From the files of Stranger Than Fiction by John Macklin

 

It had been a long day and a longer night. From early that morning, Ed Sampson had been on duty in the newsroom of America’s Boston Globe newspaper and now it was nearly midnight.
Illness and holiday absence had depleted the editorial staff and Sampson, a deputy news-editor, had agreed to work a double shift on that exceptionally-busy August Tuesday. Now the office was virtually deserted and 35-year-old Sampson, desperately tired, longed for his shift to end.
Sitting back in his chair and regardless of the clatter of typewriters around him, fell into a deep sleep. It was for less than five minutes but when he woke he was shaking with shock and fright and his ears echoed with piercing screams.

He had had a nightmare, but one so vivid and appalling that he found it hard to believe that it had just been a dream. In it he had watched helplessly as thousands of people died in agony in streams of lava as their world disintegrated around them.

Tiredness forgotten, Ed Sampson sat bolt upright in his chair. He hardly heard the last two reporters say goodnight and leave the office. His journalistic instincts dictated his next move: he must write down the details of his incredible dream before they faded away.

Once he had started, the words seemed to flow out unhindered on to the typed page. In the dream, an island called Pralape between Java and Sumatra, had blown up during the greatest recorded explosion in history.
The air was thick with smoke and lumps of stone rained down from the sky. Seconds later, the island disappeared from the face of the earth. The blast was heard hundreds of miles away.
Sampson wrote: “In the tidal wave that followed, many thousands of people were killed–the figure 35,000 was in my mind. Worst of all are the terrible pictures in my mind of the suffering and death of innocent people.
“I can see the boiling seas which crashed down on the screaming victims. I have never imagined such a terrible catastrophe as the one in my dream and can’t understand why I should have dreamed of it in such horrific detail.”

SAMPSON’S ACCOUNT of the disaster was over 3,000 words long and by the time he had finished it was nearly 3 am. He put the document in his desk drawer and left the office for his nearby bachelor apartment.
He felt better now he had committed the nightmare to paper and fell surprisingly easily into a heavy dreamless sleep. Not due back at the office until the following afternoon he dozed for most of the day, seeing no one and not even glancing at the newspapers.
Arriving at work, he found the Boston Globde buzzing with excitement and frantic activity. The tape machines were chattering with Associated Press accounts of a terrible disaster in Indonesia.
It was August 27, 1883 and the Krakatoa earthquake had emerged from Ed Sampson’s nightmare to become hard and horrific fact. Two thirds of the island had been annihilated in one of the worst disasters in history.
A few minutes after his incredulous reaction to the news, Ed Sampson knocked on the door of editor Drew Brown’s office and placed a sheaf of paper on his boss’s desk.
Brown leafed through the document and handed it back. “It’s the story of the Krakatoa disaster,” he said. “We’ve already got it on the presses–why should I want this?”
“Because,” Sampson said. “I wrote this last night–before the disaster actually happened.”

THE NEXT day the dream version of the tragedy was printed on the Globe’s front page, alongside reports of the actual disaster. The stories were identical in almost every detail.
In fact Sampson’s only major error in his astonishing story was the name of the island, which he had called Pralape.
In the weeks that followed, Ed Sampson became a reluctant celebrity. He was promoted and invited to make lecture tours and speak to paranormal research organisations. He freely admitted that he had never had any previous supernatural experience and during his remaining long career with the Globe, never had any others.
“The whole thing remains an utter mystery to me,” he admitted. “I can’t begin to explain how my nightmare turned out to be front page news.
There was to be a remarkable sequel to this strange story. Shortly before his death in 1920, Ed Sampson received a copy of a 200 year old map of Indonesia from a Dutch historical society which had been researching the history of the country.

The map gave the original name for the island of Krakatoa. Apparently for centuries it had been known by the native name… of Pralape.

 

Read John Macklin’s Stranger Than Fiction every week in Ireland’s Own