The Premonitions Bureau

On October 21, 1966, a woman named Lorna Middleton suddenly woke up from her sleep, struggling to breathe. The day before, a man named Alan Hencher was at work in London when he began to tremble all over. They both said they knew something terrible was about to happen. Sam Knight’s book is The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  How far would you go to have a healthy baby?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. But there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  This week on Explain It To Me, the ethics of embryo maxing. Listen to new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  In the early morning of October 21st, 1966, a 52-year-old dance teacher in London named Lorna Middleton suddenly woke up from her sleep. It was around 6:00 AM.

• 1:24Speaker 04

  She described waking up and experiencing a choking sensation and felt like she couldn't breathe, a kind of physical sensation in her throat and struggling to breathe.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  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 Aberfan reportedly told her mother that she'd had a bad dream.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  She'd dreamt that she was on her way to school, but the school in Aberfan was gone. It was covered in something black.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Tell me about the village of Aberfan. What was the village like in the 1960s?

• 2:56Speaker 04

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

• 3:07Speaker 03

  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?

• 3:20Speaker 04

  100%. It was a place defined by the colliery and the activity of taking the coal out of the ground.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  On the morning of October 21st, 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 mines.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  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

• 4:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  That morning, the men noticed something unusual.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  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 dead tree 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 10 feet down the hillside in the night,

• 5:34Speaker 04

  and they were unhappy about the state of it.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:51Speaker 04

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

• 6:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  The men couldn't see the village below them. They just saw the coal pile disappear in a black cloud.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  The men started running down the hillside shouting, trying to warn people about the collapsing heap.

• 6:30Speaker 04

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

• 6:37Speaker 03

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

• 7:03Speaker 04

  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 last day of term before the half-term break. And they were suddenly buried.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  A man describes seeing doors and windows of buildings crashing in. Then he was pinned under a piece of iron. And then, he said, "Everything became quiet."

• 7:41Speaker 03

  When it was all over, miners and villagers gathered in the street and began digging through the debris for survivors.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  144 people died, 116 children.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  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 Aberfan to help. Sam Knight writes that somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 people volunteered to help dig for survivors. People showed up at a nearby hospital and offered to give blood.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  So within hours, the village is besieged by well-meaning offers of help, which become 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.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  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, tin 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.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Were people talking about how this could have been avoided?

• 10:23Speaker 04

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

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Years before the disaster, Aberfan'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 Aberfan disaster could and should have been prevented."

• 11:37Speaker 03

  The morning after the disaster, while rescue workers were still digging bodies out of the debris, a man named John Barker drove into Aberfan.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  John Barker was a psychiatrist and he was a doctor at a large mental hospital that's about 100 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.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  He was interested in visions and prophecy and premonitions.

• 12:35Speaker 03

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

• 12:39Speaker 04

  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 Dr. Barker. And he came rushing to Aberfan the next day to try and find this boy and what had happened to him.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Did he find the boy when he got there?

• 13:16Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  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'd experienced. And then he heard the story of the 10-year-old girl in Aberfan who, the day before the disaster, dreamt her school was gone.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  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 eight-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 Aberfan had had premonitions of the disaster too.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  The article read, "Did anyone have a genuine premonition before the coal tip fell on Aberfan? 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

• 16:27Speaker 03

  on the morning of the disaster with a choking sensation and a sense of foreboding. And Alan Hencher, the switchboard operator who'd started trembling while he was at work the day before and had told his coworker 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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• 17:43Speaker 03

  Tell me, who was Lorna Middleton?

• 17:47Speaker 04

  So Lorna Middleton was a music teacher and a dance teacher who practiced in 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.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  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 going to 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.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  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 mother just asked her to stop telling her things because they had a habit of turning out to be true.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  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 weighed on her.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  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 Aberfan.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  He worked in a big building on the embankment in London, on the international switchboard, so pulling out cables, reconnecting them on these long shifts.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Alan 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 premonition started.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  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 the disaster. And then a voice would say to him, like, "It has happened." And it would be accompanied by words or information.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  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 Aberfan premonitions and said, "Is this perhaps an unrecognized medical or psychosomatic syndrome?" He referred to it as a pre-disaster syndrome

• 22:08Speaker 03

  and theorized that maybe a small subset of the population had it.

• 22:14Speaker 04

  I think he was someone who was pushing the frontiers of psychiatry and what he thought the mind could do. And I think it's difficult to reconstruct the scientific mainstream of the mid-1960s, but it was a more capacious, weirder space 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 1,000 people. He's responsible for 250 severely ill people.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  He's been given the first antipsychotic medication in 1955. 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.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:32Speaker 04

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

• 23:43Speaker 03

  John Barker went ahead with his research anyway. And about a year before the disaster in Aberfan, 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 postmortem showed that she had died of a rare failure of the adrenal glands.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  If I tell you that something terrible is going to happen to you, does that have a physiological component? Does that overwhelm the body in some way and bring that thing into being?

• 25:06Speaker 03

  That's when he traveled to Aberfan, after hearing the false rumor of a boy who supposedly died of shock or fear. After assessing the premonitions people had sent in about Aberfan, 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.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  One of them was a man having a dream of standing in front of a computer, which was obviously a fairly unusual thing in the mid-60s, and just seeing the words "Aberfan" on a black screen in front of him.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  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 minor, 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 Aberfan, she was at work and asked her coworker 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.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  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 Aberfan. 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.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  David Frost took one look at them through the door and decided they were too strange and motley to go onstage with him.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  John Barker was angry about it, but Peter Fairley 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.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  To 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 open-ended prophecies and premonitions.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  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 premonitions bureau log these? Would they take telephone calls? Would people send in mail?

• 28:17Speaker 04

  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 Fairley's desk in the 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 13 different categories for the different premonitions that were coming in. There would be transport, rail, the royal family, sport, 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

• 29:02Speaker 04

  and see whether any of these premonitions were coming true.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  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 Fairleigh, "We're not doing this. This is too wild. This is too weird."

• 29:37Speaker 04

  No, they didn't. They encouraged him. I mean, Peter Fairleigh'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

• 30:21Speaker 04

  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 kind of, I think Wintour had kind of sharp instincts, both for what people wanted to read about and was maybe a little, a little trashy, a little dangerous, but also just might have some, some sort of scientific kind of plausibility somewhere.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  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.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  But John Barker acknowledged that it was sort of a catch-22. If a disaster was averted and never happened, 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 Aberfan, like Lorna Middleton and Alan Hencher, to keep sending in their visions.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  One early morning in March 1967, around 6:00 AM, 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 had a premonition that kept returning to him of a plane crash. Alan 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."

• 32:34Speaker 04

  He can see lights flashing on and off. He can see a kind of, a statue of Jesus. It gives a model of a plane called a caravel. It's kind of, you know, fairly sort of detailed description of a, of a plane crash, which, you know, Barker kind of faithfully jots down and adds to the, the Premonition Bureau's records.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  At the time, it was maybe the fifth deadliest kind of plane crash on, on record. And the kind of, the, the correlation between Hencher's vision and the events that transpired is kind of immediate. The Evening Standard run a, a news story about his prophecy with the news report from the crash. So there's a kind of instant recognition that, that one of these premonitions seems to have been borne out.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  We'll be right back.

• 34:11Speaker 03

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

• 34:17Speaker 04

  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, and Barker was kind of trying to, to develop that idea and put a name on that. And it's something that we now call and study more as the, as the placebo effect, you know, which is the opposite of the placebo effect, you know? Instead of giving you an inert sugar pill, saying,

• 35:01Speaker 04

  "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, to report them. And obviously, the kind of most extreme form of, of a placebo effect is kind of people, you know, suffering extreme symptoms, even though there's nothing physiologically wrong with them.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  And she says that she can see a, 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 in space 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, his spacecraft has sort of been damaged during, during blastoff, and many of the

• 36:16Speaker 04

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

• 36:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  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, he's killed on impact. And as I say, you can, 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.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  They run from shipping accidents to horse race winners and other sort of more lighthearted or sort of random things. But as the year progresses, you have a few that nonetheless kind of really stand out.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  On October 11th, 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."

• 38:48Speaker 03

  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. Forty-nine people died.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  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."

• 39:18Speaker 03

  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."

• 39:37Speaker 03

  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%.

• 39:55Speaker 04

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

• 40:12Speaker 03

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

• 40:19Speaker 04

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

• 40:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  About a year and a half before he died, John Barker had received a phone call from Alan Hencher at 1:00 in the morning. Earlier that day, the plane crash in Cyprus had been on the news, the one Alan Hencher seemingly predicted.

• 40:56Speaker 04

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

• 41:06Speaker 03

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

• 41:20Speaker 04

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

• 41:35Speaker 03

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

• 42:05Speaker 04

  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 wants to see what's going to happen. You know, he talks about taking precautions. He talks about contacting Hencher and asking his advice about things. It's where the experiment starts to break down between the experimenter and the subject.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Before John Barker started going on speaking tours with his book, he saw Alan Hencher, who repeated his concerns. Alan thought something might happen to John in his home. He told him, I think you're going to have some trouble.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  John told Lorna Middleton about Alan's warning. She agreed that there was good reason for him to be careful.

• 43:03Speaker 04

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

• 43:12Speaker 03

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

• 43:20Speaker 04

  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 local National Health Board supervisors for straying out of his lane. And yeah, and he's getting these warnings for his life at the same time.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  After John Barker died, The Premonitions Bureau kept going for a while longer, but eventually the project wound down. Jennifer Preston, the assistant at The Evening 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. 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 the files just sat?

• 44:21Speaker 04

  It was definitely a 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 nation sending in their dreams and presentiments and feeding this into a 1960s room-shaped computer. That never came to pass. I think that it succeeded in the sense of giving a 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.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor 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 Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Sederborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. Sam Knight's book is The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  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 Spoor, 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 This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at @criminal_podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.