Akane: In 1892, 14 years before the Titanic sank... A novel was published. It was called "Futility". It was written by an American novelist named Morgan Robertson. The story was about a big cruise ship colliding with an iceberg and sinking. Of course, if that was the only similarity, there wouldn't be any reason to mention it... It wasn't though... The name of the ship, its nationality, course, departure time... Size, displacement, maximum speed, number of passengers and crew, the number of lifeboats... Even the location of the accident itself, and the cause, and the location of the damage... Everything matches the Titanic almost exactly. It was almost as if he'd seen the whole thing happen... But this book was written 14 years before the Titanic sank.
Akane: But that's not all. It wasn't just "Futility" that predicted the sinking of the Titanic. There were 2 other, similar stories written by a man named William Thomas Stead. Both of them before the accident... One in 1886, and one in 1892. Stead wrote 2 stories that had striking similiarities to the Titanic disaster. In one, 2 ships collided, and many of the passengers died because there weren't enough lifeboats. In the other, a ship collided with an iceberg, and sank.
Junpei: Hmm, I dunno. I mean, I'll give that it seems a little weird, but... I'm pretty sure it wasn't too uncommon for ships to hit icebergs back in the day, or even other ships.
Akane: Right. I knew you'd say that. But... what if Stead had some sort of special powers...? To be more specific, what if he had the ability to do automatic writing...?
Junpei: What? Automatic writing? Wait, are you... Are you talking about that thing where someone says they're possessed by a spirit... And then they write a bunch of stuff without knowing what they're writing?
Junpei: Okay, so let's say--hypothetically--that automatic writing isn't a total load. These guys still couldn't have predicted the sinking of the Titanic. When this Stead dude wrote his thing... Nobody had died on the Titanic yet. So if automatic writing is about being possessed by spirits of dead people... Who the hell possessed him so he could write that stuff?
Akane: That's not it. Stead wasn't possessed by a spirit. He was doing the possessing. William Thomas Stead was a passenger on the Titanic. He just wrote down what he saw with his own eyes... 20 years before it happened...