In April 1828, an English molecatcher carried his spade into a barn because his wife would not stop dreaming. He dug where the dreams told him to dig, under the right-hand grain bin. And there he found his daughter.

A year earlier, in the Suffolk village of Polstead, Maria Marten had walked out to the Red Barn to meet her lover, a young farmer named William Corder. They were to elope that night and marry in Ipswich. Maria walked into the barn in May 1827, and no living person outside it ever saw her again. Corder left the district soon after, and then the letters began arriving: Maria was well. They were married. She would have written herself, but she had hurt her hand. Always a reason. For the better part of a year, the family made themselves believe it.

Then, in the winter, Maria's stepmother Ann, a young woman barely older than Maria herself, began to dream. The same dream, she said, night after night: Maria was not well, and not married. Maria was in the Red Barn, murdered, buried beneath the right-hand grain bin. Ann told her husband. She told him again. She would not let it rest, and on the 19th of April 1828, to quiet his wife as much as anything, the molecatcher walked to the barn with the tools of his trade and dug where the dream said. The dream was exact. William Corder was traced to London, where he had found a new wife by advertising in the newspapers, and was arrested at his breakfast table. At the trial in Bury St Edmunds, with the whole nation now watching, the dreams were told in evidence like any other fact. Corder confessed the night before they hanged him.

The case became the most famous melodrama of the century, and its relics are still kept in the museum at Bury St Edmunds, where you can see them. But the question at the centre was never closed. Either Ann Marten's dreams truly showed her the floor of the Red Barn, or she knew something she never told, and carried it by the only door available. She was never charged. Nothing was ever proved. The spade proved the dream true. Nothing has ever proved where the dream came from.

They knew. Subscribe.