Welcome to Unexplained Extra, with me, Richard McLean-Smith, where for the weeks in

between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that for one reason or other didn't make

it into the previous show. In last week's episode, Darkness Insight, we explored the

harrowing tragedy, which has since become known as the Aburvan disaster, in which 116 children

and 28 adults were killed by a collapsed spoil heap in 1966. A tribunal set up in the immediate

aftermath of the tragedy, established at the National Coal Board, who were responsible

for the spoil tip, had been given consistent warnings of the dangers it posed, but routinely

ignored them. It was only a few weeks after the spoil collapsed that other forewarnings

of a slightly more bizarre nature began to emerge. In a series of extraordinary proclamations,

people from up and down the country claimed to have experienced visions of the disaster,

most often in their dreams, in the days leading up to it. Two children killed in the landslide,

10-year-old Errol May Jones and 8-year-old Paul Davies, are also said to have foreseen

the event. These stories were brought to light by radical

psychiatrists Dr. John Barker during an unusual experiment which he conducted shortly after

the tragedy. At the time, Barker had been researching a book about the apparent phenomenon

of what he called psychic death, in which victims of it were thought to have literally

scared themselves to death. Barker had heard reports that one of the young victims from

Abovan had been completely unharmed by the spoil only to die from shock a short time later.

It was while visiting the village to investigate this story, only days after the event, that

Barker first learned of the strange rumors of portents and premonitions. Haunted and moved

by what he saw in Abovan, Barker had a curious idea. If premonition were possible he thought,

might there be a way to harness its power to prevent such a terrible tragedy from occurring

...