BBC Radio’s Danny Robins speaks to a former delivery driver who had a shocking premonition – that ultimately became true just two days later
It’s the early hours of the morning on 6 December 2001, dark, cold and wintry, as Amanda drives down Railway Approach in East Grinstead, a small commuter town in West Sussex. She’s in her late twenties, a delivery driver, dropping off free newspapers, and her shift is finally over. It’s too late for the night owls and too early for the early birds, so there’s not a single soul around as she drives her white transit van down this street she knows so well, the road she lives on.
And then, something happens that will change Amanda’s life forever. There is a sudden impact. “I’d hit a man, head on.” He goes up onto the bonnet of her van and she is carrying him down the street. “A panic engulfs me, as, in that split second, my life has changed beyond comprehension, because I’d surely killed him.”
Except, she hasn’t, because, as she looks at the road, she sees it is entirely empty. There is no one there, and yet she still feels all of the remorse and guilt she would have felt if she’d really hit someone. “It was just the oddest of sensations.” Baffled and shaken, she goes into her house and files it away as an odd, inexplicable experience, but… things are about to get much odder.
Two days later, she opens her front door on Saturday morning to be confronted by the sight of blue flashing lights. The street is full of police! Amanda asks the officer on her doorstep what’s happened, and the officer tells her that there has been a fatal collision. She points to the spot where it happened. To Amanda’s shock and horror, it is the exact same spot where she had her vision of hitting someone 48 hours earlier.
“I went a little bit white and closed the door,” says Amanda. “It was just too, too weird.” It will get weirder still as she learns the nature of the real-life incident. Reports emerge that the driver deliberately struck the young man after an argument, carrying him down the street, just as Amanda had imagined she was doing, and the vehicle was a white van, just like hers!
Sadly, the young man did die, and the driver was convicted of manslaughter. Amanda shows me links to press reports of his trial. One of the witnesses talks about seeing the victim on the van’s bonnet, precisely as Amanda described! So, what is going on here? Did Amanda really have some kind of premonition of this incident? I ask Chris French, a psychologist and sceptic from Goldsmiths, University of London, if he thinks premonitions are possible. He’s doubtful, but he tells me about the British Premonitions Bureau founded by a psychiatrist called John Barker in the wake of the Aberfan disaster.
Aberfan is a village in South Wales where, in 1966, a terrible tragedy occurred when a huge pile of waste from the local coal mine slid down a hill and landed on a school, claiming 144 lives. Many people claimed to have had premonitions of the disaster and Barker decided to invite volunteers to send him their premonitions of future events to explore whether this was a way of avoiding other such tragedies.
Chris says the most accurate one, rather chillingly, was when one of Barker’s helpers predicted Barker’s own untimely death. He did indeed die, just one year later, aged 44.
This article was first published in the March 2022 of BBC History Revealed
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From ghostly phantoms to UFOs, The Battersea Poltergeist’s Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of paranormal encounters on his BBC Radio 4 podcast Uncanny. Episodes available now on BBC Sounds
