Mysteries of the Mind and Senses (Strange Unsolved Mysteries)

Premonitions of Disaster Certain psychic individuals receive advance warning or knowledge of an event before it actually happens. This is called a premonition or precognition, and can occur in the form of a dream, a strong feeling, or an overpowering vision. Even more amazing is when dozens of unrelated individuals have similar premonitions of the same, single disaster. This is exactly what happened in an incident described by Herbert B. Greenhouse in his bookPremonitions: A Leap into the Future. Beginning in mid-October of 1966, dozens of people living in England began feeling nervous and uneasy. On October 14, a man named Alexander Venn remarked to his wife, "Something terrible is going to happen, and it won't be far from here." According to Greenhouse, Venn couldn't stop thinking about coal dust. Three days later, another man felt there would be a horrible disaster and that it would occur on Friday. The feeling was so strong he told a girl in his office, "On Friday, something terrible connected with death is going to happen." On Thursday night, October 20, several people in different areas of England dreamed of being smothered in blackness. Earlier that morning, nine-year-old Eryl Mai Jones told her mother about a strange dream she had. "I went to school," she said, "and there was no school there. Something black had come down over it." At the same time, a woman named Mrs. C. Milden had a haunting vision of a small school in a valley and "an avalanche of coal rushing down a mountainside." On the morning of Friday, October 21, Sybil Brown awoke after having a nightmare of a child followed by a black mass. She told her husband, "Something terrible will happen." Simultaneously, a man had a strange dream in which a bright light spelled out A-B-E-R-F-A-N. Little did the man know that there was a tiny village in South Wales called Aberfan. Aberfan was located in a valley at the base of a mountain. According to Greenhouse, Pantglas Junior School was located six hundred feet below the top of the mountain, which was used as a dumping ground for huge amounts of coal waste from the nearby mines. At 9:15 on that same Friday morning, Monica McBean had a sudden vision of a "black mountain moving and children buried under it." Moments later, the mountain of coal waste, weighing one million tons and reaching forty feet high, roared down the slope and completely buried the school, a row of terraced houses, and a farm that had stood in its way. Many of those who had premonitions of the disaster didn't hear the tragic news until later that day or the next morning. Out of 144 people who died, 116 of them were children. One of those children was Eryl Mai Jones. In a survey done after the Aberfan tragedy by J. C. Barker, a London psychiatrist, almost two hundred people claimed they had premonitions of the disaster. They either had a dream, a vision, or a feeling that something horrible was going to happen. Were all two hundred claims valid premonitions? Was it just coincidental that so many people had similar feelings of disaster? Dr. Barker believes certain psychic people sense upcoming calamities, similar to the way a seismograph records movements of the earth in earthquakes. Can these human seismographs actually predict future catastrophes? And if they can, will people take them seriously? Would you? Copyright 1995 by RGA Publishing Group, Inc..Phyllis Raybin Emert is the author of 'Mysteries of the Mind and Senses (Strange Unsolved Mysteries)', published 1995 under ISBN 9780812536331 and ISBN 0812536339.