St Leonard's Churchyard in Walton-le-Dale is the setting for one of Lancashire's oldest recorded pieces of ritual-magic folklore, an account of the Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer and sometime royal advisor John Dee attempting, together with his assistant Edward Kelley, to raise the spirit of a recently deceased man from his own grave. According to the story, recorded in the 1825 book The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century, complete with a well-known illustration of the whole scene, the attempt took place in August 1560, and the raised spirit obligingly answered the questions put to him and made several predictions concerning his own former neighbours before returning peacefully to the grave, all without ever actually revealing the location of the treasure Dee and Kelley were said to have been seeking through the whole ritual.
John Dee is a genuine and extensively documented historical figure, one of the most significant intellectuals of the Elizabethan court, but this specific episode rests entirely on the later published 1825 account rather than on any contemporary record surviving from 1560 itself, a gap of well over two and a half centuries between the supposed event and its first written appearance.
It should be read, honestly, as part of the extensive later folklore that gradually attached itself to Dee's genuine real-world reputation as a practising magician and alchemist, rather than as an established, verifiable fact of his actual documented biography, the churchyard scene owing considerably more to nineteenth-century storytelling than to any first-hand account from Dee's own Elizabethan lifetime.
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