Criminal - The Premonitions Bureau

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

On October 21, 1966, a woman named Lorna Middleton suddenly woke up from her sleep, struggling to breathe. The day before, a man named Alan Hencher was at work in London when he began to tremble all over. They both said they knew something terrible was about to happen. Sam Knight’s book is The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Now playing. In the early morning of October 21st, 1966, a 52-year-old dance teacher in London named Lorna Middleton suddenly woke up from her sleep. It was around 6 a.m. She described waking up and experiencing a choking sensation and felt like she couldn't breathe, a kind of physical sensation in her throat and struggling to breathe. Writer Sam Knight.

Lorna Middleton had a tenant staying with her. He made her a cup of tea that morning, and she told him about what had happened. She said she had an ominous feeling. Hours earlier, a man named Alan Henscher was at work at a telephone switchboard in London when he said he suddenly began to tremble all over and had a feeling something bad was about to happen. He later wrote, it just hit me without warning. I did mention to a lady sitting next to me

that a big disaster was taking place in this country, which could cost many lives. I couldn't pinpoint the place of occurrence. Around the same time, a 10-year-old girl, who lived in a small village in South Wales, called Abervan, reportedly told her mother that she'd had a bad dream. She'd dreamt that she was on her way to school, but the school in Abervan was gone.

It was covered in something black. Tell me about the village of Abervan. What was the village like in the 1960? So, Abavan was built pretty rapidly during the second half of the 19th century to be a mining village. Were most of the people living there in the 60s somehow touching the coal industry? You knew someone who was working in the mines or you were supporting those who worked in the mines. 100%. It was a place defined by the colliery and the activity of taking the coal out of the ground. On the morning of October 21st, a group of men were working on a pile of coal waste, on a mountain just outside the village.

There were several huge piles like this one on the mountain that had been created from waste brought out of the mines. You would mine the coal, take the good coal, and then there would be the debris, the waste from that, and also particularly something called tailings, which is the coal, which is too fine, the kind of powdery stuff that's sort of too fine to use or to sort of sell or to kind of package up in a useful form. And then that would be hoisted onto a kind of tram way. Can you imagine something a bit like a ski lift, sort of hauling cartload after cartload, after cartload up the hill, where it would kind of reach the top, where there would be a small gang of men, six guys, and then they would kind of unhook the topmost cart and tip it onto the waste pile. And these heaps would grow and grow on the hillside until they would become unstable. and then the coal plant would shift the tramways to another part of the hillside and make a new one.

That morning, the men noticed something unusual. It'd been raining for weeks, and the men working on the tip had noticed it shifting and starting to shift down the hillside. You could sort of take a reading off a tree or a fence post. There was a particular dead tree that the men... kind of kept an eye on, and they could see that the pile was beginning to shift, and that kind of wasn't unusual in itself. It was kind of normally a sign that it's like, okay,

you know, we've put enough here at time to kind of move on and make a new one. But the rain had been intense, and that morning, the group of men in charge of the heap noticed it had sunk 10 feet down the hillside in the night, and they were unhappy about the state of it. The men had a shack on the mountain and a telephone, and so they tried to make a call to let people know that the pile had been shifting more than normal. But that morning, the phone didn't work. And so one of the guys was sent down the hill to kind of raise the news

that the pile was unsteady, and while he was gone, it suddenly slipped. It was an avalanche, effectively, of kind of fine, wet, powdery, slurry and muck and these tailings that I described, and it kind of thundered down the mountain. The men couldn't see the village below them. They just saw the coal pile disappear in a black cloud. The men started running down the hillside shouting, trying to warn people about the collapsing heap. It kind of came thundering down on people in the village, compared it to the sound of a low-flying jet. The avalanche buried sheep, cattle, and a farmhouse with three people still inside it as it crashed down the mountain.

A 14-year-old boy watched as it came towards the village and said it was, quote, moving fast, as fast as a car goes into town. It traveled in the direction of Abervan's outermost street near the mountainside, Moy Road. There were two schools there. There was the primary school and the secondary school, and it sort of the main force of the tip struck the primary school and a few houses next to it. And it just came down just as the kids were finishing off school prayers for the last day of term before the half-term break.

And they were suddenly buried. A man describes seeing doors and windows of buildings crashing in. Then he was pissed. under a piece of iron. And then he said, everything became quiet. When it was all over, miners and villagers gathered in the street and began digging through the debris for survivors. 144 people died, 116 children.

Most of the children were between 7 and 10. About an hour later, the BBC shared news of the disaster, and people started traveling to Abervan to help. Sam Knight writes that somewhere between one and two thousand people volunteered to help dig for survivors. People showed up at a nearby hospital and offered to give blood. So within hours, the village is besieged by well-meaning offers of help, which become overwhelming. So you've got ambulances, you've got industrial machinery, you've got miners coming off their shifts, desperate to help. You've got earth-moving equipment.

You've got this just kind of outpouring of a desire to help, even though it's impossible to help. You know, no one was pulled alive after 11 o'clock in the morning. As bodies were dug out of the debris, they were brought to a local chapel and placed on the pews. Letters were written out in chalk, F, M, or J, indicating whether the dead were female, male, or juvenile. Sam writes that a line of parents waited outside to identify their children. The next morning was overcast. One journalist wrote, There was a grayness everywhere, faces from the tiredness and anguish, houses and roads from the oozing slurry of the tips. Trucks pulled into the village with donations,

tin meat, chewing gum, soup, and bottles of brandy. Sam Knight writes that the Red Cross handed out 10,000 cigarettes, and an animal welfare organization went door to door and asked if anyone needed help with their pets. The scale of the tragedy, the fact that so many children were involved, the fact that on some level this was foreseen in the sense that the practice of piling waste like this was just so obviously reckless.

All of those things kind of combined immediately to make it a singular tragedy in the British imagination. Were people talking about how this could have been avoided? Immediately you've got anger against the National Coal Board, which is the nationalised organisation sort of in charge of the British Coal Industry, because this was obviously dangerous, this was obviously reckless. You've got a kind of a class dimension in terms of this is a village for workers and their families,

and they're the ones who've been hit by this thing. So yeah, immediately this is a kind of, you know, questions of being at asked at just a very kind of rational sort of engineering level. Years before the disaster, Abervans Town Council had contacted the National Coal Board because they were concerned about the waste piles on the mountain. The piles had slid before, although never this badly. But the coal board hadn't made any real changes to stabilize the piles or make sure they couldn't slide.

Later, a tribunal concluded that the disaster was, quote, a terrifying tale of bungling ineptitude and a total lack of direction from above, and that, quote, the Abervan disaster could and should have been prevented. The morning after the disaster, while rescue workers were still digging bodies out of the debris, a man named John Barker drove into Abervan. John Barker was a psychiatrist, and he was a doctor at a large mental hospital.

That's about a hundred miles from Abervan. And Barker was a, on the one hand, a man. mid-20th century British intellectual. You know, he was very well educated, he'd been to Cambridge, and he published articles on a variety of research subjects in the Lancet and the American Journal of Medicine. He was ambitious, he wanted to make a name for himself. And on the other hand, he dabbled in what we would call the occult. You know, he was someone who'd been interested in ghosts his whole life. He was interested in visions and prophecy and premonitions. John Barker was collecting case studies for a book he was writing. So for a few years he'd been

studying cases of people who had been, in inverted commas, scared to death. So he came to Abavan because he was interested in fear and the effect of fear on the human body. And in the early kind of confused reporting from Abervan. There was a report of a boy who escaped from the school, but later died from shock or from fear. And that was the kind of thing to prick the attention of Dr. Barker, and he came rushing to Abavan the next day to try and find this boy and what had happened to him.

Did he find the boy when he got there? No, he didn't find the boy, because it was wrong. There hadn't been a boy of that description, and he sort of describes it afterwards. you know, arriving in the village and suddenly, suddenly feeling out of place, suddenly aware that he's trespassing in a place that is full of onlookers and full of people coming there, obviously, with kind of good feeling in their heart, but also an edge of sort of voyeurism or just wanting to see something as appalling as this.

John Barker wrote, The experience sickened me. Parents who had lost their children were standing in the street, looking stunned, and hopeless, and many were still weeping. There was hardly anybody I encountered who had not lost someone. Sam Knight writes that the experience reminded Barker

of the World War II bombing of London, which he had lived through as a teenager. He started talking to people in town about what had happened and what they had experienced. And then he heard the story of the 10-year-old girl in Abervan, who the day before the disaster, dreamt her school was gone. The girl had told her mother, quote, I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there.

Something black had come down all over it. The next day, the girl died in the disaster. Later, John Barker heard another story, about an eight-year-old boy who also died in the accident. The night before, he'd made a drawing of people digging in the hillside. Above it, he'd written, The End. And then John Barker had an idea. He thought maybe people outside of Abervan had had premonitions of the disaster, too.

And he called a journalist friend of his at the evening. standard, which was a kind of big, a big London newspaper, he called the science correspondent there, a man called Peter Fairley, and asked him to publish an article requesting other dreams or premonitions or visions of Abervan, and that was published just a week after the disaster in the evening standard. The article read, did anyone have a genuine premonition before the cold tip fell on Abervan. That is what a senior British psychiatrist would like to know. John Barker heard from 76 people. He wrote them back and asked for witnesses who could confirm that they had mentioned having premonitions before the disaster happened. Out of the 76 people, John Barker heard from,

he thought 22 seemed credible, and there were seven people who he found especially interesting, people who often had premonitions, sometimes with physical symptoms. The group of seven included Lorna Middleton, the dance teacher in London, who woke up on the morning of the disaster with a choking sensation and a sense of foreboding. And Alan Henscher, the switchboard operator who'd started trembling while he was at work the day before, and had told his co-worker that something terrible was about to happen.

and that it might cost many lives. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. If you'll allow it, I'm going to throw some numbers at you. According to some recent polling from the good people at Pew, about half of Americans now use AI chatbots for something in their lives, whether it's work or personal.

That's a dramatic increase from just two years. years ago when it was more like 30% of the country. But here's the funny thing. Only 16% of the country thinks AI will have a positive impact on society. Two-thirds of Americans think AI technology is advancing too quickly. And most Americans, especially young Americans, don't trust AI nor the people in charge of it. And all this polling was done before an open AI agent went rogue and hacked another company. On today, explained from Vox, isn't that the thing science fiction warned us about for all those years?

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she was an emigre I guess that's the kind of word she would like us to use of her from Boston where she grew up in the 1920s and 1930s her parents were English Lorna Middleton had been a child performer a ballerina and a singer but she could never quite get it together

in London she couldn't break into the ballet schools, the family didn't have much money, and so they settled in suburban London, and she opened a little music school. And that's kind of who she was for her whole life. She had a lot of cats, she looked after, you know, the musical fortunes of kids in her neighborhood, and during her lessons, she would sometimes tell the children, oh, you know, I had a premonition about something or I knew that was going to happen. And she was someone throughout her life who had visions and could see things before they happened. She compared it to knowing the answer in a spelling test.

It was as if events were kind of already visible to her, or she would see letters lit up like a light bulb in her mind. It was something that she carried from her childhood and said that her, Her mother just asked her to stop telling her things because they had a habit of turning out to be true. Lorna said that when she was 11, she'd felt a strong urge to contact her piano teacher and begged her parents to call him. Then they found out he had poisoned himself in his home. As a young woman, she was on her way to a party at a dance hall with a friend.

It was the first time she'd gone out in months, since the start of the bombing. of London. While they were on their way there, she said she suddenly had a strange sensation and insisted they go back home. Later that night, a bomb dropped and killed over 40 people in and near the dance hall. It was just something that her mind could

do and found easy. I mean, she was clearly kind of fascinated by it, but I wouldn't say that it weighed on her. Switchboard operator Alan Hensure also said he had recurring visions. But his often troubled him. He'd been at work when he had his premonition about Abervan. He worked in a big building on the embankment in London, on the international switchboard, so pulling out cables, reconnecting them on these long shifts. Alan was 44 at the time. He lived

with his parents in Essex, just outside London. People described him as intense and serious, different from the rest of his family. At 26, he'd been in a car accident that left him with a head injury. He was unconscious for four days. Shortly after he woke up, he says his premonition started. They would be, for him, accompanied by a terrible headache,

a kind of growing, growing migraine that would then be relieved at the moment of the disaster, and then a voice would say to him, like, it has happened, and it would be kind of accompanied by words or information. Alan Henscher told psychiatrist John Barker, I accept I'm able to foretell certain events, but I have no idea how or why.

He didn't like paying too close attention to his visions. He said his premonitions were never about anything pleasant, and they affected his mental health. John Barker was fascinated by Lorna Middleton and Alan Henscher's apparent gifts for predicting events. He wrote a journal article about the Abervan premonitions and said, is this perhaps an unrecognized medical or psychosomatic syndrome? He referred to it as a pre-disaster syndrome

and theorized that maybe a small subset of the population had it. I think he was someone who was pushing the frontiers of psychiatry and what he thought the mind could do. And I think, you know, it's difficult to kind of reconstruct the scientific mainstream of the mid-1960s, but it was a more kind of capacious sort of weirder space than it may be as today. And so he was on the edges and he got in trouble for things,

but he wasn't a kook by any stretch. He's in a hospital for 1,000 people. He's responsible for 250 severely ill people. He's been given the first antipsychotic medication in 1955. You know, they are just beginning to experiment with the treatment of serious illness and delusions. And in that context, telepathy, seeing things before they happen, it's just not the craziest thing he's heard that day. He didn't really feel challenged by the work at the hospital where he was a senior psychiatrist.

Instead, he wanted to do research into new psychiatric treatments. He had done studies trying to treat addiction and unwanted behaviors in people. The hierarchy in his hospital was not receptive to really any sort of research agenda, let alone one that was pretty fringe. John Barker, went ahead with his research anyway.

And about a year before the disaster in Abervan, he'd come across an article in a medical journal that caught his attention. It was about a woman in Canada who was having a low-risk surgery. She was 43, and as a child, the woman had been told by a fortune teller that she was going to die at that age.

She now felt convinced that she wouldn't survive the surgery. But she did. The surgery went well, and the woman woke up. but then suddenly went into shock and died. A post-mortem showed that she had died of a rare failure of the adrenal glands. The medical staff said they were shocked and mystified

and wondered if the woman's, quote, emotional tensions had anything to do with her sudden death. John Barker had twice had similar experiences with patients, who he thought seemed scared they were about to die, and then mysteriously died in the hospital. He wanted to find out if an intense fear of dying could somehow affect the body. If I tell you that something terrible is going to happen to you, does that have a physiological component?

Does that kind of overwhelm the body in some way and sort of bring that thing into being? That's when he traveled to Abervan, after hearing the false rumor of a boy who supposedly died of shock or fear. After assessing the premonitions people had sent in about Abervan, John Barker and the journalist he worked with at London's Evening Standard, Peter Fairley, published some of them in the newspaper. They received many different kinds of premonitions.

One of them was a man having a dream of standing in front of a computer, which was obviously a kind of fairly unusual thing in the mid-60s, and just seeing the words, Abavan, on a kind of on a black screen, in front of him. Another premonition came from a woman who'd been to a spiritualist meeting the night before the disaster and had told six other people

that she had a vision of a schoolhouse, a Welsh minor, a terrified little boy and a quote, avalanche of coal. Another woman said she'd been noticing a bad smell for days. She described it as a decaying smell or a smell of death.

An hour before the disaster in Abervan, she was at work and asked her co-worker if he noticed the bad smell. He didn't. Then, right around when the disaster took place, the woman jumped from her chair and said something bad had happened. Her colleague said her face was highly inflamed, and she was breathing heavily. After publishing the premonitions Barker and Fairley were invited to appear on a late-night television show. along with some of the people who had submitted premonitions about Abervan. Lorna Middleton was one of them. It was the first time Peter Fairley had met most of them,

and he wasn't sure what to make of them. He wrote, Weirdos would be too strong a description, but they were certainly different. They were supposed to go on the show after the commercial break, but then the host of the TV show, David Frost, came backstage. David Frost took one look at them through the door and decided they were too strange and motley to go on stage with him.

John Barker was angry about it, but Peter fairly understood why the host had changed his mind. He could see how people might think their project didn't seem credible. So he suggested that they take a different approach. They should start to collect premonitions about things that were about to happen. to sort of avoid the hindsight problem where it's like, oh yeah, well you would say that after the event. Instead, people were invited to send in kind of open-ended prophecies and premonitions.

They announced in the evening standard that they were opening what they called a premonitions bureau. They wrote, nobody will be scoffed at and their premonitions will be treated as confidential. Let us simply get at the truth. How would it work? How did the Premonitions Bureau log these? Would they take telephone calls?

Would people send in mail? Yeah, that's it. It's telephone calls. It's postcards. It's letters. It's telegrams. And they are all ending up on Peter Fairley's desk in the kind of crowded, cluttered newsroom

of the evening standard, where they are mainly collated by his assistant, a woman named Jennifer Preston, and she created a system of filing cabinets. There were kind of 13 different categories for the different premonitions that were coming in. There would be sort of transport, rail, you know, the royal family, sport, you know, things like that. And she would file these premonitions. And then she would also look at the newspapers and the wires coming in from around the world

and kind of see whether any of these premonitions were sort of coming true. One of the categories was racing, and Peter Fairley, who liked to gamble, would sometimes check the folder for tips on what horse to bet on. They decided that the premonitions would be scored, according to their accuracy, timing, and how unusual they were. Did anybody high up any of the editors say to Fairley? We're not doing this. This is too wild. This is too weird. No, they didn't. They encouraged him. I mean, Peter Felly's editor was Charles Wintour, who is the father of Anna Wintor, the great fashion journalist, and he was a stylish, sophisticated editor. And I think that two things were sort of exciting about the kind of premonitions project.

One was that astrology and palm reading and... thinking about your future was a more accepted part of British kind of intellectual culture. Oxford had a religious experience unit, studying kind of these happenings and prophecy and things like this. And also, this was a time of kind of dramatic social and scientific progress. So it seems like a kind of a wacky project now with the sort of benefit of hindsight, but I think kind of, I think Winter had kind of sharp instincts both for what people wanted to read about and was maybe a little trashy, a little dangerous, but also just might have some sort of scientific kind of plausibility somewhere.

They decided to keep the Premonitions Bureau going for one year and then assess how successful it had been. If it looked like disasters could be predicted, they imagined working with Parliament in setting up some kind of official warning system for the whole country. Barker's vision of the Premonitions Bureau was collecting dreams and visions on a mass scale. He wanted to connect them all to a computer which would look for patterns in the information. And he kind of was describing, you know, a social network and sort of algorithms before they happened. But John Barker acknowledged that it was sort of a catch-22. If a disaster was averted and never happened,

how could people have premonitions of it? Still, he thought it was worth trying. John Barker encouraged some of the people who'd had premonitions about Abervan, like Lorna Middleton and Alan Henscher, to keep sending in their visions. One early morning in March 1967, around 6 a.m., the phone rang at John Barker's home.

It was Alan Hensure. He told John he'd just come off a night shift at the switchboard. He was upset and said, I was hoping not to have to ring you, but now I feel I must. He said he had a premonition that kept returning to him of a plane crash. Alan said that it was a passenger jet and that it carried 123 or 124 people. He said, it is coming over mountains. It is going to radio, it is in trouble. Then it will cut out. Nothing. He can see lights flashing on and off. He can see a kind of a statue of Jesus.

It gives the model of the plane called a caraval. It's kind of, you know, fairly sort of detailed description of a plane crash, which, you know, Barker kind of faithfully jots down and adds to the Promination Bureau's records. About a month later, a plane crashed in Cyprus. It was traveling to Basel from Bangkok, many of the passengers were German and Swiss people who'd been on vacation when it got caught in bad weather.

The pilot got permission to land at an airport in Cyprus. On its way down, preparing to land, the plane clipped a wing on a hillside, rolled over and caught fire. The plane carried 130 people. 124 died on impact. At the time, it was maybe the fifth, deadliest kind of plane crash. on record and the kind of the correlation between Hensh's vision and the events that transpire is kind of immediate, the evening standard, run a news story about his prophecy with the news report

from the crash. So there's a kind of instant recognition that one of these premonitions seems to have been borne out. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Bombus. There's nothing like a good pair of thoughtfully made socks. Bombus has a whole line of pro-level sports. socks made for specific activities like golf, yoga, the gym, and socks for every kind of runner.

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If you say someone's going to die, can that kind of set off a kind of hormonal kind of storm that could then sort of overwhelm the nervous system? This was a sort of physiology first described in the 1940s. and Barker was kind of trying to develop that idea and put a name on that, and it's something that we now call and study more as the nascebo effect, which is the opposite of the placebo effect, instead of giving you an inert sugar pill, saying, oh, this will probably help with your headache. You give someone an inert sugar pill and say,

yeah, you might feel a few side effects once you have this, and then, hey, presto, people start to report them. and obviously the kind of most extreme form of a nascebo effect is kind of people suffering extreme symptoms even though there's nothing physiologically wrong with them. One day in April, Lorna Middleton sent a note to the Premonitions Bureau. She'd included a sketch she'd made of a recent premonition, of an astronaut inside a spacecraft.

And she says that she can see an astronaut petrified, terrified, and just frightened and says, you know, this venture will end in tragedy. And, you know, you can be dismissive and say, well, this was the height of the space race, things were going wrong, you know, sending in a premonition of something going wrong in space isn't particularly original, but she sends it at 5.30 in the afternoon on a Sunday. And at that moment, a Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is circling the earth, about to find out that his spacecraft has sort of been damaged during blast off and many of the instruments aren't working

and he's going to have to steer his way back by hand, by skill alone, through the atmosphere, which is incredibly difficult, sort of bit of piloting to do. It was decided that Kamarov, who'd been to space before, would steer back through the atmosphere, back to Russia, on his 17th orbit of Earth. Kamarov seemed optimistic. But the first two times he tried,

the engines of his spacecraft failed, and he was sent back into orbit, while his batteries drained more and more. He tried a third time, using his knowledge of the stars and planets to navigate. And he actually manages it. He manages to get through the atmosphere, but then his parachutes fail to deploy,

and his capsule just crashes into the earth, and he's killed on impact. And as I say, you can say, oh, like space rays, things are going to go wrong. He's actually the first, and one of the very few astronauts to actually die, you know, in space or reentering atmosphere. It was the first time that that had ever happened, and she sent that in, you know, just a couple of days before. When John Barker heard the news about the crash, he wrote to Lorna, you were spot on, well done. But plenty of people were skeptical of the Premonitions Bureau, calling it unscientific and biased.

One person said it was just a series of haphazard guesses. The Premonitions Bureau had been active a little less than a year, and they'd already received hundreds of premonitions. Most of them could not be verified. They run from shipping accidents to horse race winners and other sort of more light-hearted or sort of random things. But as the year progresses, you have a few that nonetheless kind of really stand out. On October 11, 1967, Alan Hensher told them he'd had a premonition about a train crash.

He said many people would be killed, and one car would end up on top of another. Then a couple of weeks later, the Bureau received a note from Lorna Middleton, who said, She was feeling depressed. She'd had a vision of a train crash. She wrote, A station may be involved, people waiting in the station, and the words,

Charing Cross. Four days later, a train leaving Hastings, bound for Charing Cross, suddenly derailed. The wheels had had a break in the tracks, and four carriages flipped onto their sides.

49 people died. And Henscher, at the same time, is on a shift at the switchboard complaining of a kind of worsening, worsening, worsening headache, until he gets sort of taken to the sick bay. The headache lifts, and he says, you know, it's happened. The next day, the story of Lorna and Alan's predictions

was on the news. One newspaper headline read, Strange case of the two who knew. John Barker told a reporter, quite honestly, it staggers me. And then the Premonitions Bureau reached its one-year mark. Based on their scoring system, they determined that 18 of the many hundreds of premonitions they'd received had come true. Sam Knight writes that it was a hit rate of just about 3%.

And they agree with, you know, with Winter's kind of blessing to run the experiment for another year, mainly on the strength of kind of Henscher and Middleton's premonitions who do seem to sort of stand out. John Barker was busy in 1968. He was giving lectures and interviews about his book and research. And then he suffers a brain hemorrhage and dies in August, 1968 at the age of 44. The rest of his family were downstairs.

when they suddenly heard him on the bedroom floor upstairs. He was taken to the hospital where he died. About a year and a half before he died, John Barker had received a phone call from Alan Hensher at one in the morning. Earlier that day, the plane crash in Cyprus had been on the news, the one Alan Henscher seemingly predicted. And Barker sort of, like, oh, are you calling back about the plane crash or expecting to hear sort of more details about that?

And he's, no, I'm worried about you. Alan Hentcher said he'd been concerned about John all day. When he thought of him, his mind became all black. Alan asked John to check the gas supply at his house, but the house didn't have one. And he says, do you have a dark car? And Barker drove a dark green car. And he said, yes. And he says, look, you've got to be careful.

I'm worried about you. And Barker says, are you afraid for my safety? and Hentcher says yes. The next morning, John Barker wrote a note titled Some Interesting Predictions in a Possible Death Sentence. Quote, I find it a little difficult to get off to sleep again and have, of course, decided to take extra care while driving. It would be wrong for me to say that I was not frightened by a prediction of this nature.

Having recently written a book on people who were scared to death, I am perhaps beginning to feel what this would be like. You know, this is a subject that he's been studying for the last four years, and suddenly he's been told that he's in danger, and you can tell he's unsettled by it, but he's also desperately curious about it and sort of wants to see what's going to happen. You know, he talks about taking precautions.

He talks about contacting Henscher and kind of asking his advice, about things. It's sort of where the experiment starts to break down between the kind of the experimenter and the subject. Before John Barker started going on speaking tours with his book, he saw Alan Henscher, who repeated his concerns. Alan thought something might happen to John in his home. He told him, I think you're going to have some trouble. John told Lorna Middleton about Alan's warning. She agreed that. that there was good reason for him to be careful. She dreams about Barker in the large black car arriving to sort of take Barker off,

and she recounts these to him. How did this start to affect Barker? I mean, if this were me, I would, this would be harm. This would be really bad. It's a stressful time. It's a stressful time. There's no question because Barker is, he's under huge pressure at work. He publishes his book.

He's told off, he's reprimanded by his boss and by the kind of local National Health Board supervisors for sort of straying out of his lane and yeah, and he's getting these warnings for his life at the same time. After John Barker died, the Premonitions Bureau kept going for a while longer, but eventually the project wound down. Jennifer Preston, the assistant at the Evening Standard, kept all of the notes they'd collected.

And for years, she had filing cabinets holding more than 3,000 premonitions sitting in her house. Premonitions Bureau, I mean, was it a failure in some sense? I mean, did anything actually come of it? No disasters were reverted, and the files just sat. It was definitely a sort of failure in a sort of objective sense of the thing that they wanted to build, a kind of national early warning system

with the nation sending in their dreams and presentiments and feeding this into a sort of 1960s room-shaped computer that never came to pass. I think that it succeeded in the sense of giving a kind of home for these questions, acknowledging that prophecy and seeing the future. It's a central part of however, Every human culture has tried to make sense of the future and to think about time.

Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of criminal, you can see them at this iscriminal.com. And you can sign up for a newsletter at this

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