellerman, the Alchemist of Lilley

Coming into Lilley, where an alchemist once barricaded himself in with spring-guns and furnaces, then vanished without a trace.

In the 1820s a tall, striking stranger named John Kellerman took a large house in Lilley and turned it into a fortress, barricaded and ringed with spring-guns. Villagers whispered that he was an alchemist who had found the Philosopher's Stone, and gangs of men were said to work a huge set of bellows day and night. The writer Sir Richard Phillips visited and found a room crammed with crucibles, retorts and dusty books, and a host who boasted of making gold. Legend said the smoke from his furnace sometimes formed a gigantic figure in the air on stormy nights. One day the house was simply found empty.