Speaker 1: Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClean smith, where
Speaker 1: for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories
Speaker 1: and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make
Speaker 1: it into the previous show. In last week's episode, Darkness
Speaker 1: in Sight, we explored the harrowing tragedy which has since
Speaker 1: become known as the abbe Van disaster, in which one
Speaker 1: hundred and sixteen children and twenty eight adults were killed
Speaker 1: by a collapsed spoiled heap in nineteen sixty six. A
Speaker 1: tribunal set up in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy
Speaker 1: established that the National Coal Board, who were responsible for
Speaker 1: the spoil tip, had been given consistent warnings of the
Speaker 1: dangers it posed, would routinely ignored them. It was only
Speaker 1: a few weeks after the spoiled collapse that other fore
Speaker 1: warnings of a slightly more bizarre nature began to emerge.
Speaker 1: In a series of extraordinary proclamations, people from up and
Speaker 1: down the country claimed to have experienced visions of the disaster,
Speaker 1: most often in their dreams, in the days leading up
Speaker 1: to it. Two children killed in the landslide, ten year
Speaker 1: old errold May Jones and eight year old Paul Davies
Speaker 1: are also said to have foreseen the event. These stories
Speaker 1: were brought to light by radical psychiatrist doctor John Barker
Speaker 1: during an unusual experiment which he conducted shortly after the tragedy.
Speaker 1: At the time, Barker had been researching a book about
Speaker 1: the apparent phenomenon of what he called psychic death, in
Speaker 1: which victims of it were thought to have literally scared
Speaker 1: themselves to death. Barker had heard reports that one of
Speaker 1: the young victims from Abavan had been completely unharmed by
Speaker 1: the spoil, only to die from shock a short time later.
Speaker 1: It was while visiting the village to investigate this story
Speaker 1: only days after the event, that Barker first learned at
Speaker 1: the strange rumors of portents and premonitions. Haunted and moved
Speaker 1: by what he saw in Abervan, Barker had a curious idea.
Speaker 1: If premonition were possible, he thought, might there be a
Speaker 1: way to harness its power to prevent such a terrible
Speaker 1: tragedy from occurring in future. It was an idea that
Speaker 1: some belief may have contributed to Barker's own premature death
Speaker 1: only a few years later. Born in nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 1: As a child, John Charles Barker was a dedicated and
Speaker 1: straight laced student, making his way to Cambridge University before
Speaker 1: qualifying as a Doctor of Medicine in nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 1: Barker would go on to establish himself as a highly
Speaker 1: credible and innovative psychist, being mostly celebrated for his pioneering
Speaker 1: work on aversion therapy. However, it was a career in which,
Speaker 1: by his own admission, he was often torn between a
Speaker 1: conscious rationalism and a fascination with the supernatural. Writing in
Speaker 1: his nineteen sixty eight book Scared to Death, Barker believed
Speaker 1: this conflict first arose after learning of the peculiar occult
Speaker 1: happenings that his father claimed to have experienced while fighting
Speaker 1: in the First World War. Knowing his father to be
Speaker 1: a usually matter of fact individual, these stories had always
Speaker 1: stuck with him. Sometime later, Barker became convinced that he
Speaker 1: possessed a mild extrasensory perception of his own, in which
Speaker 1: he was able to sense impending disaster. It was his
Speaker 1: fascination with the potential for ESP that drew him to
Speaker 1: the concept of psychic death, believing some as yet unknown
Speaker 1: effect of ESP might be responsible for it, though he
Speaker 1: believed he had seen similar in patience of his own.
Speaker 1: Barker's interest in the idea intensified after reading of a
Speaker 1: peculiar case published in the British Medical Journal in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five. The case involved a forty three year old
Speaker 1: woman who had undergone an operation for a minor gynecological problem.
Speaker 1: With the operation successfully completed, the patient, who had no
Speaker 1: other underlying issues, regained consciousness, only to die an hour
Speaker 1: later after suffering a rare hemorrhage brought on by shock.
Speaker 1: As it transpired when the patient was five years old,
Speaker 1: she had been told by a fortune teller that she
Speaker 1: would die at the age of forty three the night
Speaker 1: before her surgery. She had subsequently insisted to her sister
Speaker 1: that she would not be surviving the operation. Thinking this
Speaker 1: might be a case of psychic death, Barker exchanged a
Speaker 1: series of letters through the British Medical with the patient's doctors.
Speaker 1: The letters, in turn brought Barker to the attention of
Speaker 1: Peter Fairley, who was science correspondent of the London paper
Speaker 1: Evening Standard at the time. Fairley was intrigued by Barker's
Speaker 1: position as a medical professional with an interest in the supernatural,
Speaker 1: and the pair Julie became acquainted, and it was to
Speaker 1: Fairley who Barker turned in nineteen sixty six when he
Speaker 1: had his brain way regarding the potential power of premonitions.
Speaker 1: Having learned of rumors that the Abberfan disaster had been
Speaker 1: foreseen by a number of its local residents, Barker realized,
Speaker 1: given the scale and emotional resonance of the tragedy, that
Speaker 1: it would be a perfect case study around which to
Speaker 1: see if anyone else had sensed it too, And so
Speaker 1: it was that on twenty eighth of October nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: an appeal was launched on behalf of Barker by Fairly
Speaker 1: in the Evening Standard, asking for anyone to get in
Speaker 1: touch who believed that they had experienced a premonition of
Speaker 1: the Abervan disaster. Within two weeks, Barker had received seventy
Speaker 1: six replies. Out of those, sixteen were discarded immediately. The rest,
Speaker 1: which were mostly taken from dreams, were assessed for their
Speaker 1: credibility according to the criteria established by parapsychologist G. W.
Speaker 1: Lambert the previous year, which included, most fundamentally that the
Speaker 1: premonition had been reported to a credible witness before the
Speaker 1: event took place, that the time interval between the dream
Speaker 1: and the event should be short, and that the four
Speaker 1: seen event should be something that would have been completely
Speaker 1: improbable to the seer at the time. In total, Doctor
Speaker 1: Barker found thirty five accounts to be worth noting, including
Speaker 1: those of Errol May Jones, Carolyne Miller, and Mary Hennessy
Speaker 1: mentioned in the previous episode. The Abovan experiment convinced Barker
Speaker 1: that premonition was a real phenomena and one that I
Speaker 1: managed properly could ultimately be used to save people from
Speaker 1: similar disasters in future. In January nineteen sixty seven, Barker
Speaker 1: announced the launch of his Premonition's Bureau, a public repository
Speaker 1: for the nation's precognitive dreams, in which anyone who felt
Speaker 1: they had experienced a premonition was encouraged to call or
Speaker 1: write in and tell him about it. Within two days,
Speaker 1: Barker received twenty different warnings of impending disaster, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't until a few months later that he received what
Speaker 1: appeared to be a genuine hit. It came from Alan Henscher,
Speaker 1: a forty four year old telephone operator from Essex who
Speaker 1: had been one of the original dreamers from the Abavan experiment.
Speaker 1: Hench claim to have experienced a vision of a plane
Speaker 1: crash over mountains, killing around one hundred and twenty four people.
Speaker 1: The corps was received on March twenty first. The following month,
Speaker 1: a Swiss Globe Air flight en route from Bangkok to
Speaker 1: Basel crashed into a hill in Cyprus while attempting an
Speaker 1: emergency landing. One hundred and twenty six people were killed.
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Speaker 1: slash Unexplained Podcast. Over the next eighteen months, Barker's Premonitions
Speaker 1: Bureau received countless accounts of potential premonitions, with varying degrees
Speaker 1: of accuracy. Alan Hensher would go on to become one
Speaker 1: of its most frequent and seemingly accurate contributors, along with
Speaker 1: one other, Lorna Middleton. Middleton, who was born in Massachusetts
Speaker 1: but later moved to North London, had also been one
Speaker 1: of the original participants of the Abervan experiment. Recounting in
Speaker 1: her own book Prediction or Premonition a few years later.
Speaker 1: Middleton had been suffering a restless night on the eve
Speaker 1: of the cold disaster, before waking at six a m
Speaker 1: with a choking sensation, convinced that the walls were caving
Speaker 1: in on her. However, it was her prediction of the
Speaker 1: assassination of Robert Kennedy in June nineteen sixty seven that
Speaker 1: most impressed doctor Barker. Middleton's apparent premonition began in March
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven with the constant appearance of the word
Speaker 1: assassination in her dreams and thoughts, believing it to have
Speaker 1: something to do with Robert Kennedy. But when doctor Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King Junior was assassinated three weeks later, Middleton assumed
Speaker 1: it was his death that she had in fact been foreseeing. However,
Speaker 1: a week later, Middleton again became preoccupied with the notion
Speaker 1: of assassination. On June the fourth, she wrote to doctor
Speaker 1: Barker declaring simply that she had sensed another assassination and
Speaker 1: again in America. In the early hours of the following day,
Speaker 1: Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: Back in the early hours of April twenty first, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, Alan Henscher called Barker, warning him to check
Speaker 1: his gas supply immediately. The previous day, Henscher had had
Speaker 1: a vision involving a dark colored car, which he interpreted
Speaker 1: as a sign of imminent danger to doctor Barker. Fortunately
Speaker 1: for Barker, there was no gas apply to his home.
Speaker 1: Henscher paused on the other end of the line and
Speaker 1: then asked, do you have a dark colored car? Barker
Speaker 1: thought for a moment before realizing he did. It was
Speaker 1: dark green. Hensher ended the call by telling Barker to
Speaker 1: look after himself. The morning after Hensha's phone call, Barker
Speaker 1: was sufficiently unsettled by his leading seer's premonition that he
Speaker 1: made note of it in a short memo, declaring that,
Speaker 1: having recently written a book on people who were scared
Speaker 1: to death, I am perhaps beginning to feel what that
Speaker 1: would be like. And as noted in a recent New
Speaker 1: Yorker article about Barker's life written by staff writer Sam Knight,
Speaker 1: the premonitions didn't end there. The following year, Hensher repeated
Speaker 1: his concern to Barker that his life was in danger,
Speaker 1: and then in February, Lorna Middleton also experienced a vision
Speaker 1: of Barker involving her deceased parents, which she took to
Speaker 1: be an ominous message concerning the doctor. A few weeks later,
Speaker 1: a fire broke out at Shelton Hospital in Shrewsbury, where
Speaker 1: doctor Barker worked. Though Barker wasn't present at the time,
Speaker 1: twenty four patients were killed. In late July, not long
Speaker 1: after her apparent successful premonition regarding Robert Kennedy, Middleton had
Speaker 1: another dream involving her deceased parents. She informed the premonition's
Speaker 1: bureau about it the following day. Three weeks later, the
Speaker 1: forty four year old John Barker was rushed to hospital
Speaker 1: having collapsed at his home. Barker, who had suffered a
Speaker 1: massive and inoperable brain hemorrhage, was pronounced dead soon after.
Speaker 1: According to New Yorker writer Sam Knight, the same day
Speaker 1: that Barker died, Lorna Middleton snapped awake in the early morning,
Speaker 1: gasping for breath and crying out for help. If you
Speaker 1: enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to help support us,
Speaker 1: you can now go to Unexplained podcast dot com forward
Speaker 1: slash support. All donations, no matter how large or small,
Speaker 1: are massively appreciate. All elements of Unexplained are produced by
Speaker 1: me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show
Speaker 1: on iTunes, and feel free to get in touch with
Speaker 1: any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
Speaker 1: the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
Speaker 1: you'd like to share. You can reach us online at
Speaker 1: Unexplained podcast dot com, or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and
Speaker 1: Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward slash Unexplained Now. It's
Speaker 1: time to take care of yourself. To make time for you.
Speaker 1: Tele a doc gives you access to a licensed therapist
Speaker 1: to help you get back to feeling your best. Speak
Speaker 1: to a licensed therapist by phone or video anytime between
Speaker 1: seven am to nine pm local time, seven days a week.
Speaker 1: Teledoc Therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download
Speaker 1: the app or visit teledoc dot com. Forward slash Unexplained
Speaker 1: Podcast Today to get started. That's t e LA DC
Speaker 1: dot com Slash Unexplained Podcast