Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven, by the history books. So if you're ready, let's begin. It happened in an instant. At 5.20 a.m.
on December 28th of 1908, the Sicilian city of Messina was demolished. That morning, an earthquake struck Sicily and the southern toe of Italy. It had developed in the Messina Strait, a sliver of ocean that separates Sicily from the mainland. For those who lived in the coastal city of Messina, there was no escape.
All they could do was ride it out and pray that they would survive. The shock lasted over 20 seconds and reached a 7.5 on the Richter scale. The historic center of Messina all but collapsed, with some of its most historic buildings crumbling to pieces. One survivor, who had been buried under rubble for 24 hours, was eventually dug out only to see their city completely destroyed.
Another said that as they walked through burning neighborhoods and piles of wreckage, there were so many corpses on the ground that they felt like they were just walking on bodies. The city had suffered, and it wasn't over. Just ten minutes after the earthquake faded, a tsunami hit the coast. Massive 40-foot waves crashed down, killing thousands of earthquake survivors.
They had run to the sea to escape the falling buildings, and the sea had turned against them. Messina was reduced a little more than a pile of rubble, with over 90% of the buildings destroyed. The city's population of 150,000 was cut in half, and across southern Italy the estimated death toll rose to over 200,000 lives. Tragedy comes for everyone, and more often than not we never see it coming.
Disasters upend our lives without warning, an earthquake, a train wreck, a deadly fire, and none of it can be predicted. Except, of course, when it can. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore Legends. Beware the Ides of March.
It was with this dramatic line that a fortune teller famously warned Julius Caesar of his impending assassination. At least, that was the line in the Shakespearean play. If the philosopher Plutarch is to be believed, the real prediction was much less exciting. Simply that Caesar should, and I quote, be on his guard against a great peril on March 15th.
But that wasn't the only warning that Julius Caesar got. Apparently his wife, Calpurnia, saw her husband's dead body in a dream. Different writers disagree on what happened in her dream. Plutarch says that she dreamed she was holding Caesar's body in her arms.
Another source wrote that she dreamed that the Senate had voted to add an ornament to Caesar's house, but the ornament collapsed and shattered. Whatever the content of her dream truly was, she was sure that it was an omen. She begged her husband not to meet with the Senate that day, and he almost was convinced. His wife was nearly hysterical.
Surely he needed to stay with her. But in the end, he stuck to his schedule and went to the Senate meeting. He never returned home. Just about every culture throughout history has, at some point or another, had a tradition of prophetic dreams.
The Greek scholar Artemis divided dreams into two categories, dreams about the present and dreams about the future. And within the latter category, he divided it even further with allegorical dreams about the future and dreams that will actually come to pass. Now, historically, the task of interpreting the meaning behind suspected pre-cognitive dreams has largely fallen to religious leaders, be they shamans or priests. Religion has almost always been intertwined with efforts to predict the future, and vice versa.
The Christian Bible, for example, has a long history of God revealing the future to his followers through dreams. In the book of Genesis, Joseph was given so many accurate visions from God that he became the vizier of Egypt, second only to the Pharaoh. And the entire apocalyptic book of Revelation, at its core, is one long prophetic dream. In the early years of the Christian church, dreams were thought to be signs from God, just as they had been in the Bible.
But as the centuries wore on, the church became much more suspicious of anyone who had vivid dreams of the future. It seemed that by giving laymen the authority to speak for God, those dreams were threatening the church's divine monopolistic power over its people. Pre-cognitive dreams were determined to be a pagan tradition, and anyone who had them was at risk of being accused of heresy or witchcraft. In the Islamic tradition, a practice known as istikara involves praying for divine guidance to appear in a dream.
While divination rituals are typically frowned upon by Islam, istikara is an ancient practice and is permitted. And there was once a similar medieval Jewish practice called shi'alat shalom, or the dream question. The dreamer had to write down the question they hoped to have answered in the dream, and then read it aloud before placing the question under their pillow. Then they would have to sleep alone on their left side in clean clothes, in a bed with clean sheets.
Only then would their question be answered. Both istikara and shi'alat shalom are examples of dream incubation, essentially rituals that create the perfect conditions for a certain dream experience. And there are of course others. Druids, for example, once induced dreams by chewing on raw meats and then praying over the meats and giving it as an offering to the gods before falling asleep.
The Quechua people of Peru practiced dream incubation to heal those suffering from what we would call today PTSD. The ritual started by killing and skinning a guinea pig and then reading its entrails. Only then would they know what medicines to give the patient while they slept. And some dreamers had to stay overnight in certain locations to get the spiritual guidance they were looking for.
In northern Africa, for example, the Berbers induced dreams by sleeping in large ancient tombs. And in ancient China, officials who traveled to new cities would sleep in the local god's temple so that they could receive a divine visit while they rested. And of course the list could go on and on. But despite this litany of rituals, luring nocturnal spiritual guidance was never an exact science.
Some were more receptive to it and some were unlucky. But on rare occasions, there had been some who could see the future in their dreams. And they could do it without any help at all. America may not have a long recorded history compared to the rest of the world, but what we do have is a rich history of prophetic dreamers.
You might know the names of more of these sleeping psychics than you would expect, from Abraham Lincoln who dreamed of his own mourners filling the White House, to Buddy Holly who dreamed of a fiery airplane ride just days before his own plane crashed. There had been plenty of people who dreamed of disaster before they ever happened. One of the more surprising dreamers was the famous conductor of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman. Born into slavery and forced to work from a young age, Harriet's early life was nothing short of brutal, but the most trying episode of her life had yet to come.
At least she would have some forewarning when it did. When Harriet was just 13, she was sent on an errand to a local dry goods store. Now, reports on the incident vary, but it seems that while Harriet was in town, she stood between an angry overseer and his slave. The overseer threw a weight from the store's counter at the slave's head, and it hit Harriet's head instead.
After the incident, she was given almost no time to recover. Commanded to work through the injury, she was soon plagued with headaches, seizures, and fainting spells. Reports that she frequently fell asleep at random times have even led some historians to speculate that she might have developed narcolepsy. And it was during these narcoleptic spells that Harriet began to dream.
In most of her dreams, she flew like a bird until she came to an impassable fence. Then, women dressed in white would pull her over to the other side, and she would be free. When Harriet's enslaver died, she and her brothers finally decided to make a break for it. They made it out, but en route to Pennsylvania, they learned that their enslaver's widow had put a high reward for their return.
Terrified of being caught, her brothers decided to turn back, but Harriet pushed forward, assured by her dreams that she would make it. Her visions might change every day, but that was the one constant. She knew she would be free, and she did eventually make it. But she wouldn't stay away for long, not when so many others still needed her help.
When Harriet later returned to the south to free other enslaid peoples, she continued to trust in her dreams. She believed that they were guiding premonitions, showing her where to go and what to do so that the people she was helping were not caught. And no one ever was. Out of the seventy enslaid people she led out of the south, none were ever recaptured.
Her dreams even showed her the death of the famous abolitionist John Brown. Before she ever met the man, she saw him in her sleep. In her vision, a snake rose up to greet her, then its face morphed, becoming the old wizard face of John Brown. Two more heads rose up next to his, the faces of two much younger men.
Before the free men could say anything to Harriet, a mob of men struck the heads to the ground, killing the odd serpents just as they would have killed any common garden snake. Later on, when Harriet finally met John Brown, she recognized his face as that of the old man in her dream. And in 1859, when she heard that John Brown and his two sons had led a failed slave rebellion in Harper's Ferry and then executed for it, she finally understood. Her dream had predicted that they would die.
Harriet Tubman, though, wasn't the only person to see a vision of someone's death. Just a couple of states away from her, at the exact time she was operating the underground railroad, a young man was about to experience the greatest loss of his life. At only 23, Mark Twain had a bright future ahead of him. He would one day become one of America's most beloved authors, his name immortalized alongside the greats.
But in 1858, he was just starting out in life, still known only as Samuel Clemens. Samuel and his brother Henry worked together on a steamboat called the Pennsylvania. Samuel was an apprentice pilot, and Henry was a low-level employee called a mud clerk. One night before the ship set out, Samuel had the most vivid dream of his life.
He saw his brother's body, dressed in Samuel's clothes and laid out on a metal coffin. Resting on his chest was a large bouquet of white roses with a singular red rose at the center. Somehow, Henry had died. The dream was so realistic that when Samuel awoke, he didn't even realize it had been a dream.
In a haze of grief, he left home, walking along the road in a super. He made it two blocks before he realized, later saying, it suddenly flashed upon me that there was nothing real about this. It was only a dream. But his doubts turned out to be true.
Samuel never joined Henry on the riverboat. After fighting with the pilot, he transferred to a different ship. Henry stayed there, though, and the two went their separate ways. Only a few days later, the Pennsylvania's boiler exploded.
The blast killed over 200 people and injured the rest of the crew. Henry's entire body was scalded, and his lungs had been damaged beyond repair. Soon enough, he was dead. The next time Samuel Clemens saw his brother Henry's body, it was inside a makeshift room for the dead.
He had been dressed in some of Samuel's clothes and laid out atop a metal coffin. Everyone heard the sound. At 9.13 a.m. on October 21st of 1966, the students at Pentglass Junior School heard a sound that was later described as an airplane landing on top of the building.
But it wasn't an airplane. It was much, much worse. The school's 240 students lived in the village of Aberfan in southern Wales. Aberfan had a long history of being a coal mining town, and the local mine was the villagers' number one employer.
Coal was in the food they ate and the air they breathed. It was a small price to pay. For the people of Aberfan, coal meant that they could pay their bills and save for their future. Coal was their life.
The mine in Aberfan had been in operation for nearly a century, and things were going pretty well. The only problem was that they didn't have the most ecological way to dispose of the mining waste. Mining waste isn't just coal. It includes everything from a slurry of ash to general rubble.
Aberfan's waste couldn't be buried, otherwise it would taint the town water supply. So instead, it was piled up into gigantic heaps called spoil tips, and these tips would be built up for years at a time, creating a variable mountain of waste. By 1966, Aberfan's Tip No. 7 had been collecting rubbish since 1958, and it contained nearly 30,000 cubic yards of mining waste.
Tip No. 7 was precariously balanced on a hill above the village. For years, people had brought up concerns about its location. Not only was the tip in an insecure spot, but it was located directly over a school.
And it all came to a head on that morning in October, when Tip No. 7 collapsed. The waste thundered down the hill, creating a 30-foot avalanche of debris. It hit farmhouses and cottages at 80 miles an hour, killing everything in its wake.
And then, it slammed into the school. In the end, 144 people died that day. 116 of them were children. Suddenly, the eyes of the world were turned on the little village of Aberfan.
The Red Cross moved in, offering medical aid and cigarettes to grieving families. Work gloves and shovels were sent to Aberfan by the hundreds. In the words of one report, In 24 hours, the world had learned the name of Aberfan and its meaning, a place whose children had been buried alive by coal waste, piled up by their fathers. Volunteers came in by the truckload to help dig bodies out of the rubble.
But some people just came because they were curious. People like the psychiatrist, John Barker. While he was an Aberfan, John heard a few stories that piqued his interest. Stories about people who had had dreams about the disaster before it happened.
He walked away wondering how many people had dreamed of the event before the tip collapsed. A week later, newspapers ran a notice asking people to send in recounting his other dreams, writing, Did anyone have a genuine premonition before the coal tip fell on Aberfan? That is what a senior British psychiatrist would like to know. One man saw the word Aberfan written in large letters.
A woman had a vision of a schoolhouse and coal sliding down a mountain. And in that vision, she saw a little boy being rescued. And then later, saw that same little boy on a television news report. But the most striking story came from the mother of 10-year-old Errol May Jones, who had told her family the day before the disaster, I dreamed I went to school, and there was no school there.
Something black had come down all over it. The very next day, Errol May Jones died when the mining waste crushed her school. After receiving this encouraging response, John Barker teamed up with his lifelong friend, newspaper reporter Peter Farley, to establish what they called the Premonitions Bureau. According to them, the Bureau would be a central clearinghouse to which the public could always write or telephone should they experience any premonitions, particularly those which they felt were related to future catastrophes.
John hoped to one day establish a sort of disaster warning system where dreams could be used to forewarn and even prevent mass casualties. In its first year, the Premonitions Bureau received about 470 dream submissions. Most of those visions never came to pass, but eventually two shining stars rose from the masses. Lorna Middleton was a middle-aged dance teacher who had experienced uncanny premonitions since she was a child.
Alan Henscher was a post office employee who frequently had intense headaches, followed by visions of the future. Together, the two became the Bureau's most reliable dreamers. Just how good were they? Well, Alan predicted multiple plane crashes, while Lorna foresaw the deaths of Vladimir Kormorov and John F.
Kennedy. They both predicted the Charring Cross train crash that occurred on November 5th of 1967, and even during the crash, Alan was having premonitions about it. At 10.15 p.m., he was overcome with a headache and wrote a note saying that there had been a railway accident that probably happened about an hour before. And he was right.
The train crashed at 9.16 p.m. In the end, the Premonitions Bureau never succeeded in its goal to create a catastrophe warning system, mostly because they had a success rate of just 3%. Failure, of course, is probably the one thing they all could have predicted. But hey, at least they tried.
For those who are curious, almost the entirety of the Bureau's 3% success rate came from Alan Henscher and Lorna Middleton. That being said, their personal success rates were remarkable. From what was recorded, it would seem that the majority of their predictions came true in some fashion or another. There was almost no tragedy they could not predict, not even their own deaths.
In July of 1967, Alan called Lorna in the middle of the night. Bleary, she answered the phone, and then she straightened. Alan had had a dream predicting John Barker's death. A year later, Lorna reached the same conclusion.
In July of 1968, she dreamed that she and her parents were having tea at the seaside, and then her mother got into a big black car and told Lorna that she wouldn't come with her. The car drove off, and Lorna chased it down the streets before realizing it was futile. She would never catch up. When she wrote to the Premonitions Bureau about her dream, she scribbled, this may mean death in all capital letters.
Then she suspected that it meant the head of the Bureau, John Barker, would die. And she was right. On August 20th of that year, Lorna shot awake, feeling like she was choking under an oppressive weight. her body knew what was coming within a matter of hours the founder of the premonitions bureau was dead he had died without ever seeing his dream warning system come into existence but it's probable that it never would anyway no matter how long he kept the premonitions bureau up and running after all two people could never be enough to predict all the catastrophes in the world and even if they could there was no way anyone could stop their terrible premonitions from occurring and in the end maybe that's the biggest tragedy we can believe in the power of premonitions and even find those who are gifted enough to experience them regularly but there's simply no way to stop a landslide or an assassin's bullet or a terminal illness some people believe the future can be seen ahead of time but all that power is a waste if we can't rewrite it well i hope you enjoyed today's topic i'd like to think that at least a few of you saw it coming after all many people wish that they could see into the future alas true premonitions have been rare throughout history proving that the rolling stone's wisdom is too accurate you can't always get what you want but there have also been times when psychic visions have done more harm than good and i have one last story to tell you that stands as proof stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it this show is sponsored by better help what are some of your relationship green flags we often hear about the red flags we should avoid but what if we focus more looking for green flags and friends and partners if you're not sure what they look like therapy can help you identify green flags actively practice them in your relationships and embody the green flag energy yourself whether you're dating married building a friendship or just working on yourself it's time to form relationships that love you back i know how important and 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and start receiving payments right away give your customers more ways to pay with popular methods like apple pay clarna ach direct debits in the u.s after pay in the u.s and canada and clear pay in the uk and you can even use your squarespace site to sell digital content like memberships or courses or files like pdfs music or ebooks so what are you waiting for head over to squarespace.com slash lord for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use the offer code lord to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain squarespace build something beautiful she saw rivers of blood and soon enough her own would flow with it lucretia de leon started having vivid dreams when she was only six or seven unfortunately in 16th century madrid dreams weren't really encouraged the catholic church held spain in an iron fist and the institutions didn't like people to dream about anything that could usurp their own authority but lucretia was just a girl she didn't know anything about politics so her parents punished her whenever she talked about her dreams and they hoped that that would be enough to keep her safe but sadly it was not when lucretia turned 18 she described one of her recent dreams to a family friend who in turn told the nobleman don alonzo de mendoza about don alonzo was deeply fascinated in the theology surrounding mysticism and apocalyptic omens he immediately took a liking to lucretia who he was certain would one day turn into a prophet to this end he had the director of a franciscan monastery named fray lucas record lucretia's dreams every day but only a few weeks into the assignment fray lucas tried to quit lucretia had dreamed of his bedroom in excruciating detail a place where no woman had ever been allowed to step foot fray lucas now knew that her dreams were very real and very very dangerous he destroyed every record he had written so far determined to vary all the evidence don alonzo however waved his worries away ordering him to continue with the project the nobleman was blinded by his ambition too blind to see the warning signs eventually public interest in lucretia's dreams grew with many believing that her dreams were actually prophetic visions she began hosting salons to talk about those dreams drawing more and more attention to herself with each session a small religious group even formed around her they called themselves the holy cross of the restoration and they built a bunker to wait out the holy tribulation that lucretia claimed spain would one day be forced to reckon with and that was the problem really not that she had vivid dreams but that most of her dreams concerned misfortunes that could befall the spanish empire in one of those dreams she saw an avenging angel come down to earth on a cloud made of blood and fire he had come to kill spain's king philip because and i quote he has punished just people without reason and without fairness and he has always favored evil people about another dream lucretia was quoted as saying and i saw a blood river coming from the area of the stables this river was surrounding the palace flowing with serpents and snakes that i have seen in other visions and with lots of crows swocking with their beaks in blood three men came out of this river and looted the palace and cut many children's and old people's heads off charming stuff i know but her most alarming dreams were about the spanish armada spain's naval fleet was the pride of the empire it had prepared for two grueling years to crush england and bring catholicism back to the heretic nation but before the armada set sail lucretia repeatedly dreamed about its demise she even dreamed about the death of its commander who actually died before the fleet's ever loved port the commander's death wasn't the only vision to come true though in 1588 the spanish armada was destroyed at the time it was the most stunning defeat in military history and no one could have predicted it except lucretia in may of 1590 lucretia don alonso and fray lucas were all arrested by the inquisition their internment had been ordered by king philip ii himself lucretia was only 21 years old at the time she ended up giving birth while imprisoned and she named her baby margarita after santa margarita the patron saint of those who are falsely accused lucretia was taken to a secret prison in toledo and put on trial for heresy and treason inquisition trials were nothing like the legal process that we might be familiar with today there was no jury appears no due process and no set timeline those arrested by the inquisition were kept in jail indefinitely and they usually weren't even told why they were being held in the first place they were just told to confess to a myriad of sins lucretia's trial dragged on for several years the entire time she was kept in prison and tortured it's believed that she was regularly waterboarded and stretched on the rack all to wring a confession out of her after five years of torture her verdict was determined in july of 1595 the inquisition decided that she was guilty of heresy but not of treason against the king they had been able to get her to talk about her dreams but she never confessed a plotting against king philip still her punishment would be severe lucretia was sentenced to 100 lashes two years of confinement and banishment from madrid after she received her lashes she was sent to a religious hospital with a bleeding back and a broken spirit and after that no one knows what happened to her lucretia completely disappeared from the historical record after that conviction and so did her daughter she may have died of infected wounds in that very hospital or she might have been able to leave and start a new life elsewhere but no one knows for sure and the irony isn't lost on me a woman with a powerful gift to see far into the future vanished from the eyes of history this episode of lore legends was produced by me aaron manke with writing by alex robinson and research by cassandra de alva don't like hearing the ads i've got a solution for you there's a paid version of lore on apple podcast and patreon that is 100% ad free plus subscribers get weekly mini episodes called lorevites it's a bargain for all of that ad free storytelling and a great way to support the show and the team behind it for more information about those ad free options go to lorepodcast.com lore of course is more than just a podcast there's the book series available in bookstores and online and two seasons of the television show on amazon prime information about all of that and more is over at lorepodcast.com and you can also follow the show on threads instagram facebook and youtube just search for lorepodcast all one word and then click that follow button and when you do say hi i like it when people say hi and as always thanks for listening y'all and and and and and and and