US Woman Bought A Vintage Dress From 1880s, It Came With A Mysterious Note

Sara Rivers Cofield, a vintage custome collecter bought a Victorian dress from the Maine antique mall. The dress was from the 1880s and it featured a fitted bodice, puffy bustle and lace cuffs. However, despite its age and delicate embroidery, the dress and its fabric were intact.

Ms Cofield bargained and bought the dress for $100 back in 2013. After some time, she found a secret pocket tucked under the bustle and it had two crumpled sheets of paper with lists of seemingly random words and places: 

Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank

Calgary, Cuba, unguard, confute, duck, Fagan

The notes on the margin of the papers appeared to depict time, according to CNN. It also had a tag stitched into the dress with a handwritten name: Bennett.

In an interaction with CNN, Ms Cofield shared that she was baffled. The words were cryptic. "What did they mean, and why did Bennett need a "super secret hidey-hole," in Rivers Cofield's words, to stash them? The buttons alone portrayed a forlorn Ophelia from Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and were worth more than she'd paid for the dress, she said.

She also posted a blog about the dress. She wrote, "What the...?," she wrote. "I'm putting it up here in case there's some decoding prodigy out there looking for a project." 

Online sleuths soon took up the case, but could not solve the mystery. Curious amateur sleuths dubbed it the "silk dress cryptogram" and had several conspiracy theories about the words. A few people speculated that Bennett was a spy using coded words to communicate. 

In 2017, one blogger added the note to his list of the Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages. The blogger floated theories including cryptic love notes, dress measurements or civil war codes. 

Ms Cofield quickly dismissed any interpretation linked to the Civil War. 

Other people speculated it was a form of communication-related to the telegraph. 

"I had kind of abandoned the blog at that point," Rivers Cofield told CNN.

"Every once in a while I would see that a comment was posted or that some other codebreaker would email me and be like, 'Hey, I'm still interested in this,' but nobody ever solved it."

Wayne Chan, a researcher at the University of Manitoba in Canada, also tried solving the code online in the summer of 2018. He told CNN he looked at 170 code books and none of them matched the message.

"I worked on it for a few months but didn't get anywhere with it. I set it aside and didn't look at it again." Chan said.

After some time, he began researching the telegraph and early last year, he had a breakthrough. 

He shared that the coded messages were in fact, a weather report. And they were not encrypted for secrecy but because the code allowed forecasters to shorten detailed weather reports into a few words, Chan said.

Each word represented meteorological variables such as temperature, wind speed and barometric pressure at a specific location and time of day, Mr Chan told the media outlet.

To keep wired messaging via telegraph inexpensive, a sort of shorthand was developed.

"Since telegraph companies charged by the number of words in a telegram, codes to compress a message to reduce the number of words became popular," wrote researcher Wayne Chan from the University of Manitoba, when explaining the topic in an academic paper published in August of 2022. 

It's still unclear who Bennett was and why she had weather codes stashed in a secret pocket.