Coincidences associated with the sinking of the Titanic.

The Titanic blockbuster movie was been beset with problems almost as disastrous as those that befell the ship. Was the Titanic cursed by the spirit of a dead Pharaoh? Was her sinking prophesied? And why did so many people cancel their journey at the last minute? Here Southampton based psychic Craig Hamilton-Parker examines the weird coincidences that surround the Titanic.

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Nearly every family in our street and throughout the Chapel and Northam districts of Southampton were grieving for someone they lost on the Titanic when it went down on the 14th April 1912" says Violet Parker (94 at time of writing) from Southampton "A terrible silence hung over the whole town. As I walked down the street with my mother we could hear sobbing coming from some of the houses, I saw women kneeled in the street in prayer and our lodger, a crew member who had survived the disaster, felt so guilty of surviving that he hung himself."

The dark legacy of the Titanic disaster still haunts Southampton and the shipyards of Belfast. Seafaring has always been plagued by superstition but many people believe that the Titanic carries a very real curse that is active to this day.

The blockbuster movie 'Titanic', was nearly scrapped because of the disasters to befell the set. The movie was two months late, and cost a staggering £150 million. It is one of the most expensive movies ever made at £600,000 per screen minute.

Only three weeks into the eight month shoot the lead actress Kate Winslet nearly stormed permanently off the set because she believed director James Cameron was a 'perfect tyrant' in overworking her. She claims that she slept only 4 hours per night, nearly drowned twice and had hypothermia. It was only after a humiliating public apology in April that filming was resumed.

But still the film was to be dogged by disaster. The 775 ft model in its 17 million gallon water tank was beset with technical problems. And many of the leading actors and actresses nearly died when a disgruntled member of the 1,000 extras and 800 crew poisoned the lobster chowder. Even the opening premier was a disaster when Kate Winslet couldn't make it because of a mysterious stomach upset.

These bad omens and obstacles are nothing new to the fated Titanic. From the very start it was prophesied that the name Titanic is cursed. A cockerel crowed in the daytime as she set sail which is a very bad omen to sailors. As the Titanic steamed past the Isle of Wight, people living along the coast stood by the shore and cheered. A Mrs Marshall screamed and grabbed her husband Jack's arm. "It's going to sink, that ship is going to sink. Save them! Save them!" But no one listened to the hysterical ravings of a woman who appeared to have gone mad. What Mrs Marshal did not know was that her mother had booked a passage on the Titanic.

This terrible disaster, 700 kilometres south of Newfoundland, was a tragedy foretold. In 1898 author Morgan Robertson published a novel telling the story of the demise of a supposedly unsinkable ocean lines named SS Titan. Incredibly, apart from the coincidence of name, Robertson's story featured a long list of similarities with the real events that coincided with the Titanic's sinking. He described the sailing of a gigantic steamship from Southampton on its inaugural voyage hitting an iceberg and sinking.

The ship in his novel was almost a clone of the White Star Line's Titanic. Robertson's Titan was 70,000 tons (the Titanic displaced 66,000 tons) measured 800 feet (the Titanic was 882.5 feet) transported 3,000 passengers and like the Titanic was driven by three propellers.

Morgan Robertson was writing at a time when there was not the technology to build such a ship. It was pure speculation. One of the main themes in the story was that the arrogant owners of the Titan were so convinced of its unsinkable that they provided only 24 lifeboats for the 2,500 passengers. The Titanic sunk with a loss of life of 2,224 passengers. There were only 20 lifeboats- half the number required.

Many of the people who booked a voyage on the Titanic had their lives saved by clairvoyance of the forthcoming disaster. Many had dreams or other inexplicable "signs" that something was going to happen to the Titanic. Some cancelled their journey at the last minute.

Psychiatrist and parapsychologist Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia (USA) researched the cases years later. He discovered about 20 cases of people who had a premonition of the event- many of who's lives were saved as a result. And the Society for Psychical Research still keep the records including an original unused ticket kept by one of those who cancelled.

One of these people who saw the future was the well known and innovative journalist William Thomas Stead. Born in 1849 he was director of the Pall Mall Gazette and was also seriously interested in Spiritualism. He founded two publications about psychic sciences: 'Review of Reviews' and 'Borderland'. In 1892, twenty years before the event, he wrote a story in which he described the awful sinking of a great liner. He also received spirit messages from mediums that urged him not to embark on a ship. Despite this, Stead disregarded his premonitions and became one of the Titanic's 1,500 victims.

Nobody knows for certain why the Titanic has been dogged by such bad luck. But the answer may finally lay in the records of the British Museum. It is said that the Titanic was carrying cursed Egyptian artifacts and the mummy of an unidentified pharaoh on its way to a museum in America. It was already notorious and had been nicknamed 'the accursed mummy' by the press. According to the newspaper reports of the time everyone who had taken photographs of it had mysteriously died. As it was put aboard the Titanic the dock workers dropped it breaking one of their colleges legs. It now lies deep beneath the Atlantic perhaps cursing the name Titanic forever.

On the night of July 1975, a family in the Dunstable area of Bedfordshire were watching the 1935 black and white film about the sinking of the Titanic. Suddenly, coinciding with the sequence in the film in which the ship collided with the iceberg, there was a tremendous noise. A huge block of ice, on that hot June night, had crashed through the roof causing great damage to the house.

On Sunday 14th April young sailor William Reeves was on watch on the prow of a cargo ship on route for Canada. He remembered the tragic history of the Titanic that had sunk on the same day and hour twenty three years before. It was easy to recall for he was born on the exact date of the tragic sinking. He suddenly thought of icebergs and in a panic, and for no reason, raised the alarm. The ship halted only a few metres away from an enormous iceberg. The name of the ship was the Titanium.

The famous novelist Graham Green got much of his inspiration from dreams. Some of Green's dreams contained prophesies and his diaries show that he foresaw the sinking of the Titanic. He said "On the April night of the Titanic disaster, when I was five I dreamt of a shipwreck. One image of the dream has remained with me for more than sixty years: a man in oilskins bent double beside a companion-way under the blow of a great wave."

Astrologer Dennis Elwell noticed that the planetary alignment for March 1987 was exactly the same as it was for the day when the Titanic sunk. "On 18th February" said Elwell "I did something I had never done before in 40 years study of astrology- issue an uninvited warning". He wrote two identical letters to Cunard and P&O alerting them "to the potential hazards locked into the March eclipse". On March 6 1987 the Herald of Free Enterprise, a big seagoing ferry owned by a P&O subsidiary, capsized off Zeebrugge with the loss of 188 lives.

Coincidences are covered in detail in these two books by Craig Hamilton-Parker:

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