The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  Dozing Man Witnessed a Faraway

  Murder

  When Susan Smith rolled her car into a lake with her two small sons inside - then went on TV to say they had been kidnapped - she felt sure no one could disprove the story. But she hadn’t counted on the extraordinary psychic abilities of 52-year-old Jerry Stewart, who had been dozing on a hotel bed in Florida, more than 2000 kilometres distant.

  In a dream, Stewart ‘saw’ every detail of the killing. He later publicly accused Smith of murder - prompting an angry response from police, who still believed her claim that the boys had been abducted.

  ‘When I had the dream I knew it was real,’ Stewart later told reporters. ‘I hadn’t a clue, though, about who the woman was or where the murder was happening. But the moment I looked at that night’s TV news I recognised the woman from my dream. When she said a black guy had taken her car with the children inside I knew she was lying. Everyone was praying for Susan Smith’s boys - but I’d already seen them die at the bottom of that lake in Union, South Carolina.’

  After the newscast Stewart wrote a detailed description of his dream and faxed copies to his local radio station and to a station in Union. The explosive letter read:

  There was no carjacking. You are looking in the wrong place.

  The children are deceased. They have been put in a vehicle and the car was run into a lake, where they drowned. You will find the lake and the car within a 50-mile radius of your present search area.

  There was no Afro-American male involved with this case, either. You’ll find the truth by getting a psychologist to interrogate the mother, break down her defences and get her to tell you what really happened.

  That same evening Jerry Stewart was repeating his allegations on national television. Infuriated detectives branded him as a publicity-seeker and viewers abused him, saying he was trying to profit from a mother’s tragedy. But five days later, Susan Smith confessed and led police to the John D. Long Lake, six kilometres from her home.

  A rescue squad dragged the car out and found the bodies of Michael and Alex Smith inside.

  Jerry Stewart had previously made many accurate predictions in TV appearances and in print, including the dates of two major Californian earthquakes and the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. ‘I began having visions when I was 20,’ he told an interviewer.

  ‘My doctor told me I’d die if I didn’t reduce my enormous weight. While I was starving myself I started to see things.’

  * * *

  There are many recorded instances of dreams that have prevented deaths. In his book Reach of the Mind the Duke University parapsychologist Dr J.B. Rhine recalled a nightmare his wife experienced when she was a young mother.

  In the sleep-vision she was at a picnic held on a high, flowered lawn overlooking the ocean, which crashed onto rocks far below.

  ‘I suddenly became aware that my two-year-old daughter was not at my side,’ Mrs Rhine said. ‘Then I saw with horror that while playing she’d wandered to the cliff edge. I ran to pull her back, but it was too late. She fell to the rocks below - and we were lost to each other.’

  Mrs Rhine woke weeping from her nightmare. But as months passed, the memory faded.

  ‘Then came the faculty picnic. As we arrived at the picnic spot, which I’d never visited before, I had a terrible sense of familiarity. Here were flowered lawns, a cliff edge and the sea pounding below. I was very unpopular with my little girl that day. I held her hand at all times and did not let her wander from my side.

  ‘I left the picnic knowing that my dream had shown me a possible, terrible path my life might take. Thanks to the dream I avoided that path - and took another.’

  Mrs Rhine had actively experienced what the author and time-researcher J.B. Priestley called ‘the Intervention Paradox’. In this scenario a dreamer - booked, for example, aboard a plane - might accurately foresee the aircraft crashing. To avoid involvement in the disaster the dreamer might cancel his/her ticket, thus altering the future.

  Curious Case of the $17,000 Dream

  Not every precognitive dream devotes itself to dark and dreadful events. I have interviewed numerous people who accurately foreglimpsed happy moments in their lives. Some have even won money as a result.

  In 1984 Nathan Black, a Melbourne businessman, booked a trip to Alice Springs to look over the town’s new casino for his company. ‘Several nights before I was due to leave I had an unusually realistic dream,’ he told me. ‘I was in the casino playing Keno. An assistant came up and handed me a selection of systems. I played one and walked out with $15,000. Next morning I described the dream to my wife Yvette - and jokingly told her I’d be bringing home a lot of cash.’

  Yvette and Nathan Black: belief in a dream won them $15,000.

  To Nathan’s delight, reality proved even better than the dream. After getting into Alice Springs at 1 am I went straight to the casino and put $45 on the system I’d dreamed about - playing 45 games at $1 per game. This won me $2100. Then I gave up and went to bed - thinking, rather ungratefully I suppose, that the dream had let me down. But next day I was feeling more optimistic, and decided to have a second crack at winning the $15,000. I was delighted I did, because the system paid the sum I’d foreseen. Adding it to the previous night’s winnings I went home with $17,100. The dream had underestimated the size of my total payout, but I didn’t mind that at all.’

  In a disturbingly repetitive sleep-vision the South Australian winemaker Wolf Blass began to foresee the winner of 1983’s Melbourne Cup - three weeks before the race was run. As a businessman I’ve never had much time for omens and portents,’ Wolf told me. ‘But this dream was so real, and so persistent, that I finally decided to act on it. The setup was always the same. I’d find myself standing in a misty, unidentified place while an invisible crowd all around me screamed, “Kiwi! Kiwi!”

  ‘At first I thought it was all about a bird. I had no idea there was a horse of that name. I’d wake up puzzled and ask my wife Martine what it could possibly mean.

  ‘But the moment I saw Kiwi listed as a Cup runner I thought I’d better back him. The fact that I only wagered $200, and made it an each-way bet, shows how sceptical I was. I collected $2000 and hated to think of how much more that could have been. Today I’m a little more openminded. If ever I dream recurringly about a horse again I’ll be backing it for a fair bit more - and to win.’

  Winemaker Wolf Blass dreamed about a horse he had never heard of, backed it - and won.

  Riccardo Pisaturo was one of 18,000 Italians captured in the Middle East during World War II and sent to Australia to sit out the hostilities. The Badgerys, a childless couple on whose property he was put to work, became so fond of him that when they died they left him the farm. Rick went on to become a multi-millionaire cattle breeder, awarded the Order of Australia for his services to the industry - but he never forgot the Badgerys, softly remarking in an ABC-TV documentary, ‘Everything I know and everything I have is due to them.’

  Rick had another (albeit less important) stroke of luck just after the war, when he dreamed that a horse named Russia would win the 1946 Melbourne Cup. Despite friends’ warnings that the contender was hopeless and a 16-to-one outsider, he trusted his dream, invested a few shillings and collected enough to buy a new set of clothes.

  When millionaire cattlebreeder Ricardo Pisaturo was young and poor he dreamed of a winning horse - and collected enough to buy new clothes.

  Strange Error in Train Crash Dream

  For nine distressing months a dream about a rail accident troubled young Melbourne woman Linda Mallet’s sleep. Often she was awakened by vivid mind-pictures of twisted rails and wreckage. She rationalised the experience by deciding that she must, unconsciously, be feeling nervous about train travel.

  But then, on 18 June 1977, came news of the Granville train disaster - and Linda knew, from the chillingly familiar details that she had for a long time been glimpsing the future. ‘When the nightmares started
they were quite vague,’ she told me. ‘I kept waking with the knowledge that something had happened to passengers on a train. But a few weeks before it all really happened, the pictures seemed to become more definite and intense.

  ‘I woke from one nightmare with the number 79 stuck in my mind. In the week that followed it kept coming back into my thoughts. Then, on the day the crash was reported, a radio newsreader said 79 people had been killed at Granville - a place I’d never heard of.’ (In later reports that early death tally was shown to have been wrong. In fact, 83 people had been killed in the horrific Sydney accident.)

  Linda commented, ‘I’m now convinced that my dreams had only partly been based on what I somehow saw of the accident itself. I’d also known that I’d hear the number 79 quoted on the radio.’

  * * *

  Linda is not the first dreamer to have peered into the future - only to catch a glimpse of an inaccurate media report. The engineer and time researcher John W. Dunne had a similar experience. While stationed at an army camp in South Africa, Dunne was overwhelmed by ‘a vivid and unpleasant dream’ in which a volcano erupted. He found himself running through the streets shouting that 40,000 people would be killed.

  Several days later copies of London’s Daily Telegraph arrived at the camp. The headline read, ‘Volcano Disaster in Martinique - 40,000 Lives Lost.’ However, later reports placed the toll at 30,000.

  Dunne theorised that he might not have ‘seen’ the eruption itself. Instead he had based his dream on a yet-to-be-printed, but inaccurate, newspaper banner.