The Premonitions Bureau

Summary

Criminal: "The Premonitions Bureau"

Podcast: Criminal (Vox Media Podcast Network)
Host: Phoebe Judge
Guest/Expert: Sam Knight (writer, author of "The Premonitions Bureau")
Date: July 31, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Criminal examines the story of the Premonitions Bureau, a real-life mid-1960s British experiment to scientifically collect and investigate psychic premonitions, particularly those that seemed to predict disasters. Triggered by the devastating Aberfan mining disaster, the episode explores the history of the tragedy, the phenomenon of people claiming to foresee such events, and the efforts of psychiatrist John Barker to study and systematize these reports. Host Phoebe Judge and journalist Sam Knight discuss the science, skepticism, and the human yearning to predict or prevent catastrophe.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Aberfan Disaster: Tragedy and Omens

(01:05—09:43)

• Setting the Scene:

  • October 21, 1966: The Welsh mining village Aberfan is devastated by an avalanche of coal waste, burying a school and several homes in minutes as children begin their day.
  • Several people, including a dance teacher in London (Lorna Middleton), a switchboard operator (Alan Hencher), and a 10-year-old Aberfan girl, had disturbing dreams or sensations of impending doom leading up to the event.

• Expert Commentary:

  • Sam Knight paints a vivid picture of Aberfan as a village inextricably linked to coal mining, marked by the dangers of massive unstable waste piles (03:02).

• Immediate Aftermath:

  • 144 people died, including 116 children aged 7-10 (07:44). Rescue efforts were overwhelmed; donations and offers of help poured into the shattered community (08:13).

“The fact that on some level this was foreseen...the practice of piling waste like this was just so obviously reckless. All those things kind of combined immediately to make it a singular tragedy in the British imagination.”
—Sam Knight (09:43)

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Official Negligence and Public Outrage

(09:43—11:42)

• Systemic Failure:
  • The disaster was not wholly unforeseen; Aberfan’s town council had repeatedly warned the National Coal Board about the unstable waste piles.
  • A tribunal condemned the Coal Board’s “bungling ineptitude and a total lack of direction from above” (10:51).

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John Barker: The Psychiatrist Drawn to Premonition

(11:42—15:08)

• Who Was John Barker?

  • A well-educated, ambitious psychiatrist, Barker was both a man of science and an investigator into the occult, fascinated by premonitions and prophecy.
  • He came to Aberfan initially to investigate reports of someone dying from fear (“scared to death”) but stayed after hearing about psychic visions leading up to the tragedy.

• Turning Point:

  • Barker learns of the Aberfan girl’s nightmare ("I dreamed...there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it." [13:47]).
  • He hypothesizes that people outside Aberfan might also have had such premonitions.

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Gathering Evidence: The First Premonition Cases

(15:08—17:07, 18:44—22:29)

• Collecting Premonitions:

  • Barker, with journalist Peter Fairley, invites the public to submit dreams or visions about Aberfan via the London Evening Standard.
  • Out of 76 responses, he finds 22 credible and 7 "especially interesting" cases (including Lorna Middleton and Alan Hencher).
  • Both Lorna and Alan have histories of intense, sometimes debilitating, psychic experiences associated with disasters.

• Personal Accounts:

  • Lorna Middleton: Described as a lifelong “seer,” her premonitions are compared to “knowing the answer in a spelling test” and are a source of both fascination and social discomfort (19:12, 19:48).
  • Alan Hencher: His prophecies are accompanied by migraines and had begun after a traumatic brain injury (21:44, 22:09).

“I accept I’m able to foretell certain events, but I have no idea how or why.”
—Alan Hencher to John Barker (22:29)

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The Premonitions Bureau: Systematizing the Supernatural

(27:29—32:29)

• From Anecdote to Experiment:
  • After being snubbed by a TV show host for being “too strange,” Barker and Fairley resolve to collect premonitions before events happen to sidestep accusations of hindsight bias (28:43–28:55).
  • The Premonitions Bureau is formed: anyone can send in (by phone, postcard, telegram, letter) visions about future disasters; these are classified and tracked for accuracy.
  • The aim: to see if a national “early warning system” could be created—decades ahead of the concept of social networks and data aggregation.

“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…and sort of algorithms, before they happened.”
—Sam Knight (32:10)

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Striking Results and Surprising Hits

(32:29—43:05)

• Early “Successes”:

  • March 1967: Alan Hencher calls Barker, foreseeing a plane crash involving 123–124 people; four weeks later, a plane crashes in Cyprus, killing 124 people (33:35–34:31).
  • April 1967: Lorna Middleton reports a vision of an astronaut dying in space—days later, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is killed when his capsule crashes (38:32–40:34).
  • October 1967: Both Alan and Lorna foresee a deadly train accident; soon after, a train bound for Charing Cross derails, killing 49, confirming many details of their visions (41:25–42:28).

• Statistics:

  • After one year, the Bureau claims 18 verified premonitions out of hundreds received—a ~3% “hit rate” (43:05).

“One newspaper headline read, ‘Strange case of the two who Knew.’ John Barker told a reporter, ‘Quite honestly, it staggers me.’”
—Phoebe Judge (42:28)

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Criticism, The Nocebo Effect, and the Limitations of Prophecy

(37:20–41:05, 47:18–47:31)

• Skepticism:

  • Critics called the Premonitions Bureau “unscientific and biased,” a collection of random guesses bolstered by chance (40:34).
  • Sam Knight and Phoebe Judge discuss the concept of “voodoo death” and the nocebo effect—how belief or fear alone can have real physiological effects (37:27–38:32).

• Did it Work?

  • By the Bureau’s own admission, no disaster was ever averted, and nothing like the envisioned national warning system was created.
  • Instead, its significance may lie in the way it gave voice (and a sort of home) to the age-old human desire to foretell or understand the future (47:31):

“It succeeded in…acknowledging that prophecy and seeing the future, it’s a central part of how every human culture has tried to make sense of the future and to think about time.”
—Sam Knight (47:31)

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The Bureau’s Demise and John Barker’s End

(43:21–46:56)

• Personal Toll and Tragic End:

  • John Barker suffers a brain hemorrhage and dies in August 1968, age 44 (43:28).
  • Eerily, Alan Hencher had warned Barker he foresaw danger around him, and both Alan and Lorna had premonitions (44:05–46:13).
  • Barker was fascinated but also deeply unsettled by these warnings—it brought his intellectual experiment uncomfortably close to home.

• Aftermath:

  • The Premonitions Bureau wound down not long after Barker’s death, with thousands of predictions archived but no further institutional support (46:59–47:18).

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “The scale of the tragedy, the fact that so many children were involved… All of those things combined to make it a singular tragedy in the British imagination.”
  —Sam Knight (09:43)

• “Is this perhaps an unrecognized medical or psychosomatic syndrome? …A pre-disaster syndrome.”
  —John Barker (22:29 paraphrased)

• “David Frost took one look at them… and decided they were too, too strange and motley to go on stage.”
  —Sam Knight (28:15)

• “Barker’s vision… was collecting dreams and visions on a mass scale. He wanted to connect them all to a computer… describing social networks and algorithms before they happened.”
  —Sam Knight (32:10)

• “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.”
  —John Barker (44:44)

• “It was definitely a sort of failure in a sort of objective sense… I think that it succeeded in the sense of giving a kind of home for these questions, acknowledging that prophecy and seeing the future... is central to how every human culture has tried to make sense of the future and to think about time.”
  —Sam Knight (47:31)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Aberfan disaster and premonitions: 01:05–09:43
• Official negligence and investigation: 09:43–11:42
• John Barker’s quest: 11:42–17:07
• Lorna Middleton & Alan Hencher’s stories: 18:44–22:29
• Establishment of the Premonitions Bureau: 27:29–32:29
• Recorded “hits”: 32:29–43:05
• Skepticism & failures: 40:34–41:05, 47:18–47:31
• Barker’s death & the Bureau’s end: 43:21–47:18

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Conclusion

The Premonitions Bureau episode braids a moving account of the Aberfan disaster with provocative questions about the nature of prophecy, collective trauma, and the boundaries of science. It highlights the lengths humans go to make sense of chaos, as well as the dangers and comforts of believing that disasters can be foretold. Ultimately, the Bureau’s statistical success was small, but its cultural impact endures as a curious episode in our quest to understand the future.

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For further reading:
Sam Knight's book, The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold
(Covered in the episode and mentioned at [48:24].)

Transcript

[Phoebe Judge]

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[Expert/Interviewee]

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[Narrator/Host]

in the early morning of October 21, 1966, a 52 year old dance teacher in London named Lorna Middleton suddenly woke up from her sleep.

[Expert/Interviewee]

It was around 6am she described waking up and experiencing a choking sensation and felt like she couldn't breathe. A kind of physical sensation in her in her throat and struggling to breathe.

[Narrator/Host]

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 Hencher 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 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 1960s?

[Expert/Interviewee]

So Aberfan was built pretty rapidly during the second half of the 19th century to be a mining village.

[Narrator/Host]

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%.

[Expert/Interviewee]

It was a place defined by the colliery and the activity of taking the coal out of the ground.

[Narrator/Host]

On the morning of October 21, 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 min.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 tramway. 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.

[Narrator/Host]

That morning, the men noticed something unusual.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 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. 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 10ft down the hillside in the night, and they were unhappy about the state of it.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

And so one of the guys was sent down the. Sent down the hill to kind of raise the news that the pile was unsteady. And while he was gone, it suddenly. 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.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

It kind of came thundering down and people in the village compared it to the sound of a low flying jet.

[Narrator/Host]

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 and as fast as a car goes into town. It traveled in the direction of Abervan's outermost street near the mountainside Moy Road.

[Expert/Interviewee]

There were two schools there, There was the primary school and the secondary school. And it's 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 kind of the last day of term before the half term break and they were suddenly buried.

[Narrator/Host]

A man described seeing doors and windows of buildings crashing in. Then he was pinned 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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

144 people died, 116 children.

[Narrator/Host]

Most of the children were between seven 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 1 and 2000 people volunteered to help dig for survivors. People showed up at a nearby hospital and offered to give blood.

[Expert/Interviewee]

So within hours the. The village is besieged by well meaning offers of help. 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.

[Narrator/Host]

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. Tinned 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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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.

[Narrator/Host]

Were people talking about how this could have been avoided.

[Expert/Interviewee]

Immediately you've got anger against the National Coal Board, which is the, you know, nationalized organization 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 are being asked at just a very kind of rational sort of engineering level.

[Narrator/Host]

Years before the disaster, Abervan's 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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

John Barker was a psychiatrist and he was a doctor at a large mental hospital that's about a hundred miles from Aberfan. And Barker was a, on the one hand, a 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, 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.

[Narrator/Host]

John Barker was collecting case studies for a book he was writing.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 Aberfan because he was interested in fear and the effect of fear on the human body. And in the early kind of confused reporting from Aberfan, 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, of Dr. Barker. And he came, he came rushing to Aberfan the next day to try and find this boy and what had happened to him.

[Phoebe Judge]

Did he find the boy when he got there?

[Expert/Interviewee]

No, he didn't find the boy because it was wrong that 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.

[Narrator/Host]

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 8 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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 Aberfan. And that was published just a week after the disaster. In the Evening Standard.

[Narrator/Host]

The article read, did anyone have a genuine premonition before the coal 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.

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[Narrator/Host]

Tell me, who was Lorna Middleton?

[Expert/Interviewee]

So Lorna Middleton was a music teacher and a dance teacher who practiced London during the Second World War and for the sort of for the decades afterwards. 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 gonna 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. A habit of. Of turning out to be true.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 sort of. It weighed on her.

[Narrator/Host]

Switchboard operator Alan Hencher also said he had recurring visions, but his often troubled him. He'd been at work when he had his premonition about Abervan.

[Expert/Interviewee]

He worked in a big building on the Embankment in London on the International switchboard, so, you know, pulling out cables, reconnecting them on these long shifts.

[Narrator/Host]

Allen 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 premonitions started.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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. Of the disaster. And then he would kind of a voice would say to him, like, it has happened, and it would be kind of accompanied by, by words or, or information.

[Narrator/Host]

Alan Hencher 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 Hencher'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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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, than it maybe is 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 a thousand 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.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

The hierarchy in his hospital was not receptive to really any sort of research agenda, let alone one that was. That was pretty fringe.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

If I tell you, you that something terrible is gonna 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?

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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, in the mid-60s and just seeing the words Aberfan on a kind of on a black screen in front of him.

[Narrator/Host]

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 miner, 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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

David Frost took one look at them through the door and decided they were too, too strange and motley to go on on stage.

[Phoebe Judge]

Him.

[Narrator/Host]

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

[Expert/Interviewee]

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.

[Narrator/Host]

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, how did the Premonitions Bureau log these? Would they take telephone calls? Would people send in mail?

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 Fairlie'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 were coming true.

[Narrator/Host]

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, to, to Fairley, we're not doing this. This is, this is too wild. This is too weird.

[Expert/Interviewee]

No, they didn't, they encouraged him. I mean, Peter Fairly's editor was Charles Wintour, who is the father of Anna Wintour, 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 Wintour had kind of sharp instincts both for what people wanted to read about and was missing, may be a little, a little trashy, a little dangerous, but also just might have some sort of scientific kind of plausibility somewhere.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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, before they happened.

[Narrator/Host]

But John Barker acknowledged that it was sort of a catch 22. If a disaster was averted and never happened, the 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 Hencher, to keep sending in their visions. One early morning in March 1967, around 6am the phone rang at John Barker's home. It was Alan Hencher. 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'd had a premonition that kept returning to him of a plane crash. Allen 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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

He can see lights flashing on and off. He can see a kind of a statue of Jesus. It gives a model of the plane called a caravel. 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 Premonition Bureau's records.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

At the time, it was maybe the fifth deadliest kind of plane crash on record. And the kind of the correlation between Hensch'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 premonition seems to have been borne out.

[Narrator/Host]

We'll be right back.

[Phoebe Judge]

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[Narrator/Host]

In the spring of 1967, John Barker was still working on his book Scared to Death.

[Expert/Interviewee]

It is trying to develop a thesis first formulated by Walter Cannon, who was the dean of Harvard Medical school in the 1940s about so called kind of voodoo death, you know, voodoo curses. If you say someone's gonna 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 nocebo effect, you know, which is the opposite of the placebo effect. You know, instead of giving you an inert sugar pills, 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 nocebo effect is kind of people suffering extreme symptoms even though there's nothing physiologically wrong with them.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 and 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 have sort of aren't working and he's going to have to steer his way back by hand, by skill alone, through the atmosphere, which is an incredibly difficult sort of bit of piloting to do.

[Narrator/Host]

It was decided that Komarov, who'd been to space before, would steer back through the atmosphere, back to Russia on his 17th orbit of Earth. Komarov 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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 Race, things are gonna go wrong. He's actually the first and one of the very few astronauts to actually die, you know, in space or re entering atmosphere. It was the first time that that ever happened. And she, she sent that in, you know, just a couple of days before.

[Narrator/Host]

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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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.

[Narrator/Host]

On October 11, 1967, Alan Hencher 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 hit a break in the tracks and four carriages flipped onto their sides. 49 people died.

[Expert/Interviewee]

And Hencher at the same time is on a shift at the switchboard complaining of a kind of worsening, worsening headache. Worsening, worsening headache until he gets sort of taken to the sick bay. The headache lifts and he says, you know, it's happened.

[Narrator/Host]

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%.

[Expert/Interviewee]

And they agree with, you know, with Wintour's kind of blessing to run the experiment for another year, mainly on the strength of kind of Hencher and Middleton's premonitions who do seem to sort of stand out.

[Narrator/Host]

John Barker was busy in 1968. He was giving lectures and interviews about his book and research.

[Expert/Interviewee]

And then he suffers a brain hemorrhage and dies in August 1968 at the age of 44.

[Narrator/Host]

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 Hencher at one in the morning. Earlier that day, the plane crash in Cyprus had been on the news, the one Alan Hencher seemingly predicted.

[Expert/Interviewee]

And Barker's sort of like, oh, are you calling back about the plane crash or expecting to hear sort of more details about that? And he says, no, no, I'm worried about you.

[Narrator/Host]

Alan Hencher said he'd been concerned about John all day. When he thought of him, his mind became all black. Allen asked John to check the gas supply at his house, but the house didn't have one.

[Expert/Interviewee]

And he says, do you have a. Do you have a dark car? And Barker drove a dark green car. And he said yes. And he says, look, you gotta be careful. I'm worried about you. And Barker says, are you afraid for my safety? And Hencher says, yes.

[Narrator/Host]

The next morning, John Barker wrote a note titled Some Interesting Predictions and a Possible Death Sentence. 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.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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 gonna happen. You know, he talks about taking precautions. He talks about contacting Hencher and kind of asking his advice about things. It's sort of where the experiment starts to break down between the kind of. In the subject.

[Narrator/Host]

Before John Barker started going on speaking tours with his book, he saw Alan Hencher, who repeated his concerns. Allen 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 Allen's warning. She agreed that there was good reason

[Phoebe Judge]

for him to be careful.

[Expert/Interviewee]

She dreams about Barker and the large black car arriving to sort of take Barker off. And she recounts these to him.

[Narrator/Host]

How did this start to affect Barker? I mean, if this were me, I would. This would be horrible. This would be really bad.

[Expert/Interviewee]

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.

[Phoebe Judge]

After John Barker died, the Premonitions Bureau

[Narrator/Host]

kept going for a while longer, but

[Phoebe Judge]

eventually the project wound down.

[Narrator/Host]

Jennifer Preston, the assistant at the Evening

[Phoebe Judge]

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.

[Narrator/Host]

Do you think that the Premonitions Bureau, I mean, was it a failure in some sense? I mean, did anything actually come of it? No disasters were averted and it kind of just the files just sat.

[Expert/Interviewee]

It was definitely a sort of failure in a sort of objective sense of the thing that they wanted to build. You know, a kind of national early warning system with the kind of 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 how every human culture has tried to make sense of the future and to think about time.

[Narrator/Host]

Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark and Lena Sillison. This episode was fact checked by Katie Cederborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see [e-mail] and you can sign up for a [e-mail] Newsletter. Sam Knight's book is the Premonitions A True Account of Death Foretold. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program Criminal. Plus you can listen to Criminal. This is love. And Phoebe reads a mystery without any ads. Plus you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co creator Lauren and Spore talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com criminal we're on Facebook at thisiscriminal and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal Underscore Podcast. We're also on [e-mail] criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast network. Discover more great [e-mail] I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.