On 20 October 1966, a ten-year-old Welsh girl told her mother that she’d had a disturbing dream. “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there,” she said. “Something black had come down all over it.” The next morning, she went to school and was killed in the Aberfan disaster, when a coal slurry tip buried an entire village.
Are premonitions real? Can people actually predict disasters? John Barker, a 1960s maverick psychiatrist, certainly thought so. Fascinated by the Aberfan story, he established the Premonitions Bureau with the London Evening Standard, asking people to contact the newspaper with their predictions. Hundreds came forward, including two particularly gifted ‘percipients’. One of them described having seen a train crash and the words ‘Charing Cross’. Four days later, a train from Hastings to Charing Cross derailed, killing 49 people. And then she made her most sinister prediction of all: Barker’s own death. Sam Knight, a British journalist with The New Yorker magazine, tells Barker’s fascinating and eerie story in ‘The Premonitions Bureau’, which is soon to be a film after a 19-way auction amongst streamers and studios. It doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that it’s going to be a big hit.
Don’t miss Sam appearing at LitFest on Sunday 2 October at 2.30pm at The White Horse Bookshop (changed from previous venue of Marlborough Town Hall).