A Littel Girls Dream

On the morning of October 20, 1966, ten-year-old Eryl Mai Jones woke up at her home in Aberfan, Wales and told her mother what she had dreamed during the night. "I dreamed I went to school," she said, "and there was no school there. Somthing black had come down over all of it."

A waking vision of something black had already appeared on October 14th to Alexander Venn, a retired Cunard Line Empolyee and amature artist who lived in southwestern England. He kept feeling that some sort of disaster was imminent, something to do with coal dust and he said to his wife, "something terrible is going to happen and it won't be far from here." With a deep sense of forboding, he took up his sketch pad and proceeded to draw a human head engulfed in blackness. On Wednesday night, October 19th, reported dreams and forbodings began to snowball. An english woman had a dreadful nightmare of suffocating in "deep blackness." Several other people in various parts of England also had frightening dreams of enveloping blackness, and one woman dreamed of a small child running, screaming, from a mountainside that appeared to be flowing downward.

On the evening of Thursday the 20th, a Mrs. C. Milden of Plymouth, England, was at a spiritualists' meeting when a vision came to her. Strangely enough, it seemed to be on film. She saw a schoolhouse in a valley and a terrified small boy with long fringe of hair; she saw an avalance of coal thundering down a mountainside, at the bottom of which a number of rescue workers were digging for bodies under mounds of slag and debris. And she noticed that one of the workers was wearing an unsual looking peaked cap.

In the early morning hours of Friday, October 21, a Mrs. Sybil Brown of brighton, south of London, awoke from a ghastly dream. A child in the confined space of a telephone booth was screaming in fear, while another child walking towards the dreamer was followed by, as Mrs. Brown described it, a black billowing mass. At the same time, a London woman woke up from a stifling dream and felt that the walls of her bedroom were caving in on her. An eldery gentleman in northwestern England was puzzled by his dream: He saw spelled out in dazzling light, the letters
A-B-E-R-F-A-N.

At shortly after nine o'clock that morning, Eryl Mai Jone joined her classmates at the Pantglas Junior School. Looming overhead was the mountain that dominated the village of Aberfan. It's peak, a 600 foot mass of coal waste from adjacent mines, glistened with the heavy rains that had fallen over the previous two days.

By 9:14, the morning prayer session was over, and the children were in their classrooms waiting on roll call. At the same time, in an aircraft plant not many miles away, a secretary, Mrs. Monica McBean, was overwhelmed by a sense that "something drastic" was going to happen. A horrible image flashed through her mind, "A black mountain moving and children buired under it."

Above the schoolhouse, the mountain moved. Half a milion tons of black waste, disloged by pounding rain, began to slither, then billow, then thunder down the mountainside in gathering bulk of blackness that reached fourty foot high. Houses were swept away; trees were torn up by their roots; and Eryl Mai Jones and more then 100 of her fellow pupils were buired under the suffocating black mass. Pantgals Junior School was gone, obliterated, just as Eryl Mai Jones as dreamed. Rescue workers dug all day and all night to recover bodies. The final count was 144 dead: 28 adults and 116 children, most of them schoolmates of Eryl Mai Jones.

During the day of the disaster and the weekend following, news spread throughout the British Isles and reached people who felt they had known something of it before it happened. Mrs. C. Milden, for instance, saw a television broadcast on Sunday in which she recognized the digging out opertion of her film like vision, complete with the terrified small boy with long fringe of hair and the worker wearing the unusual peaked cap. What she had seen was an apparent preview of the broadcast.

Other predictions surfaced as the days went by, largely because of effort of a London psychiatrist named J.C. Barker, who was writing a book about psychic predictions. Wondering if there had been predictions of the coal mine slide, he launched a newspaper appeal to those who might have experienced foreshadowings. Two other organizations undertook similar investigations. The three survrys recieved a total of 200 replies, seventy-six of which were directed to Dr. Barker, who discarded sixteen that seemed to be obviously suspect and conducted a through investigation of the remaining sixty responses.

To more then half of the respondents, the premonotions had occured in vivid dreams. Most of the others had experienced visions in a drowsy or trancelike state; some, like the retired Cunard employee, had a sensed the forthcoming event while fully awake. A total of twenty-four precognitive episodes were attested to either by a letter or diary note written at the time by the respondents or by others who had been told of them before the coal slide.