Observations placeholder

Premonitions: A leap in to the future – Herbert Greenhouse [1971]

Danny Davis had no conscious awareness of his premonition, yet his strange behavior indicated that he was being controlled by an irresistible force from the future. Everything he did was a mystery to his friends and seemed to lead him to a foreordained death.

Davis was a television comedy writer and performer living in New York City. In February, 1970, he made arrangements with a producer, Peter George, to do a pilot series for a new situation comedy show. The setting was to be a store.

While discussing the show with George, Davis came up with a strange idea: He wanted a plate glass window put up in front of the store. The actor who played the role of proprietor would drive through the window in an automobile at the start of each program in the series. George and others involved in planning the show argued with Davis, pointing out that the device was not only costly but unnecessary. Davis was adamant about it, a fact that surprised the executives of the show. He had always been reasonable and easy to get along with.

Davis lived on Manhattan's East Side, on 65th Street near the East River. As a rule he never left his apartment in the morning, generally going out about 3:00 p.m. In the middle of February, two weeks after the discussion about the plate glass window, he made an appointment with a fellow comedian to meet in his (Davis') apartment at 11:30 a.m.

Davis was known to be very prompt in his appointments and regular in his habits. Yet for some mysterious reason he left his apartment about 11:15 that morning and started to walk west toward Third Avenue, about three long blocks away. Then he turned south toward 59th Street.

When his guest arrived for the appointment, Davis was not there.

At 11:30 A.M. an auto driving north on Third Avenue went out of control as it approached 59th Street. The car knocked over a lamppost on the south side of the street, careened across the intersection, hit a woman, then hurtled over the curb and headed for a store window on the north side of the street.

Standing in front of the store was Danny Davis. The car carried him through the plate glass window and came to a stop inside the store, with Davis pinned under the wheels.

He died twenty minutes later.

Why did Davis insist that his show open each week with an auto driving through the window of a store? What compulsion made him leave his apartment on the morning of an appointment, walk about a mile south and west, then station himself in front of a store window at the exact moment when a car leaped the curb and drove him through the plate glass window?