The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  The young boxer argued that he had had dreams like this since boyhood, and had learned to trust them. But his manager, and later the event’s promoter, was adamant. Both exerted such moral and legal pressure on Robinson that he agreed reluctantly to go ahead with the fight.

  However, so fearful was the promoter that Robinson’s mental state might blight his performance that he hastily summoned two priests to talk sense to the boxer.

  Throughout his subsequent career Sugar Ray Robinson refused to discuss with journalists either his vision of the future or its outcome. But in a syndicated 1989 interview published shortly before his death he relented.

  Sugar Ray Robinson dreamed - accurately - that he would innocently kill an opponent in the ring.

  My dream was so frightening and strong I’m amazed today that those priests were able to convince me it had no meaning. They told me, with all their knowledge and education, that it was impossible to see the future and I decided maybe they were right after all - so finally, like a fool, I went ahead with the fight.

  Jimmy went down in the eighth round and I stood there feeling powerless with the dream all around me, praying for him to be OK. They carried him out of the ring on a stretcher and he died in the hospital next day. I’d known from the moment I woke up that the fight should never have gone ahead. I’d learned the hard way never to ignore a dream of that kind again.’

  Sleeper Saw His Own Death

  While researching his wife’s family history, Pat Devlin stumbled on details of a strange dream of doom.

  Devlin, of County Down, told his story to the BBC, Northern Ireland, in September 2006.

  He revealed that his wife’s great grandfather, young James Curran, had been given a ticket to Liverpool by a friend who could no longer use it. Two nights before he sailed on the twin-screw vessel SS Connemara Curran’s sleep was disturbed by a stark nightmare. In the dream he found himself struggling exhausted in raging seas which eventually hurled him, bloodied, onto a local beach.

  The SS Connemara, depicted in a 1905 postcard.

  When he described the sleep-experience to family and friends their reaction was almost universal: it might be a warning - and he should not sail. But James Curran was determined to start a new life in England - and refused to be daunted by a dream.

  On 3 November 1916 he sailed with 96 others aboard the Connemara. Many of his fellow-passengers were young women assured of work in the munitions factories of World War I. Two hours out the ship ran into a gale, and in what must have been zero visibility, crashed into a collier, the Retriever.

  The shoreline next morning was littered with bodies and wreckage. The sole survivor was a crewman from the collier. Among the dead was Curran, who was identifiable only by a button a loving relative had sewn on his shirt an hour before he left. She remembered it as having been different in colour from the other buttons.

  James Curran had gambled on the belief that his dream had no meaning - and lost.

  Omens of the Titanic’s Fate

  The sinking of the liner Titanic possibly inspired more precognitive dreams than any other shipping disaster in history.

  In the 1980s, scholar George Behe, founder of the Titanic Historical Society, documented 107 pre-visions of the dark event, publishing them in a book, Titanic: Forewarnings of a Tragedy (Patrick Stephens, London).

  One of the time-defying witnesses Behe interviewed was American lawyer Will Klein. In a chillingly realistic nightmare Klein had found himself hovering, gull-like, above the Atlantic Ocean. While grey ghostly icebergs loomed out of the darkness he gained a clear view of his friend, theatrical producer Henry Harris, fighting for survival amid a screaming crowd in the water below.

  Normally Klein would have scorned any suggestion that dreams can prefigure future events. But so shaken was he by the intensity of his dream that he decided he must act. On waking he immediately cabled his holidaying friend, who intended to return from England on the Titanic, and begged him to cancel the booking. Stiffly, Harris cabled back that he didn’t believe in ‘the superstitions of the Middle Ages’.

  The cable - dream evidence - is dated 4 April 1912.

  Henry Harris sailed as planned. On 14 April he became one of the 1513 victims who drowned when the White Star Line’s ‘unsinkable’ flagship scraped an iceberg and slid beneath the waves.

  Another dreamer who sent a warning cable, but with happier results, was Mrs B. Shepherd of Hemingford, Nebraska. Her husband, who was in England on a business trip, had booked his return passage on the Titanic. ‘But back at home,’ writes Behe, ‘his wife had a disturbing dream in which she saw the ship sinking. She immediately wrote a letter to her husband asking him not to take the liner home. Then, deciding a letter was not enough, she sent him a cable repeating the plea.

  ‘On reading these missives Shepherd was so impressed that he cancelled his Titanic reservation and transferred to another vessel.’

  As George Behe’s closely documented investigation reveals, several people who died aboard the supership told friends beforehand that they had experienced powerful premonitions of disaster.

  Particularly strong was the fear of Major Archibald Butt, a military aide to US President William Howard Taft. In February 1912 the major’s doctor ordered him to take a holiday. Butt elected to visit Europe and Britain - booking his return journey on the vessel often described as ‘the ship even God could not sink’.

  President Taft subsequently confirmed that Butt had expressed ‘extraordinary unease’ about the trip back to the United States. The president wrote, ‘He made a new will before leaving, and he told the Secret Service people who witnessed it for him that he had an unaccountable feeling he would encounter some terrible danger during the journey.’

  Butt’s name appears on the roll-call of the drowned.

  The Balloon Hunch that Saved

  Three Lives

  In February 1990 the Australian outback town of Alice Springs suffered one of its worst disasters.

  As people on the ground watched in horror, the basket of a hot-air balloon scraped across a second balloon’s canopy, sending it crashing to earth [see photograph]. The pilot and his 12 passengers were killed.

  But three young people, who had been booked aboard the death flight, lived. As they agreed afterward, they owed their survival to a ‘powerful premonition’ one of them had experienced in the final moments before takeoff.

  The young woman who sensed the looming tragedy was Kelly Thomas, an Alice Springs local. She and her workmates Linda Bejay and David Richter had bought their tickets and were about to board when, with seconds to spare, she told them, ‘Don’t get on…I’ve got a strange feeling about this flight.’

  Kelly was so plainly upset that her friends, after a quick consultation, agreed to wait in the support vehicle for the second liftoff, which never came.

  ‘At first we thought she was kidding us,’ Linda told me. ‘But when she insisted she was deadly serious and we saw the tears in her eyes, we knew shouldn’t go up in that balloon.’

  The Seer, the Train and the Timetable

  of Death

  In 1988 Janet Keanes, an English clairvoyant, woke from a distressing dream in which she had seen two trains collide, killing a young girl.

  The following morning she described her sleep-vision to railways executives. One of the trains, she told them, had had a blue diesel engine - and she had even seen the number: 47216.

  Officially the railways could not let themselves be seen taking a psychic’s advice. However, executives knew that Janet Keanes had accurately foreseen several previous accidents.

  Without publicity they recalled the blue diesel from duty and had its number changed to 47299. Officialdom’s attempt to cheat destiny seemed to work, for a while. The re-numbered diesel hauled freight around England without incident for two years.

  But then the fateful forecast was proved correct. The blue engine hit a passenger train - and a 10-year-old schoolgirl died.

  In a BBC interview
Janet Keanes said, ‘It’s pathetic to think you can alter the future simply by changing a number. The railways should have heeded my warning and scrapped the diesel itself.’

  The Boy Who Foresaw His Own Doom

  Most dreamers who pre-glimpse the deaths of themselves or others try to avert the calamity. But Gerald Ahulu, a 13-year-old British schoolboy, not only accepted his fate, but told his family the precise day on which he would perish. He also predicted a small event that would not occur after his life had ended.

  The remarkable case of the student who died on schedule was published in the British Medical Journal. A principal witness to the prophecy and its outcome was the boy’s brother, Ghana-born general practitioner Dr Kon Ahulu. He wrote:

  Jerry had just arrived home from boarding school for the Christmas break. When our mother asked if he was looking forward to a long time off he replied, ‘I’ve only got one week.’

  Thinking he was joking we took no notice, but we did observe that he looked rather depressed.

  While we were making cakes and doughnuts for Christmas Day, Jerry uncharacteristically sat in a corner, seemingly lost in his thoughts. And when Mother predicted that he’d be the first to pounce on the finished product he retorted, ‘I’m not going to eat those cakes and neither are you.’ A strange remark from someone who never played with his food.

  One week later Jerry and I played in a soccer match. Soon after half-time a bolt of lightning flashed across the field, grazing my forehead. I heard the whistle go, and to my right was Jerry, lying on his back, his left hand across his chest, quite dead. The shock was indescribable. A week ago he said he had one week,’ I kept whispering in a daze.

  That Christmas we were in mourning - and my brother’s second prediction also came true. We never did eat those cakes.

  Sleeping Judge ‘Saw’ Lawyer Killed

  In a startling nightmare a magistrate accurately foreglimpsed a murder that lay three years in the future. When he confidently confronted the astonished killers with obscure details of his dream, they were forced to confess.

  The long-range seer, whose vision became a landmark in psychical research, was Jacques Berard, a former member of the French National Assembly. He described his foray into future time in a still-celebrated article published in the Paris Review of 1895.

  I had gone for a long country walk. Near dusk I happened upon an old inn and decided to stay overnight, rather than go home in darkness. Accustomed, as a magistrate, to taking precautions I searched my room and to some surprise found a door concealed behind some hangings. I blocked it with a rickety washstand and went to sleep.

  In the night I had a terrible dream. I saw the hidden door open, then the innkeeper and his wife tiptoed into the room. The man had a knife, which he plunged repeatedly into the body of whoever lay in the bed. Then the couple dragged the corpse through the concealed door.

  I woke perspiring, but relieved that it had only been a nightmare. Three years later, however, I read that a lawyer, Victor Arnand, had vanished in the vicinity of that inn.

  The newspaper report said the innkeeper’s wife had been called to give evidence. I became suspicious, and asked the judge in charge of the hearing for permission to attend. In court, the woman claimed that the inn had only two rooms, both occupied, and that Arnand had never stayed there.

  I immediately startled her by asking, ‘What about the third room, over the stable, where I slept?’ Then, with great audacity, I accused her of breaking into Arnand’s room in the night, of standing by while her husband stabbed him, then helping him remove the corpse. The woman was overpowered by terror that I knew so much.

  All she could finally say was, ‘You saw it all, then?’

  And indeed I had: in my dream.

  A similar case of a killer who crumbled when confronted by psychic evidence occurred in Moscow in 1980. When nine-year-old Inessa Tchurina was brutally murdered, police could find no clue to the pervert responsible. But then her father sought the help of a British clairvoyant Susan Padfield - airmailing her a photograph of his daughter with samples of her schoolwork.

  Touched by the grief imbuing the parent’s laboriously constructed English sentences, Padfield knew she must help. In a trance vision she saw the child leave the skating rink where she had spent her final hour.

  ‘Next, I glimpsed a powerful bearded man, about 30, approaching her,’ she told a news conference. ‘He invited Inessa to his house to look at a pair of skates. At first she agreed to go with him - but when he placed his hand on her shoulder in a proprietorial way, she panicked and screamed. At that point the man struck her on the side of the head and strangled her.

  ‘He wrapped her body in something blue, caught a bus out of the city and dumped her in a river. That night he shaved off his beard and fled.’

  Moscow police had interviewed more than 30 suspects - one of them a bearded labourer who seemed to fit Suzanne Padfield’s description. They hunted down the man (now clean-shaven) and brought him in for further questioning. When a detective read him a précis of the psychic’s statement, the man initially appeared shocked, then exploded into tears of self-pity. No one in Moscow had seen the murder. But on an island half a world away, a middle-aged woman, dreaming in mid-afternoon, had witnessed it in considerable detail.

  The psychopath confessed and led police to the place on the riverbank from which he had cast Inessa into the water. When police retrieved the body they learned that Suzanne Padfield had been correct on one other point. The little girl was wrapped in a blue blanket.

  The Nightmare that Nabbed

  a Monster

  Young carpenter Harold Lothbridge had no pretensions to being a clairvoyant. His sole psychic experience occurred during a dark dream, whose contents he immediately reported to police. The sleep-vision led them directly to an elusive killer.

  The extraordinary drama, which captured headlines worldwide, was played out in the small town of Mount Morris, Michigan, USA. When the body of an 18-year-old girl was removed from the cemetery and dismembered, the townsfolk realised there was a madman in their midst.

  Alarm intensified when an elderly man began to accost children playing in the streets at dusk. Then, several weeks later, five-year-old Dorothy Schneider was found in roadside bushes, raped and beaten to death.

  A witness said he had seen the girl climb into a robin’s-egg blue sedan - but detectives could find no car of that colour. Impatient at the police’s plodding efforts a group of citizens met at a local hall to form a vigilante group. However, the respected church deacon Adolph Hotelling joined several other community leaders in dissuading them from taking the law into their own hands.

  Falling on his knees Hotelling led the meeting in a prayer that the fiend would be found. His plea was promptly answered. That night the youthful carpenter Harold Lothbridge woke babbling. He told his wife he had had a nightmare.

  ‘I was in Plains Road. I saw a man dragging that little girl into afield. It was our church deacon. Mr Hotelling.’

  Betty Lothbridge had known and trusted the deacon for many years. She tried to persuade her husband that his dream was ridiculous, a mere fantasy. But Harold was so convinced he had somehow witnessed the murder that he spoke to the sheriff next morning. Sceptical, but prepared to follow any lead at all, the lawman drove to Adolph Hotelling’s house.

  In the garage was a car, recently repainted black. But a scratch on the door revealed that the duco underneath was robin’s-egg blue. Confronted with the duco - and details from the dream - Hotelling broke down and confessed.

  When a journalist later asked him how he could explain such a vision, Harold Lothbridge replied, ‘I don’t think it’s anything to explain. I believe that murder was shown to me.’

  Clairvoyant was Charged with a Killing

  Not all police officers are as open-minded as the Mount Morris sheriff.

  Etta Smith, a Los Angeles district employee of the Lockheed Corporation, discovered this when, after trying to help detecti
ves, she was instead arrested for murder. Etta liked to describe herself as ‘a clairvoyant with minor abilities’. Strongly principled, she would never accept money for readings - but friends and fellow-employees attested (after she became famous) to the power of her gifts.

  In December 1980 Etta Smith began to experience a series of alarming visions. Sitting at her desk she would suddenly lapse into a vivid daydream, in which she ‘saw’ a densely forested canyon where the bloodied body of a young nurse sprawled.

  Despite her determinedly amateur status as a psychic, Etta had learned to trust these waking dreams. After work she drove straight to a police station where she described her vision in detail to detective Lee Ryan. At his request she pinpointed the murder spot, Lopez Canyon, on a map.

  ‘He promised to investigate,’ Etta recalled. ‘But he took such a bored and cynical attitude to my dream I didn’t trust him to do anything. After worrying over it for a while I decided to drive to Lopez Canyon myself. I searched the underbrush - and sure enough, there was the nurse’s body, just as I’d seen it in my mind.’

  From that point Etta Smith’s luck soured. Leaving the canyon she encountered a police car, and led the patrolmen back to where the body lay. Suspicious, the police took Etta to headquarters where they questioned her for several hours. Next they gave her a lie-detector test, and when she failed it, arrested her for the murder of the nurse, Melanie Uribe.

  Etta Smith spent several days in jail, before detectives captured the three men who were actually guilty of the rape-killing. Angered by her mistreatment the clairvoyant took the Los Angeles police department to court and was awarded $26,000 damages.