“Despair and devastation”: John Edward's gut feeling about 9/11 weeks before it happened
John Edward, well known psychic medium, had a gut feeling he just couldn’t shake as he was in a ballroom back in 2001.
He shared with Mamamia’s No Filter Podcast about the weird sensation he felt as he ducked into a nearby lobby to take a phone call from a friend.
“It was the most eerie, ominous, evil feeling. I can’t even tell you,” he said. “I get goose bumps as I tell you this. I looked around and I looked at the security guard, and then I remember looking everywhere around, and I just was like, ‘Oh’.
“I walked out of the building, and I went to my wife. I go, ‘I need to talk to you… You have to find a new place [for the competition]; you can’t do it here next year.’ And she’s like, ‘What?’ I go, ‘I don’t want you to come down here. Go talk to your boss. You’ve got to get it moved’.”
His wife was surprised at his sudden panic and kept pressing for an answer.
“I go, ‘Death, despair and devastation’.”
The nearby lobby he was standing in happened to be the World Trade Center.
The feelings Edward felt that day in mid-August, 2001 – just weeks before tragedy struck on September 11 – sat with him for a long time. They reappeared when he was dining with friends and his wife, Sandra, suggested brunch at the World Trade Center restaurant, View of the World.
It was here that Edward erupted.
“I turned to her and snapped. I bit her head off, like a lunatic. She like looked at me, like, ‘I’m gonna be polite because we’re in front of other people right now, but I want to push your arse in front of an oncoming bus for the way you just spoke to me.’
“But I just really erupted. [I said] ‘There’s no way you’re getting me in that building! There’s no way I’m going up there.’ I can’t even convey to you how it came out. It was like a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde moment. It was really weird.”
Edward then spend the next days in a deep depression. It was so noticeable that even strangers, who recognised him from his show Crossing Over, asked him if he was OK.
“I was really struggling. It was a debilitating doom-and-gloom feeling, like I didn’t want to get out of bed if I didn’t have to,” he said.
It was only when Edward recorded an episode of CNN interview program Larry King Live that the fog within him lifted. The pair had spoken about loss, grief and how to cope.
However, the following day was one that plunged the world into a state of shock and unease as two planes that were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists flew into the World Trade Center twin towers on September 11. The attack killed 2,977 people and reduced the buildings to toxic dust that still claims victims to this day.
After the attack, Edward was contacted by several New Yorkers as well as people from the surrounding areas.
“They literally said to me, ‘You were the last thing we watched, my husband and I. You were the last thing that we watched, us together. We had a conversation about grief. We had a conversation about the afterlife because of you. It was the last thing that we did.’"