Dreams Of The Falling Airplane

[00:00:00] Let's go back to May 1979, Cincinnati, Ohio. Now picture a guy named David Booth. He's a regular guy, regular job, living a regular life. But that's the thing. He's thoughtful, quiet, the kind of person who pays attention to things other people ignore. The type of person who wouldn't normally jump to wild conclusions. So when David starts having these dreams, he knows something's wrong.

[00:00:26] It begins one night, without warning. He goes to bed, like always. But the second he falls asleep, he's somewhere else. He's not in his room. He's standing near an airport runway, watching. There's a large jet, an American Airlines jet, and it starts its takeoff. It picks up speed, it lifts off the ground, and then suddenly it banks hard to the left. Unnatural, violent, and before anyone could do anything.

[00:00:53] The plane slams into the ground, and erupts into a fireball. Smoke, flames, destruction. The kind of crash where you know no one survives. The whole thing unfolds with this terrifying clarity. Like he's not dreaming at all. But witnessing something that already happened. Or maybe about to happen. And so he jerks awake, hearts racing, drenched in sweat. That kind of dream where the feeling follows you all day.

[00:01:22] At first he tries to move on. It was just a dream, right? But then the second night hits. And the exact same dream. No differences. Same plane. Same crash. Same helplessness. And then the third night. And the fourth. And the fifth. Ten nights in a row. Identical. Down to the last moment. By now, David is rattled. This isn't normal. It's not just a nightmare. It's something else.

[00:01:52] Something stuck in his head that he didn't put there. He starts telling people. Quietly and carefully. Tells his parents. A few people that he trusts. And eventually, he makes a decision that tells you just how serious he felt about it. He calls the FAA. The actual Federal Aviation Administration. He gets someone on the line and tries to explain. He just says that he's been having these dreams and they're all specific. It's an American Airlines plane.

[00:02:20] It crashes right after takeoff. Rolls to the left. Explodes. And feels like it's not just a dream. That it's something real. Something that's going to happen. To their credit, the person he speaks with doesn't laugh or hang up. They actually listen. And they make a note. What are they supposed to do, right? No flight number. No date. No city. Just a terrifying vision stuck on repeat inside one man's head. And after that 10th night, the dream stopped. Gone.

[00:02:50] Like someone turned off the loop. And that was May 24th. The next day, May 25th, 1979. American Airlines Flight 191 took off from O'Hare Airport in Chicago. And what happened next matched David's nightmare to the letter. In this story today, I'll tell you the case of David Booth and his premonition. Are some of us capable of knowing that something terrible is about to happen?

[00:03:21] My name is Edwin. And here's a horror story. The way David described the crash of the FAA wasn't vague. He told them it was a DC-10. He said it happened on takeoff. He even described how the plane rolled unnaturally to the left and exploded on impact. He wasn't claiming to know the future. He just felt it. And he wanted someone, anyone, to hear him out before it was too late.

[00:03:51] But the FAA couldn't do much with that. There were thousands of flights. No way to verify a warning that came from a dream. They logged the call, thanked them. And that was it. Still, David had done what he could. He didn't want to go to the media. He wasn't trying to be famous. He just felt it was a moral weight. Like, if he stayed quiet and something happened, he would never forgive himself. May 25th, 1979.

[00:04:20] Friday afternoon. O'Hare International Airport in Chicago is busy, like always. People are boarding flights heading into Memorial Day weekend. Some are going home. Some are off on vacation. Just a normal day, really. At least, that's how it starts. At gate K-5, passengers begin boarding American Airlines Flight 191. It's a McDonnell Douglas DC-10, scheduled to fly to Los Angeles. There are 258 passengers and 13 crew members on board.

[00:04:51] The plane pulls back from the gate, taxis onto the runway, and gets clearance for takeoff. At 3.02 PM, it begins to accelerate. And then, less than 30 seconds into the flight, everything goes wrong. As the plane lifts off, something critical happens. The left engine suddenly breaks free. Not just shuts off, it tears off the wing entirely. But it doesn't fall all the way.

[00:05:19] It flips over the top of the wing, rips through important hydraulic lines, and damages the leading edge. From the outside, it looks like the plane is flying crooked. It starts banking hard to the left. The left wing is stalling. The right side is trying to lift, but the pilots, with almost no control, are trying to level it out. But it's no use. Witnesses on the ground see the plane wobble just for a moment, and then roll over completely. And then it drops.

[00:05:49] Nose first into a nearby open field, just beyond the edge of the runway. The fireball is massive. People miles away can see the smoke. All 271 people on board die instantly. Two more are killed on the ground. And it becomes the deadliest aviation accident in US history. Still is, to this day. If you're talking about a single plane crash on American soil. And when David Booth hears about it, he doesn't have to guess.

[00:06:19] He already knows. Everything he saw in his dreams. The DC-10. The takeoff. The left bank. The explosion. This was it. The plane in his nightmares had a face now. A number. Location. There's a quiet kind of horror in that realization. That you saw something in advance, felt it coming, and try to speak up. But no one could stop it.

[00:06:46] The match between a dream and the real crash is almost too precise to be a coincidence. The left engine broke off. The roll. The sudden fiery end. Even the type of airplane down to the model was correct. David didn't just dream of a plane crash. He saw this one. And yet he wasn't psychic. He didn't think of himself that way anyway. He didn't claim to have powers. He just saw it. Like his mind was tuned into something and had no business receiving.

[00:07:17] The days that followed, the story started to spread. The FAA acknowledged his call. Some people were skeptical because of course they were. But others were just stunned. Not because they believed in prophecy or the supernatural necessarily. But because how do you explain something like this? David didn't have a platform. He didn't want one. He didn't push the story. But it followed him anyway. Because once people heard what he'd seen. Before it happened.

[00:07:46] It became impossible to ignore. It wasn't just a nightmare then. It was a warning no one could do anything about. The story starts to trickle out. A few local outlets pick it up. And the national ones. Man predicts crash in a dream. It sounds like a tabloid headline. But the FAA confirms he really did call them before the disaster. The timing matches. The details match. And now everyone's asking the same question.

[00:08:16] How? Like how do you explain that? Was it some kind of freak coincidence? A psychological glitch? Or was it something else? And that's where things start to get weird. On one hand you got the science crowd. Psychologists. Cognitive researchers. Even sleep experts. And they'll tell you the brain is a bizarre, powerful machine. Every night your subconscious is sorting through thousands of tiny inputs. Headlines you skimmed. News reports you overheard. Airplane sounds outside your window.

[00:08:46] It all blends together. The brain is great at pattern recognition. Even when you're not aware of it. So maybe they say. David picked up on something. Something subtle. Maybe a recent crash overseas. A report on DC-10 engine problems. Maybe he was worried about flying. His brain took all those scraps of information and stitched them into a nightmare. And when something terrible happened later, it looked like a prediction. In that version, it's not supernatural.

[00:09:15] It's just the mind doing what the mind does. Making connections. So on the other side, you've got the people who think there's more going on. Maybe the world has layers we don't understand. Time isn't as linear as we think. Maybe David somehow caught a glimpse, an echo of the future. And not because he was special necessarily. But because for whatever reason, he was listening at the right moment. Some call it a premonition. Others say it's intuition.

[00:09:45] And some don't even try to label it. They just know it gave them chills. And then there's David himself. He didn't lean too far in either direction. In interviews, he always sounded kind of baffled by it all. Like he was still trying to make sense of what happened in his own head. He said he felt like he had to tell someone. Like he was being pushed by something outside of himself. And once the dream stopped, he knew. He called it a burden.

[00:10:14] And honestly, that fits. Because here's the part no one really talks about. Imagine carrying that with you, knowing you saw something horrible coming and no one could stop it. It doesn't make you feel powerful. It just makes you feel haunted. And whether it was a freak accident of the mind or something beyond explanation, what happened to David Booth still doesn't have a clean answer. It just sits there.

[00:10:40] In that weird gray space between what we know and what we feel is possible. In that space, well, that's where the story really lives. In the days after Flight 191 went down, the country was in shock.

[00:11:05] The National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB, launched a full-scale investigation almost immediately. And what they found would shake the aviation world. It turns out the issue wasn't some random freak mechanical failure. It was human error on the ground. During maintenance weeks earlier, workers had used a forklift to remove and reinstall the left engine. Not the official method. It was faster, cheaper, and until then, seemed to work.

[00:11:34] But it weakened a key component on the engine pylon. A crack formed. And over time, with vibration and stress, that crack got worse. And when Flight 191 throttled up for takeoff, the whole engine tore clean off the wing. When it flipped up and over, it severed hydraulic lines and electrical systems the pilots desperately needed to keep the plane stable. That explained why they couldn't steer it, couldn't control it.

[00:12:01] From the cockpit, they were flying blind, doomed from the moment the engine let go. After that, the FAA grounded all DC-10s in the U.S. until new inspections and safety protocols weren't put in place. Airlines overhauled how engines' maintenance was done. And the crash changed how people thought about aircraft design, risk, and regulation. It made an impact that reached far beyond that field in Chicago.

[00:12:29] But while the world tried to move forward, David Booth was still stuck in something he never asked to be a part of. He gave a few interviews, carefully, and only because the story was already out there. It was never animated or dramatic about it. If anything, he sounded tired. Like someone still trying to shake off a bad dream that wouldn't let go. The press kept asking the same thing. How did you know? And David never really had an answer. He always said the dreams came without warning.

[00:12:59] That they felt different than anything he had ever experienced. That they were clear. And that he just had to act on them, even if no one took him seriously. But it affected him. You could hear him. He said he was just relieved that the dreams were over. That once the crash happened, it was like whatever message had been sent, had been delivered. The years that followed, his story faded from the headlines. But it stuck around in a quieter way.

[00:13:28] It showed up in books about premonitions. It got passed around late at night in conversations about dreams and fate in the unexplained. Some people believed every word. Others chalked it up to coincidence. But no one could forget it. And even now, decades later, people still bring it up. They still wonder, what if he'd been able to say more? What if someone had listened harder? What if the future really does tap someone on the shoulder now and then?

[00:13:57] And we're just too distracted to hear it. David Booth never claimed to have the answers. But for 10 nights in 1979, he had the nightmare of someone else's reality. And it came true. By the time the world moved on from flight 191, David was already back in the background. No book deal, no talk show circuit. He didn't try to turn his experience into a brand. He went back to his life, more or less.

[00:14:26] But the story stayed with him. And with anyone who heard it. At a certain point, you stop trying to explain it and just sit with it. Maybe not everything has to be solved. Maybe some things are meant to remind us that we don't have it all figured out. There's a lot we like to believe is under control. Our lives, our safety, the machines we build. But stories like David Booth's poke at the edges of that belief.

[00:14:53] And they whisper, hey, what if there's more? What if the future isn't locked in a box? What if, hear me out here, every once in a while, it slips through the cracks. Just enough for someone like David to catch a glimpse of it. That's what makes the story more than just a weird footnote. At least to me. Because it's a reminder to listen a little bit harder. To pay attention. To trust the voice in your gut. Even when it makes no sense.

[00:15:21] Because sometimes the world doesn't give you the answers. Sometimes it gives you a nightmare. And sometimes that nightmare turns out to be real. David Booth's story is probably the most famous example of a dream predicting a disaster. Mostly because of how specific it was. And because there's actual proof that he called the FAA before Flight 191 crashed. But what's interesting and maybe unsettling.

[00:15:51] Is that his story isn't totally one of a kind. There have been other cases scattered through history where people experienced something. Often a dream, a gut feeling, or a sudden fear. And then watched it play out in real life. They're not always well known. They don't get all the media attention. But the ones that do? Well they share a weird familiar chill. I'll tell you a little bit from some examples I found. The Aberfan disaster in 1966.

[00:16:20] Right, let's start with this one. In the small mining village of Aberfan, Wales. 116 children and 28 adults were killed. When a coal waste heap collapsed and buried the local school. And just days before. A 10 year old girl named Errol May Jones. Told her mother that she had a dream that her school was gone. And that she was buried under it. Her exact words were, Mom, I dreamed I went to school and there was no school there.

[00:16:48] Something black had come down all over it. She actually died in the collapse. Now you hear that and sure it sounds like a child's imagination. But it wasn't an offhand comment after the fact. Her mother shared the story publicly almost immediately. In the middle of her own grief. It didn't feel like myth building. It felt like shock. Like trying to make sense of something too big. Now this next one's a little messier, right?

[00:17:17] It's about 9-11 and the unnamed traders. And it's controversial. But it keeps coming up so we'll talk about it. In the days leading up to September 11, 2001. Unusual financial trading activity was reported. Particularly, put options being placed on United and American Airlines. Now these are basically bets that the stock price will drop. And after the attacks, the sudden spike in those bets made people suspicious. Was it insider trading?

[00:17:47] A coincidence? Some people wondered if it was a form of financial premonition. A gut instinct turned into action. Of course, it's hard to prove anything without names or motives. But it left a lot of people wondering. Did someone sense it coming? And here's a couple more. Mark Twain and the death of his brother. So even back in the 1800s, stories like this existed, right?

[00:18:12] Mark Twain, THE Mark Twain, wrote about a dream that he had when he saw his brother Henry lying in a metal casket, wearing a specific suit with a bouquet of white flowers on his chest. Days later, Henry was killed in a steamboat explosion. At the funeral, Twain was stunned to see his brother laid out exactly as he had dreamed. Same casket, same suit, same flowers. He wasn't a spiritualist. He didn't build a career on ghost stories.

[00:18:42] And he told that one with a kind of nervous honesty. Like he didn't know what to make of it even years later. And then this last one, which is about the Titanic, where there's multiple cases. Before the Titanic sank in 1912, several passengers reportedly had dreams or premonitions that something was going to go wrong. One man, a first class passenger named William T. Stead, actually wrote a short story before the voyage.

[00:19:11] It was about a ship that struck an iceberg and sank. And also, there weren't enough lifeboats. Stead died in the sinking. Even creepier, he told people before boarding that he had a bad feeling about the trip. But went anyway. And he wasn't alone. There were other passengers who canceled at the last minute, citing anxiety or a strange feeling.

[00:19:37] It's the kind of thing you only notice after something terrible happens, sure. But it makes you wonder. So here's a takeaway. David Booth's story might stand out because it was confirmed by government records. And it was so exact. But he's not alone in the strange category of people who saw it coming. What ties all these stories together is not some magical claim or Hollywood dramatics. It's the same eerie thread.

[00:20:05] Regular people living regular lives suddenly hit with a feeling they can't shake. And when the moment comes, they're right. You can call it a coincidence. You can call it subconscious intuition. Or maybe there is something deeper we haven't figured out yet. But one thing's for sure. Stories like these make it a lot harder to shrug off the next nightmare.

[00:20:32] The one that feels just a little too real. What do you think of premonitions or about this case specifically? Do you think we're simply not paying enough attention? Let me know. This episode of Horror Story was written and produced by me, Edwin Coarrubias. I want to thank Dee, Ian, Rogers, Autumn, and Blanca for your comments on last week's episode. I'm very happy to know you're enjoying these.

[00:21:01] And by the way, these episodes are coming to YouTube very soon and I was wondering something. Do you watch any mystery or creepy channels on YouTube? And can you send them to me? I'm looking at a bunch of them to get ideas for styles of video just so that we can develop our own. You can DM me or email me. I'll leave my info in the description. If you're following the show, I will tell you another story next week. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon.