Читать книгу Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 - Various - Страница 4

On Saturday the 30th of July, 1853, the dead body of a young woman was discovered in a field at Littleport, in the Isle of Ely. The body has not yet been identified, and there can be little doubt that the young woman was murdered. At the adjourned inquest, held on the 29th of August, before Mr. William Marshall, one of the coroners for the isle, the following extraordinary evidence was given:

"James Jessop, an elderly, respectable-looking labourer, with a face of the most perfect stolidity, and who possessed a most curiously-shaped skull, broad and flat at the top, and projecting greatly on each side over the ears, deposed: 'I live about a furlong and a half from where the body was found. I have seen the body of the deceased. I had never seen her before her death. On the night of Friday, the 29th of July, I dreamt three successive times that I heard the cry of murder issuing from near the bottom of a close called Little Ditchment Close (the place where the body was found). The first time I dreamt I heard the cry it woke me. I fell asleep again, and dreamt the same again. I then woke again, and told my wife. I could not rest; but I dreamt it again after that. I got up between four and five o'clock, but I did not go down to the close, the wheat and barley in which have since been cut. I dreamt once, about twenty years ago, that I saw a woman hanging in a barn, and on passing the next morning the barn which appeared to me in my dream I entered, and did find a woman there hanging, and cut her down just in time to save her life. I never told my wife I heard any cries of murder, but I have mentioned it to several persons since. I saw the body on the Saturday it was found. I did not mention my dream to any one till a day or two after that. I saw the field distinctly in my dream and the trees thereon, but I saw no person in it. On the night of the murder the wind lay from that spot to my house.'

"Rhoda Jessop, wife of the last witness, stated that her husband related his dreams to her on the evening of the day the body was found."

In Mr. John Hill Burton's Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland, is a chapter entitled "Spectral and Dream Testimony," to which the above evidence will be a curious addition.

C. H. Cooper.

Cambridge.