Bidston Windmill was built in the late eighteenth century to replace an earlier mill lost to fire in 1791, and it went on working, grinding wheat for the local area, right up until 1875, when steam-powered milling finally made its sails obsolete. Rather than falling into complete ruin afterward, it was restored in 1894 and again in 1971, and today stands as a public visitor attraction, one of the more physically intact pieces of the hill's long working history still open for people to walk around and climb.
Local paranormal tradition reports more than one presence attached to the mill. There is a vaporous, indistinct male figure, described in terms too vague to pin down to any specific identity, and a named individual, Richard Tilly, remembered in some retellings as a Satanist, his story drawing directly on the hill's much wider reputation for witchcraft and occult activity that surrounds the neighbouring sites on Bidston Hill more generally.
No historical record of Tilly himself, nor of any death actually connected to the mill, has been traced in any documented source, which means this should be treated honestly as local ghost-tour tradition rather than a case with any independently verifiable history behind it. Given how closely the mill's reputation echoes the broader witchcraft folklore already attached to the rest of Bidston Hill, it seems plausible that Tilly's story grew up as a specific, mill-shaped extension of that wider local reputation, rather than as an entirely separate tradition in its own right.
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