The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  Many of the mysteriously missing people disappeared on the brooding mountain itself. On 12 November 1945, for example, a veteran woodsman, M.D. Rivers, led four visiting hunters up the northern slope. On the way back to camp they lost sight of him. Despite a massive search by police and volunteers Rivers was never seen again. The only clue was a single bullet, which police believed had fallen from his ammunition belt.

  On 1 December 1946, Paula Welden, an 18-year-old student at Bennington College, also vanished on the mountain. When a days-long search failed to find her, the state legislature offered a $5000 reward. No one claimed it. An FBI investigation was equally unsuccessful.

  On 1 December 1949 - the third anniversary of Paula Welden’s disappearance - local pensioner James Tetford boarded a bus after staying with relatives in the vicinity of Glastonbury Mountain. When the bus pulled up at the Bennington Soldiers’ Home where he lived, he was nowhere to be seen. The driver and 14 passengers (most of whom knew Mr Tetford) confirmed during independent police interviews that he had been soundly asleep on the bus when it left the previous stop. A bus timetable lay open on his empty seat - and his suitcase was still on the luggage rack above it.

  On 12 October 1950 an eight-year-old child, Paul Jepson, vanished from home, in daylight. His father told police that the boy, wearing a highly visible red jacket, had always had a ‘yen’ to explore Glastonbury Mountain. Volunteers scoured the mountain as part of an intensive search. Bloodhounds picked up the boy’s scent - tracing it to the forest’s edge where it dissipated. Paul Jepson was never found.

  In Native American lore the mountain is known as a repository of evil spirits, which the region’s tribes were avoiding long before the European invasion. Glastonbury is only one of several natural ‘black-hole’ monoliths around the world. Another is the aptly named Black Mountain in Queensland, on whose slopes a number of farmers and visitors have inexplicably disappeared.

  * * *

  The Book that Foretold

  Diana’s Doom

  Premonitions in Print

  and Film

  * * *

  On 31 August 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a high-speed car crash in a Paris tunnel. Ever since, persistent speculation has suggested that her death was not an accident but the result of conspiracy. Less widely known is the uncanny fact that Diana’s miserable marriage and ultimate fate in the auto disaster had been described 17 years in advance in a remarkable novel. When young journalist Tim Heald’s book was published in 1980 he was unaware that Diana Spencer even existed. But his prophetic narrative has admitted him into that pantheon of authors who - unconsciously - have created stunningly accurate visions of future events…

  IN 1978, YOUNG NEWSPAPERMAN TIM HEALD was working in London as a specialist royal reporter. The press at that time was filled with conjecture about Prince Charles who, many Britons believed, was unlikely ever to break the comfortable bonds of bachelorhood. Heald sensed that there might be a book in the subject - a novel perhaps.

  In his spare time he sat down and, lightheartedly at first, planned and wrote. But the nature of his story gradually changed, to something darker and more sinister than he had originally intended.

  What if Charles failed to find a ‘true love’? What if he married the wrong girl? What if he became king, but was locked into an unhappy union? What if…?

  Heald, always a fast writer, finished the novel in 1979 - a year whose final two digits, reversed, coincidentally form the year of Princess Diana’s death. Although the plot (as he imagined) was sheer fiction he decided to use a nom-de-plume.

  Caroline R, by ‘David Lancaster’, was published by Hutchinson in 1980. It sold well and was re-released in March 1981 as an Arrow paperback. Even at that time, real events had begun to jostle on the novel’s heels. Shortly before the soft-cover appeared, the Palace announced Prince Charles’s engagement to an obscure 19-year-old kindergarten teacher, Lady Diana Frances Spencer. The wedding date was set for July 1981. ‘David Lancaster’ (aka Tim Heald) felt obliged to write a ‘Foreword to the Paperback Edition’ which read, in part:

  When I wrote this book I had never even heard of Lady Diana Spencer - indeed as far as I can make out Prince Charles had scarcely heard of her either. There was still talk of him marrying a foreign princess; there was still talk - loose talk - about his liking for vivacious blondes; and there was even some apprehension. He had said he would like to marry when he was around 30 but 30 had been and gone and he seemed as far from the altar as ever. Maybe he would never marry.

  That period of nervous speculation is now firmly in the past. The Prince has chosen a sensible, attractive English girl from an aristocratic family which has a long connection with the monarchy. They are a happy young couple who one day, God willing, will make a popular and successful King and Queen. It has all turned out for the best.

  But…just suppose that royal judgement lapsed… that he fell in love with a girl who was unfamiliar with royalty. What then?

  Diplomatically Tim Heald continued:

  That was the starting point of this novel. It is a novel and it is set in a future which is now impossible, where it was once only implausible…

  The author little knew in 1981 that 16 years later his story would be proved neither ‘impossible’ nor ‘implausible’. The novel would be seen to contain numerous scenes that darkly mirrored Princess Diana’s marriage, right through to her violent death in a car.

  In 2006 Tim Heald conceded that his book had been ‘horribly prescient’.

  In a novel he imagined to be fiction, journalist Tim Heald created stunningly accurate visions of future events.

  Snapshots from the Future

  The author describes Caroline, his novel’s heroine, as ‘tall and leggy and slim and blonde’ - a description equally applicable to Diana. The daughter of an old, rich American family, she dutifully bears her husband, the king, two children, but despite her love for them, recognises that marrying into British royalty was not her wisest decision. The king seems distracted and is continually absent, leaving Caroline (like Diana) to sit, idle and unhappy, in the cold draughty royal quarters. A friend describes her as ‘a prisoner in a mausoleum’.

  Caroline tells her husband she wants to do useful work, rather than be a mere figurehead - and when at last he allows this, her life changes. She finds (as will Diana) that people love her and want to touch her. The prime minister’s wife expresses the general sentiment, saying, ‘You’ve cheered me up no end…it’s good to know there’s some warmth and generosity left in the world.’

  ‘My book proved to be horribly prescient’: journalist Tim Heald.

  Increasingly the Palace mandarins regard Caroline as a major security problem. British intelligence operatives award her a codename, Apple Pie (which rhymes with Di). They are particularly disturbed by her insistence on giving spontaneous, unscripted speeches - and are alarmed by her expressed desire to speak out on such issues as seal-hunting and nuclear armaments. (Diana would subsequently outrage Western arms manufacturers by campaigning against landmines. She also had strong empathy toward animals - and detested the bloodsports the Royal Family enjoyed.)

  The fictional Caroline’s sins seem venial enough - but now, writes Heald, she lives in an atmosphere of ‘distrust and threat’. She is warned that if the monarchy crumbles, due to her misbehaviour, Britain will no longer be central, through NATO, to Western Europe’s defence. ‘The monarchy,’ she is warned, ‘is the one institution that guarantees British stability. And you’re part of that stability.’

  Scandal begins to surround Caroline - especially when, in her loneliness, she engages in an affair with Julian, a political extremist on MI5’s watchlist. When a paparazzo takes compromising photographs of the pair, intelligence operatives decide to ‘examine’ their ‘options’.

  By now Caroline (like Di) is in a state of nervous exhaustion. To friends (as will Di, in future reality) she writes increasingly desperate and revealing letters. She feels that she has only on
e real friend in the Palace: a press secretary, Maurice Henderson. (Diana’s sole friend within the ‘royal mausoleum’ was butler Paul Burrell, whom she described as ‘my rock’.)

  The first hint that Caroline’s life might be at risk emerges when two shadowy official plotters discuss the possibility of killing her in a ‘convenient car crash’.

  Caroline knows nothing of this conversation - but (like Diana) she begins nevertheless to have a chilling presentiment that her life is at risk. To a diary she has secretly been keeping she confides her fears - then tells press secretary Henderson that if she suddenly dies, he must retrieve the diary and give it to her best friend who lives in the United States. Tim Heald’s novel had, again, been eerily prophetic…

  In late 1996, two months after her divorce from Charles was finalised, Diana wrote a letter expressing fears that someone was plotting to kill her. According to butler Paul Burrell in his book A Royal Duty (2003) the Princess gave him the letter, saying, ‘I’m going to date this and I want you to keep it…just in case.’ According to Burrell, Diana attached a note which included the words, ‘This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous.’

  Eight months later she was dead.

  In the letter, first quoted and photographed in Britain’s Daily Mirror (October 2003), Diana named someone who was ‘planning an accident in my car, brake failure and serious head injury’. On legal advice the newspaper blacked out the alleged plotter’s name.

  Millionaire retailer Mahommad al Fayed, whose son Dodi had died with Diana in the crash, immediately demanded an inquest. [Until then only French authorities had investigated the deaths.] Mirror editor Piers Morgan shared Fayed’s concern, telling BBC News, ‘There has been, to date, incredibly, no inquest into the death of Princess Diana and there has been no public inquiry in this country. Paul Burrell has watched and waited and nothing has occurred. He feels this is the time to come forward and demand these two things happen.’

  Publication of Diana’s explosive letter prompted British authorities to mount an inquest in 2004. It was adjourned while police investigated the crash. In May 2006 British police said they had found new witnesses and forensic evidence.

  In the 1980 novel the fictional Caroline’s fears for her life are grimly validated when she dies in a car in which a time-bomb has been planted. The novel even describes rumours that a mysterious ‘second car’ was involved in the plot - but was never traced. (Following Diana’s death 17 years in the future, witnesses claimed they had seen a ‘second car’, white in colour, tailgating the Mercedes through the Pont d’Alma tunnel in Paris. This ‘second car’ was never traced.)

  Tim Heald’s book further describes how the RAF flies Caroline R’s shocked and guilt-wracked husband to London from a fishing trip in Iceland. (In real life the RAF flew a grieving Charles to Paris to collect his ex-wife’s body.)

  Within an hour of the fictional Caroline’s death large quantities of flowers from grief-stricken Britons begin arriving at the Palace. Millions worldwide watch the televised funeral. (London in September 1997 became a city of flowers. More than a million mourners stood in the streets to pay a last tribute to their beloved Diana. Hundreds of millions more, across the planet, watched the funeral on television.)

  The final chapter of Caroline R contains a second - quite shocking - twist. For the sake of readers who might manage to look out a dog-eared copy of this venerable book, I’ll refrain from publishing the details here.

  My thanks to Sandy Coghlan of Book Orphanage, who alerted me to the existence of this extraordinary and most mysterious novel.

  Tim Heald was not the only journalist to experience unwitting premonitions of the tragedy.

  BBC Film ‘Predicted’ Royal Car Crash

  A fortnight after Diana’s death Britain’s Radio Times (13 September 1997) published an interview with John Morrison, editor of BBC-TV news programs:

  ‘Our business is to satisfy the public hunger for information, working to a strict protocol laid down in a BBC manual. We routinely rehearse possible future news stories. In one of those rehearsals recently we decided to work to a fictional scenario involving the death of a leading royal in a car crash in a foreign country.

  ‘That rehearsal proved amazingly prescient. When the real news came through from Paris on August 31, I felt as if I was dreaming.’

  Two Magazines Foreglimpsed

  Death Smash

  On 14 November 1996 - nine months before Princess Diana died while fleeing from pursuing photographers - the British magazine Big Issue published a prophetic interview. A reporter interrogated royals-chasing paparazzi Glen Harvey and Mark Saunders. When the interviewer asked if there were any situation in which he would not take a picture of Diana, Harvey replied: ‘If she was driving along in front of us and she had an accident and it was a life-and-death situation, we’d save her life - (but) if there was a chance of a picture after that…’

  In my book Unexplained I describe how an article in the British weekly The Spectator presaged Princess Diana’s death, and the air of mystery surrounding it, just three weeks before the tragedy occurred. Author of the innocently predictive opinion-piece was Alan Clark, Conservative MP for Kensington and Chelsea.

  The magazine advertised the controversial politician’s contribution on the cover of its 9 August 1997 issue with the words, Alan Clark names the famous person whom the press would most like to drive to suicide.’ Inside, under the heading PRESSED TO DEATH, Clark wrote: ‘The suicide of Gordon McMaster MP brings the press corps body-counts up to three…congratulations, boys! The big one still eludes you, but I expect you’ll get her in the end.’

  Clark then attacked the paparazzi photographers, saying, All moral impediments are discarded in the thrill of the chase.’ His essay ended, And still elusive, though one must assume in the telescopic sight of every editor, is the ultimate trophy - the most brightly plumaged of all: ‘to accelerate, and then be the first to capture, the sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in unexplained circumstances.’ [My italics.]

  Clark’s use of the words ‘accelerate’ and ‘thrill of the chase’ seemed unconsciously to forecast what would actually happen in the infamous Paris tunnel on 31 August. The security guard driving the Mercedes 600 with Diana and Dodi al Fayed in the back accelerated to shake off seven photographers pursuing on motorbikes. The Mercedes smashed into a concrete post. Controversy over the crash’s true cause has continued ever since.

  Also predictive were the words ‘capture the sudden death of Diana’. A particularly ghoulish paparazzo began taking pictures of her in the wrecked Mercedes. Infuriated onlookers attacked him.

  * * *

  Alan Clark heard the news of Diana’s death when he arrived back from a fishing trip in Scotland. He told the Times (12 September 1997): ‘I was horrified…it was very, very creepy to happen within three weeks of my writing about it. But I don’t see why I should feel terrible. It’s a fairly medieval precept to believe that people who predict things actually cause them to happen.’

  No scientist has yet produced a satisfactory explanation of precognition: the ability (usually inadvertent) to foretell future occurrences. But some adventurously minded physicists might be coming close, in their belief that the phenomenon possibly involves quantum mechanics, a discipline which has demonstrated a mysterious connection between distant particles. That link, discovered relatively recently, shows that the particles seem to transcend the boundaries of time and space.

  Most precognitive visions are brief, exploding in a flash during dreams or daylight reveries. But harder to comprehend are cases like that of author Tim Heald, who spent months - and hundreds of pages - unconsciously constructing a sprawling, detailed landscape of future time.

  On national TV, psychic Michel Hayek foretold Diana’s ‘death in a car accident’ - eight months before it happened.

  But what of the professional clairvoyants? After news of the tunnel tragedy broke, armies of ‘psychics’ around the globe came forward to say t
hey had foreseen it all - and had described their visions either in obscure radio broadcasts or to witnesses. But to my knowledge none [with the honourable exception of Lebanese clairvoyant Michel Hayek, below] seemed to have written or published any circumstantial prediction before the event. Provided she had read it, a detailed letter of warning to the already fearful Diana might have saved her life.

  A Middle East Magician Muzzled

  The future seems more accessible to Michel Hayek than to the rest of us. By his 27th birthday Hayek’s accurate predictions had won him such celebrity in his native Lebanon that a national TV network engaged him to present annual forecasts for the 12 months ahead. In his December 1996 telecast, preserved on tape, he said: ‘England will experience sadness when their princess, Diana, is killed while travelling in a car.’

  Viewers had learned to take such forecasts seriously. Hayek had a nose for imminent death, having starkly, and publicly, predicted the destruction of US space station Challenger in the mid-1980s.

  In his December 2004 program Hayek said, ‘A major incident in downtown Beirut will shake the area for a long time.’ In February a truck bomb killed 23 people including a former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.

  During the same alarming telecast Hayek tipped that the government would collapse. It did. He also said the media and cabinet would come under violent attack - naming publisher Gebran Tueni, his friend, president Emile Lahoud and defence minister Elias al Murr as particular targets. Two months later the men were blown up by a bomb. Tueni and one of his journalists died.

  As his other forecasts of assassination attempts kept reliably proving correct, Hayek grew increasingly defensive. ‘It’s not my fault that these things happen - I just see them,’ he said. ‘I wish my predictions did not come true and all those people did not die.’