Book review: How can you explain this?

Fiona Sturges learns how the Aberfan disaster in Wales prompted one psychiatrist to launch a search for ‘seers’ who could predict the future

Rescue workers forming a chain to move debris, in an effort to reach children trapped in Pantglas Junior School in Aberfan near Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan, Wales, after it was engulfed by a sliding mountain of slag in October 1966. The disaster claimed the lives of 144 people, including 116 children. Picture: PA

On October 20, 1966, 10-year-old Eryl Mai Jones, from Aberfan in south Wales, told her mother about a dream she’d had the night before. “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there,” she said. “Something black had come down all over it.” The next day, at 9.14am, a colliery waste tip came crashing down the hillside, smothering the village school and the surrounding houses. Eryl Mai was among the 144 dead.

Visiting Aberfan in the days after the tragedy was John Barker, a 42-year-old psychiatrist and superintendent of a large mental hospital in Shropshire who had an interest in “psychiatric orchids”, or unusual mental conditions. Barker had conducted studies on Munchausen syndrome, sufferers of which are known to feign illness, and was in the midst of researching Scared to Death, a book about people who accurately foretold their own deaths.