The Premonitions Bureau

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0:36Life is full of inevitable, unpleasant experiences. But thanks to modern medicine, perimenopause doesn't have to be one of them. There is still this idea that we have to suffer through it. And I am here to say to anyone listening that suffering not only is unnecessary, there's no metal at the end, but it will derail your health. This week on Explain It To Me, how to navigate the change before the change. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.

1:08In 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 a.m. 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. 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 Hensher 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.

2:07He 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. She'd dreamt that she was on her way to school, but the school in Aberfan was gone. It was covered in something black. Tell me about the village of Aberfan.

2:50Phoebe Judge:What was the village like in the 1960s? So Aberfan was built pretty rapidly during the second half of the 19th century to be a mining village. 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%. It was a place defined by the colliery and the activity of taking the coal out of the ground. 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.

3:42You 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.

4:30And 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. That morning, the men noticed something unusual. 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.

5:21But 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, and they were unhappy about the state of it. 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. 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. 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.

6:14The 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. It kind of came thundering down and people in the village compared it to the sound of a low-flying jet. 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 Abervan's outermost street Near the mountainside, Moy Road 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.

7:27A 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. 144 people died, 116 children. Most of the children were between 7 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 and 2 ,000 people volunteered to help dig for survivors. People showed up at a nearby hospital and offered to give blood.

8:15So 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. 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.

9:06Sam 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. 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.

10:15Phoebe Judge:Were people talking about how this could have been avoided? 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 asked at just a very kind of rational sort of engineering level. Years before the disaster, Abervans Town Council had contacted the National Coal Board because they were concerned about the waste piles on the mountain.

11:04The 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. The morning after the disaster, while rescue workers were still digging bodies out of the debris, a man named John Barker drove into Aberfan. John Barker was a psychiatrist, and he was a doctor at a large mental hospital that's about 100 miles from Aberfan.

11:55And 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. John Barker was collecting case studies for a book he was writing. So for a few years, he'd been studying cases of people who had been, in inverted commas, scared to death.

12:44So 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.

13:11Phoebe Judge:Did he find the boy when he got there? No, he didn't find the boy because it was wrong. There hadn't been a boy of that description. And he sort of describes it afterwards, you know, arriving in the village and 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. 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.

14:01There 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 Aberfan 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.

14:52The 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. And he called a journalist friend of his at the Evening Standard, which was a kind of 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. The article read, Did anyone have a genuine premonition before the coal tip fell on Aberfan?

15:47That 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.

16:43and that it might cost many lives. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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17:09What's the best way to think about age in politics? You don't want to be ageist, right? I do think term limits are more important than age limits. Some old people are really sharp. Bernie Sanders is popping off and he's like, what, 2 ,000? I'm so fed up with the fact that most of our lawmakers are so old. The gerontocracy feels like a huge problem in American politics. We're now in our third oldest Congress in history. So why won't the boomers retire? I gave serious consideration last year to not run again. I asked 17-term Congressman Jim Clyburn that exact question. And I kept being asked, how do you feel?

17:53Clyburn, who turned 86 just this week, is running for re-election in South Carolina again. And I kept answering, I feel fine. And they said, well then, why would you quit? But this week on America Actually, Congressman Clyburn makes the case for experience and the establishment.

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19:21Phoebe Judge:Tell me, who was Lorna Middleton? So Lorna Middleton was a music teacher and a dance teacher who practiced in London during the Second World War and for the decades afterwards. She was an émigré, 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.

20:13and 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. 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.

21:10Phoebe Judge: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. It was just something that her mind could do and found easy.

21:52I mean, she was clearly kind of fascinated by it, but I wouldn't say that it sort of, it weighed on her.

21:59Phoebe Judge:Switchboard operator Alan Hensher also said he had recurring visions, but his often troubled him. He'd been at work when he had his premonition about Aberfan. 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. 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.

22:46They 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 kind of accompanied by words or information. Alan Hensher 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 Hensher's apparent gifts for predicting events.

23:34He 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 and theorized that maybe a small subset of the population had it. 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 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.

24:28He's in a hospital for 1 ,000 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. 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.

25:10The hierarchy in his hospital was not receptive to really any sort of research agenda, let alone one that was pretty fringe. 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.

25:58A 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. If I tell you that something terrible is going to 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?

26:44That'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. 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 mid-60s, and just seeing the words Abba Van on a black screen in front of him.

27:26Phoebe Judge: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 Aberfan, 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.

28:09Phoebe Judge: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.

28:52David Frost took one look at them through the door and decided they were too strange and motley to go on stage with him.