Premonitions

Did you ever have a feeling that something bad was about to happen and it did? This feeling is felt by thousands of people every day. There are those who believe humans are endowed with a sense most of us don’t realize we have. Some call it the sixth sense. When some scientists were asked about this they said what people perceive as a sixth sense may just simply be their vision systems detecting things they can’t articulate. Wow I might believe this had a chance of being correct except for the fact some people detect tragedies which are going to happen days in advance and I don’t see how this could have anything to do with that explanation. Some people attribute this sixth sense to the supernatural, but there could be some sort of scientific explanation,  such as some people gaining entry to other dimensions and seeing their future, but even this is so far out it would be hard to believe. All I can say is maybe we all have a touch of what made the prophets great and that is being able to predict future events or maybe it is only a select few who have the gene for this, if it is a gene.
On October 21, 1966 a terrible thing happened in the Welsh mining village of Aberfan. Coal waste had been piling up until it reached mountainous proportions. This waste was placed right above the village. The rubble rolled right over the village and the town school. The rubble had been loosened by rains and it must have formed a sort of sludge. Along with the school over 20 houses were destroyed. The school had been obliterated and it was full of the town’s children. The village lost 144 people that day, they were either crushed or suffocated and many of them were children. The remaining families suffered terribly, but one family who had a child in that school may have suffered even more. The reason I make this statement is that this child had predicted the event and even told her mother what was about to happen and said she was not afraid to die. The family probably thought this was just a crazy child’s thought and sent her to school anyway, only to lose her in the tragedy.

There is a little known story about actress Sharon Tate. In 1966 she had seen a ghost and had a feeling of terror. The ghost was the deceased owner of the house she was in. She ran downstairs and saw another figure, it was a female with her throat cut. As years went by she believed more and more the figure of the woman she saw was her. Three years later Sharon was within two weeks of giving birth when Charles Manson and his cult followers broke into her home and stabbed her to death. This house was less than a mile from the home where she saw the ghost of the woman with her throat cut.

We all know about the Titanic, but how many of us know there were two people who had premonitions that it would sink? One was a maid named Anne Ward. She worked for the Cardeza family who were very wealthy and purchased a booking in the most expensive suit on the ship. She had been experiencing very bad feelings about the trip and before the ship departed she decided she was not going to board it. The second person was Major Archibald Willingham Butt. He also had a premonition the ship would sink. This caused him to make out his will before boarding the ship. Yes, he still went on the voyage. I guess he felt he was being silly, but made the will out just in case.

Sometimes really terrible events seem to spur premonitions in people and Barrett Naylor was one of those people. He was heading to work. He was a chief executive on Wall Street and the year was 1993. He said he was overcome with a feeling of dread and compelled to return home, which he did. This caused him to miss the bombing of the World Trade Center that year. Here is the kicker. It was now 8 years later and he was heading to work again. He was working in the World Trade Center in one of the Twin Towers. That feeling came over him again and he was once again compelled by some unseen force to return home and when he got there, to his horror, the World Trade Center had been attacked. What special powers does this man have? He probably doesn’t know himself, but he is certainly unusual.

In 1970 an American Airlines captain had a reoccurring dream of an airliner crashing and flipping over in flames. He told a lot of people about this, but the authorities of the company as expected were not going to listen to someone having dreams about crashes and I guess we really can’t blame them. The captain was put on American Airlines flight 191. The flight was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from O’Hare Airport in Chicago to Los Angeles International Airport and the plane was a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10. Moments after the plane took off it crashed and all 258 passengers and 13 crew members were killed. Two people on the ground also died. It is considered one of the deadliest aviation accidents to have ever occurred inside the United States.

We all know what a great man Martin Luther King Jr. was, but how many of us know he kept getting premonitions of tragedies which were going to befall him. Even on the day when he eventually was murdered he had told a friend he might not be coming back. Apparently he had foreseen his own demise that day.

So what exactly causes us to have premonitions and how come most of us never have them? This is a hard question to answer. In some cases like Dr. Martin Luther King, he was under threat every day and this might have caused him to feel that foreboding. The airline pilot may have been hearing about plane wrecks. The year before there had been a slew of crashes and some of them had been by McDonnell Douglas airliners and this could have been playing on his nerves* . There is just no explaining why a school child was able to predict her death or why the Wall Street executive turned around twice to avoid disasters. Even the maid who wouldn’t board the Titanic is hard to explain. I guess the answer is sometimes there are reasons for not doing something which has caused dread and other times it is truly a premonition.

*Here is the address of the airline crashes in 1969 you can copy and paste it into your browser to view it. Sorry, Truth Facts does not use live links. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_commercial_aircraft#1969