On the night of Wednesday the twenty-fourth of November, 1779, at his Surrey country house at Pitt Place near Epsom, a thirty-five-year-old British peer dreamt that a white dove flew into his bedchamber. Behind the dove came a woman in white robes. She pointed at the bedchamber clock. She told him he would die at twelve o'clock at the end of three days. He woke. He told the dream the following morning to his physician, to his guests, and to his servants. Three nights later, he died exactly at twelve minutes past midnight.

His name was Thomas Lyttelton, the second Baron Lyttelton. He was a Whig Member of Parliament for Bewdley, a Lord of the Bedchamber to King George the Third, and one of the most notable orators in the House of Lords. He was a guest at Pitt Place, a Georgian country house outside Epsom owned by the Pitt family. He recounted the dream over the next three days to: his physician, his guests Captain William Wolseley and Arthur Pigott, his stepdaughters the Misses Amphlett, his guests Lord Fortescue and Lady Flood, the Reverend Mr Sykes of Epsom, and his servants Faulkner and Hugues.

Lyttelton was a Whig peer of robust good health and considerable irreverence. He decided to disprove the dream. On the afternoon of Saturday the twenty-seventh of November, 1779, the third day after the dream, he secretly moved his bedchamber clock forward by half an hour, intending to outlive the predicted hour. He conducted himself normally in the company of his guests at Pitt Place all evening. As the clock in the hall approached midnight he became visibly uneasy. His guests later testified to it. He looked at the bedchamber clock, said the words 'I shall fool the ghost yet,' walked to a side-table for a glass of wine, and dropped dead in his bedchamber.

His physician and his servants recorded the actual hour of death by the unmoved hall clock as twelve minutes past midnight, three days to the hour of the predicted hour. Lord Fortescue wrote the account on the morning of the twenty-ninth of November, 1779 to William Pitt the Elder, the first Earl of Chatham. The letter survives in the Chatham Papers at the British Library. Dr Samuel Johnson called it the most extraordinary thing that had happened in his day.

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