On October 21, 1966, a half million tons of coal slag slid down a mountain overlooking the village of Aberfan, Wales, and killed 144 people: 28 adults and 116 children. Later investigations by three newspapers revealed that nearly 200 persons had had premonitions of the disaster, coming in dreams, visions, and feelings of discomfort and distress before the day of the tragedy.

One of the 200 was nine-year-old Eryl Mai Jones, who lived in Aberfan and attended the Pantglas Junior School, which stood at the base of the mountain. Two weeks before the disaster the child had told her mother, "Mummy, I'm not afraid to die, because I shall be there with Peter and June." Peter and June were her classmates at school. On Thursday October 20, she woke up and said, "Mummy, let me tell you about my dream last night. I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it..."

Many of the premonitions came in dreams. A telephone operator dreamed the night before of a screaming child in a telephone booth and another child walking toward the dreamer, followed by a "black, billowing mass." Others dreamed of "something black... deep blackness... hundreds of black horses thundering down a hillside dragging hearses...."

A man living in Kent began to have a feeling several days before: "On Friday something terrible connected with death is going to happen..." He was depressed for the rest of the week and when he came into his office on Friday, he told a fellow employee, "Today is the day it is going to happen." On the same morning a secretary in an aircraft plant had a sudden premonition that "something terrible" was just about to happen. In her mind's eye she saw "a black mountain moving and children buried under it."

Minutes later the coal slag, which for years had been dumped by the British government on top of the mountain, began to rumble, then roared down over the village, crushing houses and cottages, and demolishing two schools, one of them the Pantglas Junior School. One of the children killed was Eryl Mai Jones. Three days later a mass funeral was held, and the dead children were buried in a common grave. Eryl Mai was buried between her classmates, Peter and June.

Policeman Victor Jones carries Susan Maybank from ruins of school

EDITOR'S NOTE

If Eryl Mai's resignation seems a child's naïveté, consider that famous dream Duke Ferdinand's Assassination, fifty years earlier. The duke didn't try to prevent it, or ask his friend to do so; just to pray for his soul. Some people believe in fate.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: The New World of Dreams, Ralph Woods & Herbert Greenhouse, eds., 1974; p.86-87. Photos from Web.

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