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Jamie Frater
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Jamie founded Listverse due to an insatiable desire to share fascinating, obscure, and bizarre facts. He has been a guest speaker on numerous national radio and television stations and is a five time published author.
More About Us10 Times Nature Invented Something Before Humans Did
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10 Premonitions and Predictions That Became Reality
Have you ever had the unshakeable feeling that something terrible was about to happen? Something that you couldn’t quite put your finger on, but you knew it would change your life or the lives of others forever. Have you ever dreamt of unimaginable tragedy or been blinded by a sudden vision of imminent terror?
Did your premonition come true?
Related: 10 Ancient Predictions That Came True
10 “You were right about that too.”
Suzan Saxman is a popular, if reluctant, psychic from Woodstock, New York. From a young age, she’s had terrifying visions of death and tragedy, and this only encouraged her to try and ignore her gift. However, she eventually embraced being a psychic and also wrote a book about her experiences.
She’s had several visions and premonitions upon meeting clients who want a reading. She mentions some of these in her book The Reluctant Psychic, including the unsettling meeting with a man in the middle of a divorce who didn’t believe that his wife would truly go through with it.
Suzan told him that what she saw was no court case, no split, no fighting, and that he would have sole custody of his daughter in seven years.
The following week, the man’s wife came to Suzan’s office, visibly upset. She told Suzan that her husband had relayed the psychic’s vision to her and that she had mocked her husband, saying that nothing would stop her from finalizing the divorce. A few days later, her husband and friend departed for a business trip on a small airplane. Unfortunately, the plane crashed, and they were both killed.
Seven years later, the woman again went to see Suzan. This time to tell her that her daughter had died of leukemia. She tearfully told Suzan, “You were right about that too. He has sole custody of her now.” [1]
9 A Sense of Foreboding
Seven-year-old Kathleen Middleton was watching as her mother, Annie, made breakfast one morning. Suddenly one of the eggs Annie was frying lifted itself out of the pan and levitated toward the ceiling. Kathleen thought it was hilarious, but her mother frowned and worried that it might be a bad omen. Annie consulted a fortune-teller who told her that the incident symbolized imminent death. Within a few weeks, one of Annie’s best friends was dead.
That was Kathleen’s first experience with something that couldn’t be explained off-hand. Soon, she realized that she always got a headache before an earthquake struck, and she started having visions of names and numbers.
On October 21, 1966, when Kathleen was 52, she woke up in the early hours of the morning choking and gasping for air. A horrible feeling of foreboding overpowered her, and it felt like her bedroom walls were closing in on her. She couldn’t fall asleep again and eventually got up, greeted the lodger that lived in her home at the time, and told him about the feeling she’d experienced earlier. At 8 am, they were drinking tea, and Kathleen was trying to block out the ever-increasing sense of doom.
Just one hour later, a massive heap of coal waste that had shifted after heavy rain rushed down a steep hillside, covering the Aberfan valley below and demolishing Pantglass Junior School.[2]
A total of 144 people, including 116 children, died, leaving South Wales in mourning.
8 Losing Their Heads
During a salon dinner party in Paris in 1788, French author and occultist Jacques Cazotte predicted that King Louis XVI would meet his end during the revolution. He also exclaimed that many other aristocrats, some of whom attended the party that evening, would be beheaded, die of poisoning, or by suicide.
The French Revolution started in May 1789, and Cazotte’s predictions came true. One after the other, nobles were beheaded. Four years later, King Louis XVI also lost his head in front of a large crowd in Paris. Cazotte wasn’t in that crowd, however, as he’d been executed via guillotine the year before after being denounced as a royalist.[3]
7 A Devastating Plague
Nicolaas Pieter Johannes Janse van Rensburg was born in Potchefstroom, South Africa, in 1864. It is said that he never read anything other than the Bible growing up and that throughout his life, he had over 700 visions. During the Boer War, he became a trusted companion of General Koos de la Rey, who believed van Rensburg to be a prophet of God.
Van Rensburg was commandeered during the war but was never armed and never fired a shot. He provided visions and prophecies, some of which were helpful in fleeing or outsmarting the enemy. He became known as Siener (Seer) Van Rensburg, and his visions continued throughout the war and afterward. His daughter kept a record of his visions, of which some are still being deciphered today.
At the beginning of 1918, Van Rensburg had a vision about a devastating “plague” that would leave no country, including South Africa, unscathed. In September that same year, the Spanish Flu hit South African shores, and 140,000 people died within seven weeks. Worldwide, an estimated 40 million people succumbed to the pandemic.[4]
6 “I did it anyway.”
Mike Fridley had a very strong sense of foreboding whenever he thought about the upcoming trip he was to take with his friend Graham Wood in November 1999. It was the first time that he’d felt so strongly about not going through with something, but he didn’t adhere to the voice screaming at him in his head. Instead, he blocked it out and went on the trip anyway.
It was a bad decision that ended with the former military officer and his friend plunging into the Everglades in Wood’s small plane after the engine seized.
Fridley pulled Wood out of the plane and onto the wing to shield him from the gasoline pooling around them. Unfortunately, Wood had a broken back, and Fridley had a broken ankle and sternum. Despite the intense pain, Fridley waded through chest-high water for about 1,000 feet before reaching a fishing camp where he found some drinking water. He couldn’t make his way back to Wood, however, because of exacerbated pain.
The following day he heard helicopters flying overhead and managed to draw the attention of a pilot. Fridley was rescued, but when they arrived at the wreckage site, Wood was dead.
Fridley said afterward that he didn’t want to die out there and insisted he was no hero for trying to find help even though he had broken bones.[5]
5 Right on the Number
In 1981, a clairvoyant contacted British Rail to warn depot employees that she’d been having a recurring vision of a fatal train crash. In her vision, one of their blue engines hauling oil tankers crashed with devastating consequences. She also saw that the train number was 47216.
Managers took the warning seriously, as they were aware that the clairvoyant had assisted police on several occasions. They applied to have the number of the particular train changed to 47299.
In December 1983, the 47299 train was hauling an oil train when it collided with a DMU at Wrawby Junction. One person died, and it was concluded that a combination of equipment failure and human error was to blame.[6]
Afterward, the accident was referred to as an “amazing coincidence.”
4 A Feeling of Dread
On the afternoon of March 17, 1999, Carol Deemer felt a strange sensation settle over her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something awful had happened and said so to her husband when he arrived home later. She added that their 17-year-old daughter, Jennifer, wasn’t home yet and that she hadn’t received the usual phone call from her either.
As Carol’s husband, James, looked at his wife while she spoke, he had a fleeting thought about a car accident.
Soon after, Carol and James learned that Jennifer had been driving home from school when one of the passengers in her car threw a pizza box out of the window. The box stuck to the windshield, causing Jennifer to swerve into the path of oncoming traffic. Her vehicle collided head-on with another car. Jennifer died on impact, and her four passengers were injured. Two people in the other car also suffered injuries.[7]
3 Saved from a Tragic Fate
In late August 2013, 11-year-old Marie Elias couldn’t stop thinking that something bad was going to happen if she fell asleep. It was a Saturday night, and Marie was determined to stay awake so that she could face whatever was coming.
At 1:30 in the morning, a fire broke out inside Marie’s house, which she shared with her parents and 17 other family members. As she was lying on her bed, fighting sleep, Marie noticed a burning smell coming from the wall closest to her. She immediately alerted her parents, and everyone inside the house escaped unharmed.
There were no smoke detectors in the home, and if Marie hadn’t had the premonition she did, things would likely have turned tragic very quickly.[8]
2 “It’s an experience you can’t explain.”
In 1984, Viv Donovan had an unsettling dream while staying in a small apartment in her parent’s backyard. In her dream, she was sitting up in bed with her arms stretched out in front of her. There was no one on her left-hand side, but in front of her was her entire family. She told her parents about the dream and was astonished when her father said he had dreamed about looking at Viv sitting up in bed with the family surrounding her.
This freaked Viv and her parents out, but they soon forgot about it. However, a month later, Viv suffered a burst cyst on her ovary, which led to appendicitis. The doctors saved her life in the nick of time, as she would have been dead had she arrived at the hospital even 20 minutes later.
Exactly a month after the dream she’d had, Viv sat up in her hospital bed and welcomed her visitors. She stretched her arms out in front of her, and her whole family gathered around the bed, but not on the left-hand side. Before this, Viv had never even been in a hospital for treatment.
This wasn’t the first time that Viv had experienced precognition, however. When she was nine years old, she woke up at night and just knew that her father was in trouble. She looked out of the back door and saw her father having a severe asthma attack. She immediately got up and phoned for an ambulance, effectively saving her father’s life.[9]
1 Thirteen Tears
Seventeen-year-old Rachel Scott was devoted to her religious faith and never shied away from living her Christian life at school. Unfortunately, this opened her up to ridicule and severe bullying. But she never let go of her belief and kept a diary in which she detailed some of her struggles and how she looked to God to help her overcome them.
Rachel was a student at Columbine High and was the first victim shot to death by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in 1999. In the aftermath of the shooting, rumors abounded that Scott had been killed because of her faith and that Klebold turned around after seeing she was still alive and asked, “Do you still believe in your God.” When she whispered, “You know I do,” he shot her in the head and walked away. This sequence of events has been both affirmed and disputed by several people.
Something that did take place, however, was that Rachel had drawn a picture in her diary shortly before the shooting. The sketch depicts a pair of eyes from which 13 tears trickle down to a rose, where they turn into drops of blood. Tragically, 13 people died that day at the hands of Harris and Klebold.
It is also claimed that a stranger named Frank Amedia contacted Rachel’s father a month after she died and told him that he had dreamed about Rachel’s eyes and tears streaming from them. The water flowed down to water something that he couldn’t make out in the dream. Rachel’s father had no idea what this could mean until he was given Rachel’s backpack after the authorities were done with it. Inside was two journals, with the last entry in the most recent diary being the drawing of the eyes and 13 tears.[10]