So Supernatural - MYSTICAL: The Aberfan Premonitions

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

In 1966, an avalanche struck a school in Wales, killing more than 100 children. Afterwards, dozens of people claimed to have "seen" the disaster in dreams and visions before it happened — inspiring one psychiatrist to start Britain's first Premonitions Bureau. 

In 1966, one of the worst disasters of the 20th century hit the town of Aberfan, Wales. By the time it was over, 144 people had died, most of them children. It was horrible, I mean the kind of thing no one saw coming, except some people had. In the weeks that followed, people from all over Britain came forward claiming they'd had premonitions of the disaster mere hours before it occurred. There was even evidence that some of the Aberfan children had predicted their own death. So was it all a coincidence or were these premonitions meant to save lives? This is Supernatural. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week's episode is about the Aberfan Premonitions.

After an avalanche struck a village in Wales, people claimed they'd had dreams and visions of the disaster before it even happened. One doctor gathered enough evidence to actually study the phenomenon, but his efforts wound up destroying him. We'll dig into the mystery coming up. Stay with us. In 1966, Aberfan was a village of terraced houses and cobblestone streets nestled in a valley between green hills. It was a cute place to raise a family or maybe own a small business, but the town's lifeblood wasn't so much above ground, where the butchers and bakers worked. It was down below.

Aberfan was one of three different coal mining villages surrounding this massive underground mine, known as the Merthyr Vale. The mine employed about 800 men from Aberfan, so it was definitely the town's bread and butter. But it also posed some dangers, not just to the miners, but to the entire community. See, when you mine for coal, you have to remove a bunch of rock and dirt from underground first. This waste is thrown onto huge piles above ground known as spoil tips. The Merthyr Vale mine had seven of these spoil tips. The largest one,

spoil tip seven, sat on a hillside directly above Aberfan, and it was getting bigger every year. By 1966, it was over 100 feet high. So I mean, imagine looking out your window and seeing this huge mountain in the distance, except it's not a mountain. It could move. The tip already sat on top of a spring, which meant it was constantly damp, and rain could make it even more unstable. Too much waterlog, and theoretically, it could slide down the hill, posing a serious danger to anyone in its path. And in its path was the town's elementary school. Now, this had made people nervous for some time.

Three years before, in 1963, a mining engineer wrote a letter to the National Coal Board. He said Spoiltip 7 was a hazard to Aberfan, specifically the school. But the coal board brushed it off. They weren't worried, and they definitely didn't want the expense of moving it. Plus, there was a fear among workers that the board would close the mine. Coal was a dying industry. Oil was the next big thing. So if anyone made too big of a fuss, people could lose their jobs and the town would be ruined. So they just learned to live with it. But in early October 1966, it started to rain.

For weeks, Aberfan was pounded by storm clouds. It didn't let up until the early hours of Friday, October 21st. At about 7.30 that morning, a crane operator named Gwen Brown noticed that the top of Spoiltip 7 had sunk. I mean, like a good 20 feet. So picture this massive crater at the top of a ginormous dirt pile. Like, Brown couldn't even see the rails that normally carried debris to the top of the pile because they had literally sunk down into this crater. Brown wanted to call his supervisor right away, but at the time, the little booth on the top of the mountain was missing a telephone. So Brown sent his co-worker

down the slope to tell their bosses. By 9 a.m., engineers had come up, looked around, and decided the situation was dicey enough that they ordered all dumping to halt until further notice. Then they told Brown to move his crane and just went off to have a cup of tea. So basically, Brown was left alone, staring at this sunken tip, when all of a sudden, he saw the crater start to rise. Now, he didn't use this comparison exactly, but it sounded kind of like, like when you're watching a boiling pot of water overflow. And as the wet dirt leveled with the top of the mound,

it turned into a wave. But there was nobody to call. No way to reach anybody. At this exact moment, students at the Aberfan Elementary School were just beginning their classes. And this was actually their last day of school for a while. In just a few hours, their fall break would start and they'd have a week vacation. So there they are at their little wooden desks trying to pay attention when suddenly the unthinkable happened. At 9.15, there was a thunderous roar, like a jet taking off. 150,000 tons of rock and dirt rushed down the mountain. First, it hit a group of cottages, killing everyone inside.

Then it continued down the hill, picking up speed as it reached the school. The students and teachers saw the lights flicker. The building shook, and then everything went black. The entire school had been buried. It was pure chaos. People ran to the scene, mothers clawed at the dirt. They could hear their children's cries, but they couldn't reach them. It was just too deep. As the minutes ticked by, the slurry hardened into something almost like cement. People continued to dig, and by some miracle, a few lucky children, 10 in total,

were pulled out and saved. Four teachers were also rescued, but by 11 a.m., not even two hours since the mudslide, there were no survivors left. Anyone who hadn't been killed on impact had suffocated to death. The only thing the rescue workers could do was keep digging up the dead and bring each tiny body, one after another, to a nearby chapel where parents could identify them. When it was all over, 116 children had died, and most were between 7 and 11 years old. As you can imagine, this event shook Great Britain and the entire world. The disaster was front-page news everywhere, and the citizens of Aberfan were traumatized. They wanted justice, but they never got it.

The National Coal Board was held liable, but in the end, they escaped any kind of financial responsibility. I mean, no one even lost their job. Meanwhile, donations from all over the world poured into the coal board, totaling over 1.7 million pounds. The money was meant for Aberfan to help villagers cope with their loss and rebuild, but ultimately it paid for costs the board refused to shoulder, like getting rid of the remaining spoil tips. Each grieving family received a small donation of 500 pounds, and they had to fight for anything extra, like even for the cost of their children's gravestones. Now, money wasn't the only form of help Aberfan received. In the weeks following the disaster, people showed up at the village simply

to lend a hand. And one of those people was a 42-year-old psychiatrist named Dr. John Barker. Barker worked at a psychiatric hospital in Shropshire, England, and he was an odd mix of the old guard and the cutting edge. He'd been formally educated at Cambridge, but he was pushing to modernize mental health treatments in England. One area that fascinated him was the paranormal and the effect it had on psychology. At the time of the Aberfan disaster, Barker was studying something he called psychic death. This was basically cases of people who had visited a fortune teller or a psychic and were told when they would die. Then they did die when the psychic said they would, but not because of anything medically wrong with them. They'd simply collapsed from the stress and anxiety of knowing their prediction. It was this topic that brought

Barker to Aberfan in the first place. He'd heard a story about a little boy who actually escaped the school and lived, but who died later from fright. So one day after the disaster, Barker traveled from England to Wales to see if he could find any other cases. As he wandered around, he heard more stories from the parents of the deceased children. But these were different. It seemed that in the days and hours before the disaster, some children had actually sensed it coming. One boy, 8-year-old Paul Davis, had drawn a picture the night before of the tragedy. It showed a group of people digging through a hillside, and at the bottom

of the page, Paul wrote two words, the end. At the time, his parents hadn't known what to make of it. They basically shrugged it off. But when Paul died the next morning, his drawing had a new meaning. Then there was 10-year-old Errol My Jones. About two weeks before the disaster, Errol told her mom, out of the blue, that she wasn't afraid to die, and that when she did die, she'd be with her best friends, Peter and June. Her mom thought it was a morbid comment and just kind of changed the subject. But the day before the tragedy, Errol brought it up again. This time, she said she'd had a dream. In it, her school was gone because, quote, something black had come down

all over it, end quote. The next day, Errol was also killed. And just like she predicted, she was laid to rest between her best friends Peter and June. The more of these stories Barker heard, the more curious he became. It made him wonder if other people from outside of Aberfan had experienced premonitions too. When he got back home, Barker reached out to his friend Peter Fairley, a science writer at the Evening Standard newspaper. Barker pitched him an idea. What they needed was to put out a widespread call, asking people to write to them about any premonitions they'd had

in regards to the Aberfan disaster. Fairley was on board, and a week later, on October 28th, the paper put out the request. It was a little experiment that proved shocking, because over the next two weeks, the paper got 76 replies, most of them from people who had never even seen or heard of Aberfan before. Coming up, Barker uncovers strange stories about Aberfan. Now back to the story.

Of the 76 letters the Evening Standard received, only 16 seemed totally fake, or like they were about something other than Aberfan. But 60 of the writers seemed to be telling the truth. They had either dreamed about the disaster or seen it in a fantasy or a vision. Barker was fascinated by these people. He called them percipients, or basically people who can perceive the future. He knew their dreams and visions couldn't be a coincidence. And just to be extra cautious, he took the 60 letters and narrowed them down to the 35 that

seemed most on point. What's weird is that the vast majority of these people had no relationship to Aberfan whatsoever. No friends or relatives who lived there. And again, many of them had never even heard of Aberfan, much less visited it. Yet they each had dreams or visions about specific details of the tragedy. Black sludge or coal coming down a mountainside, adults digging, people wearing Welsh clothing or a miner's uniform, and children, lots of children crying or trying to escape, or even being overtaken by a black sticky substance. Another common theme was the name Aberfan. One man dreamed of the word lighting up in front of him like a neon sign. Another dreamed of it being spoken by a child. Now, just to be sure these were premonitions and not, you know, fantasies after the fact, Barker asked these 35 folks for proof that they'd experienced

their dream or vision before they heard about the tragedy. Not all of them could do this, but 24 of them could through sworn statements from friends and witnesses. And of these people, seven had experienced specific symptoms. They'd had kind of an emotional hangover following their premonition. They were called feeling anxious, sad, or apprehensive. A couple of them even felt a choking sensation. These feelings hung around, sometimes for days, until they saw the news and heard about the disaster, at which point the symptoms just went away.

One of these seven was 54-year-old Mary Hennessy. The night before the disaster, Mary had a dream that children were trapped in two rooms trying to get out. Wooden bars blocked their way and the children were doing everything they could to slip over or under the bars. One child finally managed to escape and the next thing Mary saw was a group of adults running frantically to the same place and crying. The dream was so disturbing, it woke Mary up. The first thing she thought of was her grandchildren. Now, they didn't live in Aberfan, and they were only toddlers, but she called her son a couple of hours later, telling him to take special care of the kids that day.

For the next few hours, Mary walked around feeling disturbed and sort of poised for tragedy. It wasn't until almost dinner time that she heard the news from Aberfan. Another percipient was Carolyn Miller, a 47-year-old woman from Plymouth, England. She claims she actually witnessed the entire disaster in a vision the night before. She saw a small schoolhouse at the bottom of a valley and somehow she knew it was in Wales. An avalanche of coal was descending over the village as a little boy watched and cried. Standing next to him was a rescue worker wearing a cap with a peaked brim. The next day, when Carolyn saw the news, she saw the same little boy from her dream, along with the same rescue worker, in the same hat being interviewed. It was stories like these

that hooked Barker. And as a psychiatrist, he wondered if people like Mary and Carolyn had some kind of undiagnosed condition. He even came up with his own theory. Barker called it pre-disaster syndrome, and he attributed it to a special ability to sense what he called telepathic shockwaves. In other words, the vibrations of a tragedy coming before it actually happens. Barker was psyched about his idea and dead set on gathering more examples of premonitions, preferably before a new disaster occurred. So he came up with a new experiment. With the help of his colleague Fairley, he convinced the editor-in-chief of the Evening Standard to set up a department at their paper called the Premonitions Bureau. The Bureau would publish a request for people to send their premonitions. Then they'd log every single disaster premonition they'd received and see if anything came to pass.

If it worked, it would be proof that pre-disaster syndrome was real. And ideally, Barker hoped to learn enough about premonitions that he could create some sort of early warning system. Meanwhile, he told his seven precipients to pass along any sense of foreboding they might have, no matter what it was about. In January 1967, two and a half months after the Aberfan disaster, the Premonitions Bureau was born. Almost right away, reports trickled in, but it wasn't until a few months later that one of them finally came to pass. In a 2019 New Yorker article about the Premonitions Bureau, journalist Sam Knight writes about a man named Alan Hencher. Alan was a 44-year-old telephone operator and one of the seven percipients Barker singled out after Aberfan.

On March 21st, 1967, he called Dr. Barker at 6 a.m. and told him he'd just had a vision of a plane crashing. Allen said it would be carrying around 123 people, maybe 124, but that they would all die. Barker wrote it down and waited. Nothing happened at first, but a month later, a Britannia jet crashed into a hillside in Cyprus, killing 124 people. It was almost exactly what Alan had predicted. Obviously, it wasn't exactly a moment to celebrate, but Barker felt vindicated. The Evening Standard even ran an article about the premonition alongside one about the crash. So he had to be feeling like all of his work was finally leading somewhere. And sure enough, later that year, on November 1st, another

of Barker's seven recipients had a premonition. Her name was Kathleen Middleton, and she claimed she'd had a vision that predicted a railway accident. According to Kathleen, it would affect a train on its way to London. She knew this because she'd seen a crowd of people standing on a platform and the words Charing Cross lit up. Four days later, it came to pass. A train on its way into London derailed and 49 people on board were killed. I should mention, though, that these two stories were some of the more noteworthy premonitions Barker received. By the end of its first year,

the Premonitions Bureau had received 469 premonitions. And while some of them had to do with disasters, many of them had to do with more frivolous things, like horse racing. And I'm not sure how many total came to pass. But behind the scenes, things at the Bureau were taking kind of a dark turn. Barker had become friendly with some of his precipients, and now they were beginning to have premonitions about him. The night of the airline crash in Cyprus, Alan Hensher placed a frantic call to Barker. He asked the

doctor to check his gas supply and told him he'd been worried about him all day. Barker said he didn't have a gas supply. And then he asked Alan if he thought his life was in danger. And Alan said yes. Coming up, a premonition seals Dr. Barker's fate. Now back to the story. When Barker found out Alan thought his life was in danger, he went ahead and told Kathleen Middleton, the recipient who had predicted the train crash. And then she started having premonitions about his death. For almost a solid week, Kathleen had visions of Barker's head and

shoulders appearing next to her dead parents. She assumed this meant that he would be dying soon, but there was nothing more useful she could say. Obviously, Barker was terrified, but also a little intrigued. And weirdly, this lined up with what he'd studied earlier in his career. Cases where people died of fright simply because a psychic predicted they didn't have long to live. So on the one hand, Barker knew he shouldn't dwell on his own death, or it could become a self-fulfilled prophecy. On the other, the whole point of the Premonitions Bureau was to see if it could help people prevent disasters. But in Barker's case and every other case he'd witnessed, there was nothing anyone could do to stop bad things from happening. And that's always the problem with premonitions, right? They're too

vague. No details, no dates, nothing that can actually help anyone prevent anything. This proved nowhere more true than the following year in 1968. As it turns out, there was someone else Kathleen Middleton was worried about. U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy. Starting in March of 68, she began seeing the word assassination in Senator Robert Kennedy. Starting in March of 68, she began seeing the word assassination in connection with Kennedy. By June, she was beside herself with worry, but she didn't know the date, the time,

who would kill him, or even where it would happen. She just knew that he was going to be murdered. It was all she could see, all that she could think about. So on June 4th, she put in three calls about it to the Premonitions Bureau. And later that very same night, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed. And like, obviously, it is wild that Kathleen predicted a literal assassination. But it's also kind of a reasonable fear surrounding any politician. Like, Kennedy's brother JFK had already been killed by that point.

Maybe Kathleen made a lucky guess based on something that had already happened. But Kathleen continued having bad feelings about Barker too. And the month after Kennedy's death, in July of 68, she had one last premonition about him. In it, she was having tea with her dead parents. She watched as her mother stood up and got into a waiting black car. To Kathleen, it was clear death was coming for someone, and that person she believed was Barker. She alerted the Premonitions Bureau on July 28th, and three weeks later, on August 18th, Dr. Barker had a sudden brain hemorrhage. He died upon reaching the hospital, and he was just 44 years old. Kathleen and Alan had both been right, and there was no way Barker could have

protected himself from something that random. So if you're like me, you're probably wondering, like, what is the point of having premonitions then? And where do they even come from? Is it some unseen force trying to warn us? And if that is the case, then it really doesn't make sense why premonitions are so vague. Like those two children in Aberfan, Paul and Errol, who both sensed that something bad would happen. Even if their parents had taken them seriously, it doesn't mean that they would have known how to protect them or even for how long. And again, it is hard to overstate just how much of an impact this disaster had on the country. For an entire village to be robbed of

its children was tragic. I mean, to this day, it still defines Aberfan. The people in the village never got over it. Divorce rates went up. alcoholism went up, 20 of the parents who lost children ended up dying prematurely. It's almost easier to believe that premonitions are just some cruel but otherwise meaningless coincidence. And when you look at history, you'll find a ton of examples. Let's rewind to 1898, about 70 years before the Aberfan disaster. That year, an author named Morgan Robertson published a short novel. It was about an ocean liner named Titan. In the book, Titan is thought to be unsinkable until it hits an iceberg,

at which point all hell breaks loose. There aren't enough lifeboats for everyone, and 2,500 people die as the boat sinks into the North Atlantic. As we all know, this actually happened, but 14 years later. In April of 1912, the Titanic ocean liner hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage, and just like in the book, there weren't enough lifeboats. 1,500 people died. It's almost as if Morgan Robertson saw the future, and it definitely would have been an easy claim to fame, but he insisted it was all a coincidence. Apparently, he just knew a lot about boats and the terrible things that can happen at sea.

He literally scoffed at the idea he was psychic. But there are so many other weird details in the book that match the real-life event. The Titanic was going almost the same speed as the Titan when it hit the iceberg. Both ships hit the iceberg in the same place. They were even the same size and carrying almost the same amount of people. I don't know about you, but coincidence is such a tough thing

for me to wrap my head around. It implies that everything is random when all we want is order and meaning. And if you think about an event like 9-11, coincidence almost goes out the window. There are entire books devoted to premonitions people had leading up to the attacks. I'm talking visions of burning buildings and debris falling. Others just had a funny feeling or a sense of dread.

And in some cases, it actually saved people's lives. In his book, The Science of Premonitions, author Larry Dossey talks about the planes that were hijacked and how empty they were, which is weird because these were routine flights. You'd think they'd be packed, but on September 11th, a day that started out like any other, the planes were at most only half full or even less. There's nothing rational to account for this except that maybe people decided subconsciously or not to skip their flight. Dossie also tells this strange anecdote about a woman he calls Becky. Apparently, Becky had booked tickets to Orlando on September 11th, but as the date got closer, she was overcome by just

this feeling of dread. And on September 4th, this is one week before the hijackings, she had a dream she was, quote, spinning into blackness, end quote. She woke up with a name in her head that sounded like Rooks or Horrocks. Becky wrote them both down because they seemed important. And a few days later, she canceled the trip. Then September 11th happened. The planes were hijacked and airports across the country shut down. Becky realized her flight to Orlando would have been canceled anyway, so it's not like she really avoided anything. Then she happened to hear the name of the pilot

whose plane crashed into the South Tower. It was Michael Horrocks, one of the names that had been stuck in her head after her dream. To be fair, I'm not sure how true the Becky story is because, again, this is all according to Larry Dossey and the other researchers. But at the very least, premonitions seem to tell us some part of the future. And maybe this is just some sort of instinct. Take the tsunami that hit Southeast Asia in 2004. It killed 230,000 people in at least 12 different countries. But when you look at the animal death toll, it's totally different.

In many areas, animals either flew or ran to safety before humans had any idea what was coming. There are a couple of theories of why this happened. One, the animals heard the underwater earthquake that triggered the tsunami. And two, they could feel the vibrations of the quake rippling across the globe. So this isn't so much a sixth sense as it is a heightened sensitivity. But if you think about it, that's basically the same thing as Dr. Barker's theory about pre-disaster syndrome. He described it as the ability to sense shock waves from an event before it happens. Still, there's one other possibility that may explain the premonitions of Aberfan, and it's what's known as inference.

Basically, a primary rule for studying premonitions is that whatever people claim to have seen or dreamed has to be original. It can't echo an event that has already happened and that the person might even subconsciously be afraid of. In other words, it can't be inferred from the past. For the people of Aberfan, they had a similar bad memory lurking in their subconscious. Mining accidents were common. Spoiled tips had slid before, not just in other villages, but in Aberfan itself, once in 1944 and once in 1963, just three years before the disaster. The 1963 slide wasn't big enough to have reached the village, but the community was aware of it. The danger of another one happening was probably on people's minds, and it's possible

a few parents spoke about it in front of their children and that the children internalized those fears. Maybe they were even old enough to remember the last avalanche. But what about the people outside of Aberfan who dreamed of black sludge and children crying? How do we explain that? The simple answer could be empathy. If there's one thing Aberfan seems to have taught us and that Barker's friendships with Alan and Kathleen taught him, it's that we're all somehow

connected. And when a tragedy threatens to sever that connection by striking in a dramatic and forceful way, maybe, just maybe, it can bend the rules of time and space. So next time you have a random dream about someone you've never met or somewhere you've never been, keep your ears peeled. You might be on to something before it even happens. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.