← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
Predicting Death: Strange History of the Premonitions Bureau
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- [00:01]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling. And if you would like After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
Sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week.
- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
Sam Knight
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- [00:33]
Kathleen Middleton
That sounds like a threat.
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Sam Knight
Then how do you think we should say it?
- [00:36]
Jennifer Preston
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- [00:38]
Kathleen Middleton
$25 a month for the rest of your life? I don't know. Until your ultimate demise.
- [00:44]
Sam Knight
What if we just say forever? Okay, $25 a month forever.
- [00:47]
Kathleen Middleton
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Kathleen Middleton
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Sam Knight
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- [02:06]
Jennifer Preston
The day before the disaster, 10 year old Errol Mai Jones said to her mother, mommy, let me tell you about my dream last night. Her mother answered gently but firmly, darling, I've got no time. Tell me again later. The child replied, no Mummy, you must listen. I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it. The next morning, the morning of 21st October 1966, there were men up on the hills above the village of Aberfan in Wales, where Errol Mai lived. There were always men up on this hill, you see. Aberfan was a mining town and these men slingers were getting ready to spend another day adding more black spoil from the coal mines to an already giant heap behind the town. Tip number seven, as it was known, had been growing for almost a decade and was 111ft high by this point. Picture a gigantic pyramid of dark black rocks perched on top of a rolling Welsh hill. But as soon as they reached the tip, the men saw something was wrong. That morning the heap had sunk considerably. Overnight. They sent a runner down the hill to the colliery office. The message came back, do not add any more spoil to the pile. A little while later, as they were having a cup of tea, they watched aghast as the tip rose up in front of their eyes almost like a mountain that had become liquid. Witnesses said it sounded like a low flying jet engine. As at 9:15am, dark glistening waves of spoil 6 meters high tore downwards, rolling terribly on towards Aberfan and its residents, who unaware were just beginning their day. Tragically, heartbreakingly, the town's two schools were the first buildings in its path. Erol Mai, who had had that dream that something black would swallow her school, was killed along with more than a hundred other young children that day. This disaster resulted in 144 deaths and remains a very real and very raw piece of history. For many, it's still a living memory. It's also remarkably, the starting point for today's story about the British Premonitions Bureau. Because among those who picked their way through the Aberfan community in the days after the 21st of October 1966 was a young English psychiatrist called John Barker. And it wasn't the rescue or cleanup operations he'd come to assist with. While there he learned about Errol Mai Jones vision of the disaster and other strange premonitions and coincidences that day too. Lives saved or ended seemingly by chance or out of character choices. By the time he left Aberfan Barker was enthralled with the possibility of precognition. What followed was a tale of clairvoyance, catastrophe, psychology and an incredible ending. Welcome to After Dark Today. It's the almost unbelievable history of the British Premonitions Bureau.
- [06:25]
Anthony Delaney
It is indeed. My name's Anthony and along with Maddie, we will be talking today with Sam Knight, a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the that both Maddie and I are reading at the moment. And oh my goodness, you need to get this book. It is. I'm not just saying this because he's a guest on the podcast. It is so well written and the story is just. Well, we're about to discuss some of it today. It's called the Premonitions Bureau and it's his nonfiction debut. And it's all about predictions, the uncanny, and how we continue, I think, to crave knowledge about what's to come. I think that's something that appeals to people, has always appealed to people. And Sam is here today, as Maddie said, to talk about the Premonitions Bureau and to tell us a little about the history of the British psychiatrist John Barker and his entanglement with a group of people who believed that they could sense when things were about to go wrong.
- [07:17]
Jennifer Preston
So, Sam, without further ado, and are gushing about this brilliant book. Welcome to After Dark.
- [07:24]
Kathleen Middleton
Thank you for having me. It's really a joy to be here.
- [07:28]
Jennifer Preston
We're going to talk about the terrible disaster in Aberfan, and we'll talk about that in some detail in a moment. But I wanted to ask you first. This book came out, I believe, in 2022, and having penned a book myself, I know how long these things take to write. And I'm assuming, therefore, that you wrote it during the COVID lockdowns, at least in part. And so, Sam, was this moment of writing in a global crisis and a crisis that no one really saw coming, Was this what sparked your interest in the subject? Or was this a long term project that just happened to coincide with a global disaster?
- [08:04]
Kathleen Middleton
Yeah, it's b. Yeah. No, I've been working on this and thinking about it for quite a long time. I mean, it's sort of, you know, my job is as a magazine writer. So you're sort of always kind of looking around for kind of ideas and thoughts that might sort of go somewhere and. No, this started a long, long time ago when I became interested in questions of premonitions and prophecy a bit in a way that I find kind of hard to exactly explain because this is a cliche among people who sort of believe in premonitions that they say, I'm not that sort of person, you know, but anyway, I'm not that sort of person. And I started reading kind of collections of prophecies and premonitions, many of which sort of 19th century or first half of the 20th century, the kind of heydays of British spiritualism and kind of telepathy and all those sorts of things. But I came across literally just a couple of mentions of this thing called the Premonitions Bureau from the mid-60s. And it just sort of leapt out at me immediately because of its name, because of its seriousness in a way. Like, it wasn't obviously an occult kind of operation and that. And that just kind of. It just drew me in from the start.
- [09:21]
Anthony Delaney
I have a terrible, terrible natural inclination with this particular conversation to just skip ahead because I've been reading the book and I'm just like, and now I want to talk about this particular thing. But I need. I realize I need to bring listeners on the journey with us. So let's just take a second to situate ourselves in Aberfan, I think probably is a good starting point and to highlight firstly how huge an impact this had in Britain and across the world at the time and how it, you know, continues to inspire drama, nonfiction works. We are confronted with this horrendous tragedy all the time. But there is an individual within that tragedy who is formative in this history, and that is John Barker. Sam, can you tell us who he is and what was he doing in Aberfan at that particular moment in time?
- [10:12]
Kathleen Middleton
Yeah, so John Barker was a psychiatrist. He was the deputy superintendent, so the kind of second in command, if you like, of a large mental hospital outside Shrewsbury in the west of England, near the Welsh border, but still about 100 miles from Aberban. And in October 1966, Barker got his day job looking after about 250 patients in this mental hospital. And at the same time, he pursues a kind of extracurricular research agenda which is very much his own. And it sounds pretty eccentric, and it sounds pretty out there in 2024. I think in the mid-60s, we have to be aware that the scientific mainstream was in a different place, and some ideas that we would not see as obvious bedfellows operated more closely alongside each other. But in the mid-60s, Barker is very interested in the question of, if I tell you something really bad is going to happen to you, I. E. You're going to die, does that make it more likely to happen? And, you know, as soon as I say that, it kind of. It brings to mind curses and kind of, you know, obviously supernatural things like that. But there's obviously an important physiological question here as well, which is, if I give you a terribly bad diagnosis, does your body somehow incorporate that news and make it more likely to come about? And Barker's really interested in this question, and he's starting to write a book about it. Barker's, you know, such a fascinating character to write about because on the one hand, he is a mainstream, classically trained Doctor on the other hand, he's hungry for fame. I think some of his experiments and some of the research steps that he takes in the 1960s, we immediately recoil from. We think they're brusque, you know, insensitive. But he's working on this study of people who've been scared to death, in his words. And he hears in the early news reports from Aber Van, a report which turns out not to be correct, that a boy escaped from the primary school, made his way home and then died of fright afterwards. And Barker literally gets in his car the following morning and drives to Aberfan. And I think it's worth pausing at this point just to underline how traumatic this industrial disaster was. As you kind of intimated, Anthony, it kind of immediately seared its way into people's hearts, obviously because of the huge number of children who died, but also because of the essential truth that there was a disrespect, a dishonouring, a lack of care for the coal mines and the coal mine workers of South Wales. And people could immediately see the class ramifications of this and just the horror. And so even within 24 hours of the accident, the village was besieged by well wishers and people trying to help, but also people coming to stare. It was a very, very complicated scene. And I still don't really know how Barker got in there, but he did, he was a doctor. There were kind of checkpoints, there were people trying to stop kind of random people getting into the village. He clearly managed to bypass that and really set about trying to make inquiries about this boy who he'd heard about on the news. And in his own kind of eyewitness description, he realized as soon as he arrived that he couldn't just go blundering about going into people's houses. He says it was immediately obvious that it would be inappropriate to do that. But nonetheless, he hangs around and he starts collecting stories and those stories are what kind of pricks his kind of scientific interest in what's happening.
- [14:10]
Jennifer Preston
This really comes across, Sam, in the opening of your book, when you talk about just the sheer amount of help that was immediately offered to Avavan. And I think you talk very sort of vividly about the amount of brandy bottles that were sent there, the amount of spades, you know, sort of practical items, but also items of comfort and help in other ways that would really just sort of flooded the town and that the atmosphere there was actually incredibly tense. There's one line in the book that really stood out for me where you talk about a Policeman kind of taking a break at one point and having a cup of tea. And someone throws, I think, a tobacco box or something that hits them in the face because they're just so sort of outraged by this man who's meant to be helping you, taking a moment for himself in the face of this terrible crisis. And it just seems remarkable to me that in this moment a man like John Barker would find his way into this environment and set about asking the questions that he does. We established that. That the story of the little boy who dies of fright isn't actually true. But he does come across these other stories, doesn't he? And stories of people who have had what seem like premonitions or made choices not to be present in the area that is then hit by the disaster, or indeed decisions to go to that area, and they've died as a result. Can you tell us some of those little anecdotal stories that he comes across?
- [15:30]
Kathleen Middleton
It's a collection. And, you know, right at the beginning, you kind of. You read the testimony of Errol May Jones. There's another boy who died in the disaster who'd made a drawing the night before which sort of seemed to show the recovery effort, so a kind of a mountain, coal, waste, helicopters. And he entitled it the End. And that drawing was found after the boy died. And as you say, these little almost kind of micro decisions or coincidences, you know, a school bus was late that morning. Those children lived, the others died. Some children paused on their way to school and were hit by the wave of waste as it hit the village. A boy overslept that morning, having never done so before in his life, and clearly didn't want to go to school on time and was kind of hurried out of the house by his mother and also died. And Barker began to kind of collect these. And the idea formed in his mind of a national experiment. Yes, these are children and people close to the disaster. But what if he could sort of send out a broader appeal to the whole country, saying, hey, did you have a dream or a precognitive vision that this event, you know, might have caused? And so he starts sort of sending out the word for that through his friend and kind of collaborator, who's a man called Peter Fairlie, who's the science editor of the Evening Standard.
- [16:55]
Anthony Delaney
So we have this. This national tragedy that is. And I really. That invocation of a nation pouring in sympathy and parts of material culture into this little Welsh village is so evocative. And then we have this idea that Barker is going around getting These different stories and gathering this different. These different pieces of information that apparently had come before the tragedy itself. But it seems to me that it's a bit of a leap from that information gathering to establishing a British premonitions bureau. So I'm just wondering if you can tie that link together for us.
- [17:38]
Kathleen Middleton
I think it's really important that Barker is already working on a body of research before he arrives in Aberfan. And obviously this question of if I give you a terrifying medical diagnosis, does that make something more likely to happen? There's a close relationship between that and having a premonition or a sense that something bad is going to happen to you. So Barker is a. He's ready, if you like, to pose a problem of this nature. You know, he's a member of this thing called Society for Psychical Research, which sort of been around since the 19th century and, you know, was originally set up to kind of run experiments to debunk and to test the occult and to test the supernatural. So Barker has a predisposition towards these questions and a predisposition towards experiment and trying to put these things on some kind of semi rigid scientific basis. So I think that's where it's not like he turns up in Aberdeen and then the big idea kind of fully forms, enters his mind. He's looking to test these ideas and Aberravan for its kind of the way that it. It kind of penetrates the national consciousness. And B, it's unusual nature. You know, his kind of starting thought is that if you've had a premonition about Aberfan, you couldn't get that muddled up with something else. It's not just a plane crash or a car crash or some other kind of calamity. Presumably these would be quite distinctive in. In people's minds. So, you know. But again, I come back to the kind of. To Barker's character at this point in that some of these things are hard to explain. Do you know what I mean? He steps ahead. There's a kind of heedlessness, an element of kind of poor taste here, which is kind of unavoidable. But he pushes forward in a way that, yes, others would not have done.
- [19:41]
Jennifer Preston
And it's really fascinating to me that he uses media, modern media, to start this search for, I suppose, a network of people, or at least a community of people who have experienced or believe they've experienced these similar premonitions. You mentioned earlier Peter Fairley, who is a journalist at the Evening Standard, and together they kind of team up, don't they and start to get people to write in, to connect in that way. And what emerges is, I think, not surprising for anyone who's ever looked into a history of British supernatural beliefs or sort of superstitions. It's not surprising that a lot of people do come forward and want to be part of this and feel that they have some valid experience to offer in this way. What I suppose might be surprising is that this is happening in the 1960s, not the 1860s or the 1760s.
- [20:36]
Kathleen Middleton
Yeah, and I think you're touching on kind of modern technology and modern media is really important for two reasons. And I think the first one is that the 1960s and really from the sort of the mid-1950s onwards, this is a period of dramatic kind of social and technological change. You know, it's so telling for me that Peter Fairlie's main job is covering the space race, right. He's commuting back and forth between London and Houston and Florida, writing about Gemini rockets and the Apollo program and then going through the latest submissions to the premonitions bureau at his desk at the Evening Standard. These things seem worlds apart, but in his mind they're not. Because science is doing impossible things every single day. And therefore the idea of some kind of breakthrough in the study of how our minds work doesn't seem as kind of impossible as it does now. And likewise, Barker works in a hospital. The first really kind of effective antipsychotic drugs start getting administered in the UK in 1955. Before that point, the kind of patients that Barker's looking after on a day to day basis were simply not treated at all. They might have had a leucotomy or a lobotomy or drastic surgery, or they just would have been sedated and kind of marooned in these hospitals. Barker, likewise in his medical scientific field, is also seeing dramatic change and dramatic possibility. So I think both men are working in fields where there are kind of measurable advances on a kind of monthly yearly basis. So therefore the idea that our brains work in kind of previously kind of not understood ways is not as kind of bonkers as it seems now. And Barker's vision for this is to collect enough dreams and visions and forebodings from the British public in order to feed them into a computer. And then the computer would be able to kind of read those and try and see whether the nation was dreaming or having bad feelings about some kind of collective thing, sort of looking for kind of what he calls peaks and patterns in the data, which, you know, to my mind describes a social network that we have now very well, you know. So Barker's constantly kind of stepping into the world of kind of ghosts and prophecy and kind of ancient like law and spiritualism and then back into science and progress and kind of rationalism. He's kind of, he's zigzagging between the two, which made him wonderful to write about, but it doesn't mean that he was right. Foreign.
- [23:32]
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- [26:55]
Anthony Delaney
It also doesn't necessarily mean that everybody in the 1960s thought that this was necessarily a credible pursuit. Right? And the thing that struck me about this is the naming of the institution that they found the British Premonitions Bureau. There's something very formal and authoritative or an attempt to be authoritative about this. And I would imagine firstly that that's purposeful that they have decided to do that to garner a little bit of reputational kudos. But can you tell us what did that actually look like if you went to work on a Monday morning at the British Premonitions Bureau? A, where are you going? And B, what are you doing? What does that look like on a practical level?
- [27:40]
Kathleen Middleton
So that's such a good question. And that's where you know, the Premonitions Bureau is part scientific study, it's part publicity machine, it's part, you know, it's a, it's a complicated little organism. But if you turned up to work in the morning at the Premonitions Bureau, your name was probably Jennifer Preston. And Jennifer Preston is one of my kind of favorite characters in this story. And she is the assistant to Peter Fairlie at the Evening Standard newspaper. So the Evening Standard at the time is just off Fleet Street. It's a kind of proper mid century newspaper with the presses kind of rolling in the basement kind of nine times a day. And then this kind of first floor newsroom, the typewriters clacking away. And Jennifer Preston was described by one of her colleagues as like a kind of captain in the army, right? So she is a born kind of coordinator and logistics person. And she is there next to Peter Fairlie at the kind of science desk in the middle of the newspaper, taking telephone calls, taking telegrams, taking letters from the public and then sorting them into 13 different filing cabinets, according to the different type of kind of premonition made. And Preston was, you know, one of these amazing people who very, very good at Latin, totally on top of the science. She herself had a kind of predisposition towards fortune telling. One of the favorite things I kind of found out about Jennifer Preston, one of her kids told me, is when, when the house needed repointing, she hired some scaffolders to do the scaffolding and then just repointed her entire house. Just one of these kind of autodidact, kind of wonderful characters who is running the kind of bureau on a kind of logistical basis. And then you have Fairleigh, who is writing about it, newspaper going on the radio, hustling for publicity and getting public awareness because obviously the kind of more predictions that they can collect, the better. And then the kind of information and data is sent to Barker at Shelton Hospital just outside Shrewsbury, where he. Again, you can imagine there's a thousand patients, four consultants. He's responsible for a quarter of them, plus doing kind of outpatients, going to visit patients in the Welsh and English countryside around Shrewsbury and coming back to his house in the evenings and kind of going through the kind of the latest information and phone calls and trying to make sense of it all. So the kind of the bureau is this. It's really an experiment, but it's an experiment kind of running alongside a newspaper b a mental hospital and see the kind of scientific coverage of space race, lasers, atomic energy. It's kind of existing alongside those things.
- [30:22]
Jennifer Preston
I love that it combines all of those things together also. I feel like we absolutely need the film of this from Jennifer Preston's point of view immediately.
- [30:30]
Anthony Delaney
Please sell those rights.
- [30:32]
Jennifer Preston
Yeah, please do. This is so great. Let's talk about another character in the book, though, one of the really the star correspondents of the Bureau, and that's a woman called Kathleen Middleton. You actually open the book talking about Middleton and what on the surface seems like a fairly mundane life. She's a piano teacher. She has this, I suppose, slightly aspirational glamorous youth that appears to have slipped by and been replaced by a sort of suburban, steady existence. But she is someone who has these experiences on a regular basis and as you detail in the opening pages of the book, has sort of escaped disaster at multiple points in her life because of these feelings that have come to her. So can you tell us a little bit about who she is, what she's all about, and how she becomes caught up with the bureau?
- [31:29]
Kathleen Middleton
You know, it's a Very deliberate choice to start the book and to start the story with her, with Ms. Middleton, as she was known because she was this local piano and ballet teacher. And it's something I come across in my work. It really sort of depends how you introduce people and how you introduce stories. And I wanted people to encounter her first as. As a person and as a kind of complex person, and then learn about her involvement with the occult and visions and premonitions, because it's very easy to categorize people and projects like this one as somehow over there, as somehow eccentric, as somehow kind of my least favorite word, you know, quirky. Whereas, in fact, these things are part of social history and part of our collective history, and they kind of exist for a reason. And Ms. Middleton was a kind of child performer, a kind of child. Child star who moved back to the UK from the US with her English parents when they lost all their money during the Depression. And as you say, it just kind of passed her by. She couldn't go to a good ballet school in London. She didn't have the money. She sets up a kind of ballet school in the kind of front room of their house in Edmonton, in North London. And she's someone who has visions and premonitions throughout her life. She doesn't work as a psychic. She doesn't attempt to make money out of it. And when she reads about Aberfan and she has her own premonition of Aberfan, when she reads about that experiment in the press, she starts kind of sending in her thoughts and her visions to the Bureau. And in the end, Barker's particularly kind of. Barker's kind of witnessing of her and sort of taking these things seriously means an enormous amount to her in her life, and she remembers it for the rest of her life. And I think. I think there's something in common with kind of all the characters involved in this book and often involved in questions around the supernatural in the occult, is that people are. I'm generalizing here, but I'm going to generalize. People are often reaching for something. They're often reaching for something that didn't come true in their own life or some kind of traumatic tragedy that they are trying to kind of restitch or trying to sort of find some higher purpose in order to make sense of something that's missing. Do you see what I mean? And I think she's definitely a person for whom. For whom that is the case.
- [33:53]
Jennifer Preston
Yes. I mean, you talk a lot about her experience during the Blitz. And there's one particular story you Tell about when she chooses not to go dancing, when the bombs are falling and her and her friends stay home instead because they have this feeling that something bad is coming. And actually the place that they were going to go dancing in does get destroyed and there's a whole busload of people outside who are also tragically killed and, you know, they avoid this terrible fate. And I wonder how much the Second World War and that experience of war being brought into the urban environment, the domestic environment of everyday people not fighting in the forces, how much that then shaped the interest in the occult. I mean, we see it have a huge increase after the Second World War. We see seances and spiritualism, obviously have this huge moment. And I Wonder in the 1960s if that is partly an echo or a sort of ramification of experience at home during the Second World War. Do you think that in Middleton's life that does play a part?
- [34:52]
Kathleen Middleton
I think it has to. I think it has to. And I think all of the people taking part in the Premonitions Bureau lived through the Second World War. And I think there's no question that you're seeing the kind of after effect of this sense making, right? We're talking about trying to make sense of a chaotic, terrifying experience. And that happens after Aberfan in exactly the same way. And you mention Middleton's experience during the Second World War and that was a V2 bomb landing on a dance hall in Edmonton, which became part of daily reality for Londoners in the latter stages of the Second World War. Even when the war seemed to be heading towards a positive conclusion for the Allies, you had this menace of kind of random bombs landing on the city with kind of terrifying effects. And people would come up with their own logic for how to navigate the city and say, oh, well, that, you know, a V2 hit Clapham yesterday, so it won't hit Clapham again today. Do you see what I mean? And kind of. Or they, if I hear the siren at this time, then I'll go out. People would make their own rules for kind of, for making sense of it. And the V1 and V2 bombs are especially interesting because after the war people studied where they fell and it was entirely random. There was no logic. But because we're humans and because we have to find ways to organize these experiences, we impose our own logic on them and, you know, to make a connection with Aberfan, you know, this unbelievable kind of tragedy happened and people. The first, not the first, but the second or the third question is, how did this come to pass? How did we not see that it would come? And when you hear the voices, particularly of children apparently seeing it coming, that's obviously meaningful. Or is it meaningful? But we want it. We want it to mean something because we're trying to make it make sense in some way.
- [36:47]
Anthony Delaney
One of the most striking things when you write about Kathleen is, and you've kind of said how this comes about, but she emerges as a very credible person, I think, and somebody who you would be inclined to listen to and to take on board what she's saying. So just what are some of the predictions that Kathleen is thought to have made, apart from you hinted there that she had made some kind of a prediction around Abraham herself. But beyond that, are there others that people might be aware of?
- [37:19]
Kathleen Middleton
So I'm immediately, you know, conscious of it matters how you present this, present this information. Ms. Middleton's predictions that really caught Barker's attention were she became very worried about an astronaut in space in March of 1967, just about six months after of Abavan, and sent a note and the sending of her letter with a little kind of drawing attached where she was very scared about what would happen to an astronaut in space kind of coincided with the death of Komarov, a kind of Soviet cosmonaut who died when his craft kind of reentered Earth's atmosphere and the parachutes failed to deploy. He was actually the first astronaut of any nation to kind of to die. She was very insistent about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Again, you could argue, not a terribly hard thing to predict given political violence in the US and what had happened to his brother. But nonetheless, she made three predictions on the day that he was killed. But the one that really kind of, I find very kind of difficult to get my head around was of a train crash in November 1967, where Ms. Middleton was sitting in her kitchen in Edmonton and suddenly had this kind of wave of depression and exhaustion. And she scribbled down on a piece of paper that there would be a train crash. And she could see people standing on a train platform. And it was at Charing Cross station in London. And she sent this kind of scrappy note off to the bureau. And then that weekend, three days later, a train came off the tracks eight miles outside Charing Cross, an express train. And more than 40 people were killed in South London. And so they range from being the kind of headline kind of news orientated predictions to things which kind of border on the edge of things which were easy to explain.
- [39:17]
Anthony Delaney
There is then, of course, this perfect, well, Maybe not perfect for everybody, but perfect narrative ending to this history. And it sees not only the end of Barker, but the end of the bureau itself too, essentially. Because Fast forward to 1968, two years after Aberfan Barker dies suddenly of a brain embolism. And I mean, this is really hard to believe, but it's also kind of fitting because this death, Barker's death, has been predicted by his own experiment.
- [39:45]
Kathleen Middleton
Yes. So you have to bear in mind that kind of Barker's starting point for this research is what happens to you if someone tells you you're going to die? Does that make that more likely to happen? And about six months into the experiment, he gets a call at his home outside Shrewsbury from a man called Alan Hencher. And Alan Hencher is also a very kind of successful percipient, as Barker calls them, a successful kind of contributor to the bureau. And Hencher calls him anxiously at one o'clock in the morning and says, look, I've been thinking about you all day, I'm really worried about you and I think you're gonna die, and gives this news to Barker, who, you know, at this point is 43 years old with four young children. And in this bizarre way, the experiment kind of closes in on Barker.
- [40:41]
Maddy Pelling
It's an incredible end to an incredible story. But the note that I want to end on is this. On this show, we're often coming up against, on the one hand, claims from history of the supernatural, of the kinds of different folklore and mythologies, and we're always trying to look for the historic fact within that. And you've been doing that with this story today, Sam. That said, I do find Barker's death and some of the predictions, like Middleton's prediction of the train crash, quite remarkable and honestly, quite hard to reconcile. I know the counterargument to that would be to look at the other predictions that were sent to the bureau and how many of those were wrong and never went anywhere and were never counted. But my question for you is, what you think is going on here? Is this just enough people send enough predictions in, eventually someone's going to get something right? Is that what's going on here? Or do you think that there is some kind of supernatural element to it?
- [41:47]
Kathleen Middleton
Look, it's a complicated question to untangle. Let's be cold rationalists for a moment. About 3% of the predictions sent to the British Premonitions Bureau were kind of recorded as being kind of successful predictions or premonitions. 3%. Frustratingly for us, it's right around the kind of Margin of error, which is kind of often the case with parapsychological studies. They're kind of. There's an effect there, but is it repeatable? It kind of borders on the edge of being statistically significant. And you're left with this kind of. This kind of unresolved feeling of like, well, did it amount to anything? Did it prove anything? I think that we're definitely talking about the law of large numbers here in the British population. The number of people kind of having dreams every night. It's the same reason that someone wins the lottery every week. You know, it's impossible, looking at the odds, but nonetheless, it happens every week. Right. So there's definitely that going on. But I think we're also talking about ourselves and we're also talking about our own witnessing of these. Of these things. People look at these experiments existing kind of out there in the world, and then they have their own lived experience. And it's very common for families to hold a precognitive or a kind of prophetic experience, either in their generation or the generation before, which has nonetheless had effect and has changed people's lives for good or for bad. Whether it. Whether it was a true precognitive experience or not is kind of beside the point. It's the fact that our lives and our behavior is changed as a result. So kind of I really wanted to write this book about that real side of the Premonitions Bureau, if you know what I mean, about its origins in real people's lives and the way it changed them and the way it marks them. And so therefore, it's not a way of kind of dodging the science, because in a way, everything we know about science tells us that time moves forward and you can't see things before they happen. That's the way it goes. But nonetheless, the feeling that you can, or the feeling that the curtain parts for whatever reason, and there is that connection with the future. It's part of what makes us human. And I think that's also unavoidable.
- [44:10]
Anthony Delaney
At the same time, I think that's the perfect place to leave it. Thank you, Sam, so much for coming in to talk to us about this just bizarre and incredible slice of British history. It was really eye opening, actually. And if you've enjoyed listening to Sam talk, then please do rush out and get your hands on his book, the Premonition Bureau. It's so well written. I really have enjoyed reading it so far. It's a wonderful read and there are just so many characters in there, and it really does lift the veil on this particular past and looks at kind of the eccentric edges to British society that we're always talking about here on After Dark. But for more modern British paranormal history, then you can also check out our episode, of course, of the Enfield Poltergeist from earlier this year. Thank you for listening to this episode of After Dark. We are of course coming up to Christmas, as that slave valve I hear in the background. So don't forget to give your loved ones the greatest gift of all. A recommendation for a wonderful new podcast to listen to in 2025. Guys, I'm talking about us. After Dark. Spread the word and we'll see you next time.
- [45:20]
Sam Knight
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Kathleen Middleton
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Sam Knight
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Kathleen Middleton
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Sam Knight
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Kathleen Middleton
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