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Have you ever had a feeling that something bad was about to happen? Has it ever come true? On October 20, 1966, a young Welsh girl named Eryl Mai Jones recounted to her mother a dream in which she went to school and found it wasn\u2019t there. \u201cSomething black had come down all over it,\u201d she said. The next day, Eryl and 143 other people were killed when a pile of waste at a nearby coal mine collapsed and sent an avalanche of rubble into the village of Aberfan. After learning of Eryl\u2019s dream\u2014and others like hers\u2014the psychiatrist John Barker teamed up with reporter Peter Fairley to establish a Premonitions Bureau at the Evening Standard newspaper to \u201clog premonitions as they occurred and see how many were borne out in reality.\u201d New Yorker staff writer Sam Knight tells the story of Barker\u2019s experiment in his new book, The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold. Barker hoped that the bureau, which would receive more than 700 premonitions within 15 months (some of which proved true) might serve as a warning system for future calamities. But the gravest predictions that Barker received warned of his impending death.

Go beyond the episode:

• Sam Knight\u2019s The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold
• Read the article that started it all: \u201cThe Psychiatrist Who Believed People Could Tell the Future\u201d
• For just $183.45, this first edition of John Barker\u2019s Scared to Death could be yours!
• The Brits seem to have a thing for where the supernatural and the subconscious meet: listen to our interview with Kate Summerscale about The Haunting of Alma Fielding
• Then again, so do we

Tune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.

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