Dreams Of The Falling Airplane

Let's go back to May nineteen seventy nine, 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. 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 to take off. He picks up speed, he lifts off the ground, and then suddenly it banks hard to the left, unnatural, violent, and before anyone could do anything, the plane slams into the ground and it rubs into a fireball, smoke flames to 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 and sweat, that kind of dream where the feeling follows you all day. 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 difference is 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, something stuck in his head that he didn't put there. He starts telling people quietly and carefully, tells his parents, 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. 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, 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 tenth night, the dream stop gone, like someone turned off the loop. And that was May twenty fourth. The next day, May twenty fifth, nineteen seventy nine, American air Line's Flight one ninety one 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 at his premonition. Are some of us capable of knowing that something terrible is about to happen? My name is Edwin, and here's a horror story. The way David described the crash the FAA wasn't vague. He told them it was a DC ten. 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, 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 locked the call, thank 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 twenty fifth, nineteen seventy nine, 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 five, passengers begin boarding American Airlines Flight one ninety one. It's a McDonald Douglas DC ten scheduled to fly to Los Angeles. There are two hundred and fifty eight passengers and thirteen crew members on board. The plane pulls back from the gate, taxis onto the runway and gets clearance for takeoff. At three h two PI. It begins to accelerate and then less than thirty 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. 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 it completely. And then it drops nose first into a nearby open field, just beyond the edge of the runway, and the fireball is massive. People miles away can see the smoke. One hundred and seventy one people on board die instantly, two more are killed on the ground, and it becomes a 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. He everybody knows everything he saw in his dreams. The DC ten, the takeoff, the left bank, the explosion. This was it. The plane and 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. The match between a dream and the real crash is almost too precise to be a coincidence. The left engine broke off, the role, the sudden fiery end. Even the type of airplane down to the model was correct. David didn't just 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. His mind was tuned into something and had no business receiving. The days that followed, the story started to spread, the FAA acknowledge 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 had seen before it happened, 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, 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've 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. 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 you see ten 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. 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, 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, and some don't even try to label it. I 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. 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, 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, and that weird gray space between what we know and what we feel is possible, and that space, well, that's where the story really lives. In the days after Flight one Andy one went down, the country was in shock. 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 was in 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. 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 one and one throttled up for takeoff, the hold 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 I explained why they couldn't steer it, couldn't control it from the cockpit. They were flying blind, doomed from the moment the engine let go. After that, the FA grounded all DC tens in the US until new inspections and safety protocols weren't put in place. Airlines overhauled how engine's 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. 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, 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. It showed up in books about premonitions, It got passed around late at night in conversations about dreams and fate and 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 will 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 and were just too distracted to hear it. David Booth never claimed to have the answers, but for ten nights in nineteen seventy nine, he had the nightmare of someone else's reality, and it came true. By the time the world moved on from Flight one ninety one, 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, given back to his life more or less, 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, and the whisper, Hey, what if there's more? What if the future isn't locked in a b 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 a 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, 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 one Anyone crashed. But what's interesting and maybe unsettling, is that a story isn't totally one of a kind. There have been other cases scattered through history where people experience 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 see a little bit from some examples. I found the Aberfan disaster in nineteen sixty six, right let's start with this one. The small mining village of Aberfan, Whales, one hundred and sixteen children and twenty eight adults were killed when a cold waste heap collapsed and buried the local school, and just days before, a ten 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. 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 ome 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. It's about nine to eleven 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 eleventh, two thousand and one, unusual financial trading activity was reported, particularly put options being placed on United and American airlines. Now, these are basically bets at the stock price will drop, and after the attacks, the sudden spike in those bets made people suspicious. Was it insider trading? 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 we left a lot of people wondering did someone sense it coming? And here's a couple more. Mark Twain in the death of his brother, So even back in the eighteen hundred, stories like this existed, right 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. 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 nineteen twelve, 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. 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. 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 this strange category of people who saw it coming. What ties all these stories to is not some magical claim or Hollywood traumatics. It's the same eerie thread regular people living regular lives suddenly hit with the feeling they can't shake, and when the moment comes the 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, 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 Kawarrubias. I want to thank d Ian Rogers, Autumn, and Blanca for your comments on last week's episode. I'm very happy to know you're enjoying these 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 here Following the show. I will tell you another story next week. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.