Abra Stone’s Premonition of the September 11 Attacks

Abra Stone’s premonition of the September 11 attacks emerges through two dreams shared by her parents and an infant’s unexplained crying. The dreams supply the flight numbers; Abra’s crying then stops at the precise moment the second plane hits the World Trade Center. The sequence turns a private family crisis into evidence, for the Stones, of their daughter’s extraordinary perception.

The Paired Dreams

About five months after a disagreement over Abra’s caul, Lucy Stone dreamed that her daughter was crying somewhere far from the family’s bedroom on Richland Court. Lucy ran through a long passage that first seemed to have doors on either side and then rows of seats, suggesting a plane or perhaps an Amtrak train. The search ended at a bathroom. Afraid that the door might be locked, and then afraid of what she might find inside, Lucy opened it and saw Abra lying on the floor, naked and tearful. The number 11 appeared on the baby’s chest, written in what looked like blood.

David Stone’s dream presented a different but corresponding route to the same child. He pursued Abra’s cries up an escalator in a burning mall, moving against its slow descent. People were caught in the flames, yet the dream offered no smoke and no sound other than Abra’s cries. At the top, David found his daughter on the floor as people rushed around her without noticing her. She, too, was naked, and the number on her chest was 175. The settings differed—the confined transit passage in Lucy’s dream, the burning public space in David’s—but both placed Abra in danger and attached a number to her body.

The Crying and Its End

The Stones woke together, at first taking the cries they heard for an echo of their dreams. Abra was actually in her crib beneath a Shrek mobile, crying forcefully. Ordinary attempts to settle her did not work: a diaper change, feeding, carrying her up and down the hall, and singing all failed to quiet her. With Abra still crying and Lucy at a loss, Lucy called Concetta Reynolds in Boston at two in the morning. Concetta listened to the baby and asked about signs of illness; Lucy reported none beyond warmth from crying.

The episode became a medical concern as well as a frightening mystery. At the emergency room, Abra had no fever or rash, and the examinations described in the account found neither pyloric stenosis nor a foreign object or bowel obstruction. The doctor could find no diagnosis to explain the crying and would not give an undiagnosed infant a sedative. The Stones were left waiting with a baby who continued to cry and with no ordinary medical explanation for what was happening.

John Dalton arrived after receiving the message. With the door open, David became aware of the commotion outside and asked what had happened. Dalton told him that a passenger jet had hit the World Trade Center and that it was not thought to be an accident. The first plane was American Airlines Flight 11. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.; at that moment, Abra abruptly stopped crying. By 9:04, she was asleep. The exact correspondence between the second flight number in David’s dream and the time her crying ceased gives the episode its decisive link to the attacks.

Recognition and Retelling

On the drive back to Anniston, Abra slept in her car seat while David and Lucy listened to the radio. The reports became harder to hear as the broadcasters named the airlines and flight numbers. David eventually turned off the radio, then began telling Lucy that he had dreamed something. The account places this conversation immediately after the parents have experienced the match between the dream numbers and the unfolding disaster: recognition comes not as an abstract explanation, but as a response to the sequence they have just lived through.

David later presented the episode to John Dalton and Concetta Reynolds as a story whose details could be compared. He began with the marathon crying and its immediate end after the second plane hit, then returned to the dreams: Lucy had seen 11, the number of American Airlines Flight 11, while he had seen 175, the number of United Airlines Flight 175. He connected Lucy’s airplane-bathroom setting and his burning mall to the attacks, but remained uncertain about what the dreams meant beyond the correspondence of the numbers. His hesitation matters: the evidence convinces him that the flight numbers are more than coincidence, while leaving him afraid to claim full understanding.

Dalton restated the implication plainly: Abra had been only five months old, and her parents believed she had foreseen the attacks and somehow communicated the warning telepathically. Concetta affirmed that concise account. David explained that he and Lucy had kept the incident to themselves apart from Concetta, to whom Lucy had confided it that night. The later telling therefore transforms a private and difficult-to-explain experience into a shared account, while preserving the parents’ caution about how to interpret it.

Significance

The premonition is built from a convergence of distinct signs rather than a spoken prediction. Lucy and David receive separate images, each with a flight number; Abra’s real distress overlaps with those dreams; and its abrupt end coincides with the impact of Flight 175. The episode’s force depends on the order of those details: the numbers appear first in the dreams, acquire public meaning through Dalton’s news, and are then reinforced by the timed change in Abra’s behavior.

Abra is still an infant, unable to explain what she perceives. Her parents must infer the connection from what they have dreamed and witnessed, and their first response is practical care and medical help rather than certainty about psychic ability. Later, David can organize the events into a compelling account without resolving their meaning. The episode thus establishes a formative pattern in Abra’s story: her extraordinary perception can reach others before she has the language or age to describe it, leaving those closest to her to recognize its signal through coincidence, timing, and careful retelling.