There are certain murders which seem unwilling to remain confined to history. They swell instead into myth, accumulating atmosphere over time like old buildings accumulate damp. The Red Barn Murder is one of those cases: a real killing that slowly transformed itself into something stranger, darker and far more enduring than ordinary crime. It began in 1827, in the Suffolk village of Polstead, where a young woman named Maria Marten disappeared after arranging to meet her lover, William Corder, at the Red Barn, a weathered agricultural building standing beyond the village. They were supposedly going to elope together. Maria had already borne Corder’s child, their relationship had become tangled in scandal and gossip, and marriage offered the possibility of escape. Instead, Corder murdered her. Afterwards, he buried Maria beneath the barn floor and began sending letters to her family claiming she was alive and living happily elsewhere. The letters arrived regularly enough to sustain hope, though perhaps not conviction. And then, the story took an odd turn. Maria’s stepmother, Ann Marten, claimed she had experienced a series of vivid visions in which Maria appeared to her and revealed that she had been murdered and buried inside the Red Barn itself. Eventually, Maria’s father (somewhat reluctantly) dug beneath the floorboards and discovered her remains exactly where the dreams had indicated. That detail altered the entire shape of the case. Suddenly, the murder no longer belonged entirely to the material world. Their dead daughter had apparently intervened. The crime itself seemed to possess an afterlife. What followed feels less like criminal history than collective obsession. Crowds travelled to Polstead merely to look at the barn. Newspapers covered the story relentlessly. Ballads and pamphlets circulated almost immediately. Stage melodramas transformed Maria into a tragic heroine and William Corder into a figure of near-operatic villainy. The boundaries between reporting and storytelling dissolved with astonishing speed.

The story begins exactly as all good Victorian ghost stories should: with rain, exhaustion and a cab rattling through London after midnight. According to an 1897 article printed in the Shields Daily Gazette, there existed somewhere in a London mews an ancient four-wheeled cab so feared by cabmen that they refused to go near it after dark. The vehicle itself sounded appropriately ruinous — worm-eaten, moth-ravaged, smelling of damp upholstery and decay, with ‘a vast hole in the roof’ exposing the interior to the weather. Yet what disturbed visitors most were the sounds supposedly emerging from it at night: ‘muffled moans and harsh cries’ drifting through the yard after darkness fell. The tale attached to the cab possessed precisely the kind of melodramatic atmosphere Victorian newspapers adored. One bleak evening, the cabman had supposedly picked up a frantic passenger fleeing invisible pursuers through the London streets. The man screamed continually at the driver to go faster, glancing behind him in terror as though something unseen were closing steadily nearer. Eventually, after the terrified journey ended, the cabbie opened the door to discover his passenger dead in the back seat, having apparently committed suicide during the ride itself. And then the story became stranger. Within days the driver himself was discovered dead inside the same cab, allegedly strangled ‘by the ghost of the suicide.’ After this, according to the article, the vehicle acquired its sinister reputation among London cabbies, who treated it less as transport than cursed relic. What lingers now is not the credibility of the story — which is almost certainly nonsense — but its atmosphere. Victorian London was uniquely suited to this kind of haunting. Horse-drawn cabs moved endlessly through fog, gaslight and narrow streets carrying strangers whose lives remained completely unknown to one another. The city itself encouraged narratives of hidden terror unfolding silently behind glass windows and carriage doors.

There are some stories that resist classification so completely that they begin to feel less like reported events and more like fragments from a dream someone else had years ago and passed on imperfectly. The Sandown Clown encounter of 1973 belongs firmly in that category: not quite a ghost story, not quite science fiction, not quite folklore, but something stranger than all three. It has the unsettling texture of memory itself — blurred at the edges, absurd in places, yet carrying an emotional weight that refuses to disappear. The story begins innocuously enough. Two children, walking near Sandown on the Isle of Wight, heard a strange noise somewhere across the marshland: a high mechanical wail, rhythmic and unnatural, like machinery attempting to imitate distress. So, they crossed a small footbridge and entered the reeds. What they found there has remained a mystery. The figure was tall and awkward, dressed in a kind of patched costume that resembled a clown outfit designed by somebody who had only received verbal descriptions of clowns second-hand. Its face was white and featureless apart from triangular eyes and painted lips. A black wig hung stiffly around its head. It moved oddly too, lifting its knees high with every step as though uncertain about gravity, or perhaps uncertain about legs. And yet the thing did not threaten them. If anything, it seemed eager for company. “My name is All-Colours Sam,” it reportedly told them, with the solemn confidence peculiar to beings — human or otherwise — who assume they are making perfect sense. That sentence is the detail that transforms the story from mere oddity into something haunting. It has the logic of a sentence spoken in dreams: grammatically correct, emotionally coherent, and completely incomprehensible at the same time. The children accepted it immediately. The entity led them to a strange metallic hut hidden in the marshes. Inside were pieces of furniture, strange equipment and various scraps whose purpose remained unclear. Nothing dramatic occurred there. No revelation. No attack. Instead, the encounter drifted into a kind of gentle surrealism. Sam demonstrated how he ate berries by placing them into one ear, after which they somehow travelled through his head before emerging near his mouth, as though he didn’t really understand the process.

Even in daylight the landscape around the B3212 across Dartmoor possesses an unsettling quality: sudden fog, prehistoric stones, streams black as oil beneath narrow bridges. The moor seems less like scenery than weather made solid. One understands immediately why generations of people travelling across it began imagining things moving in the mist beside the road. And on this particular stretch between Postbridge and Two Bridges, they imagined the Hairy Hands. The legend emerged properly during the early twentieth century after a succession of violent accidents on the moor road. Drivers and motorcyclists described losing control suddenly and inexplicably, as though some external force had seized the wheel or handlebars and wrenched them sideways. Survivors spoke of large disembodied hands — cold, muscular, covered in dark hair — appearing from nowhere and dragging vehicles towards the verge. One of the most famous cases involved a doctor travelling by motorcycle in 1921. His machine suddenly swerved off the road near Postbridge, killing him instantly. Other witnesses reported similar experiences: steering wheels twisting violently in their grip, invisible forces dragging vehicles across the carriageway. By the 1920s the story had spread nationally through newspapers and collections of Dartmoor folklore. The details vary wonderfully. Sometimes the hands are visible; sometimes merely felt. In certain versions they emerge through the fog ahead of travellers before fastening themselves upon the controls. Elsewhere they become almost vampiric in behaviour, scratching at caravan windows at night or creeping across the glass towards sleeping occupants. One woman reportedly escaped only by making the sign of the cross upon the windowpane. What makes the legend so effective is its absolute simplicity. No face. No voice. No explanation. Merely hands appearing suddenly where hands should not exist. And Dartmoor itself encourages precisely this kind of fear. The moor has always possessed an atmosphere peculiarly suited to English folklore: ancient crosses marking forgotten tracks, Bronze Age burial sites half-submerged in grass, ruined farmhouses dissolving slowly into rain and granite. Even modern roads across the landscape feel temporary, vulnerable to weather and darkness. The Hairy Hands seem less like a ghost story imposed upon Dartmoor than something generated naturally by the place itself.

The telegram arrived on the day of the funeral. “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” Nothing else. No explanation. No sympathy. Just those three grotesquely cheerful words sent anonymously from Dublin to the parents of Lieutenant Hubert Chevis after their son had died in agony from strychnine poisoning. Weeks later another message arrived: “It is a mystery they will never solve.” And nearly a century later, it still is. The death of Hubert Chevis possesses the atmosphere of an English detective novel written by somebody slightly unwell. Summer 1931. Surrey. Military camps hidden among pine woods and heathland. Manchurian partridge served for dinner in a bungalow at Deepcut Barracks. The details arrive already carrying the faint unreality of fiction. Chevis himself seemed almost aggressively conventional: handsome artillery officer, Charterhouse-educated, recently married to Frances Rollason, a wealthy divorcée six years older than him. On the evening of the 20th of June, the couple entertained friends with cocktails before dining early so they could attend the Aldershot Tattoo later that night. Dinner was prepared by the cook and served by their batman with the full machinery of upper-middle-class military England still functioning between the wars. Then Chevis tasted the partridge. “Take this bird away,” he reportedly said after one mouthful. “It is the most terrible thing I have tasted.” His wife agreed the meat seemed “fusty”. The birds were taken back to the kitchen and burned. Soon afterwards, Chevis collapsed with violent convulsions. Frances Chevis also became ill, though less severely. By the following morning Hubert was dead. Two grains of strychnine were found in his stomach. What followed feels peculiarly British in its combination of restraint and deepening nightmare. Detectives traced the poisoned birds backwards through butchers, suppliers and storage rooms, discovering no obvious contamination. Nobody appeared to possess motive. The marriage seemed happy. Chevis was popular. His wife inherited money independently and gained little from his death. The partridges themselves had vanished into the kitchen fire before examination could occur.