Omens of Death: From Broken Clocks to Butterflies

Welcome on this Weird Wednesday! Today we’re asking existential questions of insects.

People like to know what’s coming, even (especially) if it’s bad. It’s said no one wants to know the hour of their death, but we wouldn’t have a whole list of death omens if that were true. Traditionally, signs of impending doom are found in two places: the natural and the supernatural. So come have a seat by the fire, and let’s hope we don’t cast headless shadows. (No, really.) 

Some natural omens of death can be summed up as “animals acting strangely.” Birds coming inside the house, a hen crowing (that’s the rooster’s job), a cow trampling the vegetable garden. Obviously, it’s a bad sign (and very sad) if a bird dies flying into a window. This is the same kind of idea as a ship’s cat getting worked up before a storm: animals are supposed to sense something bad coming, and they’re either trying to warn us or they’re uncomfortable with the approaching dark clouds.

You can actually get this with plants as well: flowers blooming out of season are a death omen, though presumably the apple tree is not doing it on purpose to warn us. It does seem a little strange to me that nature would react weirdly to death, when death is a completely natural process. But maybe it’s also natural to receive warning?

Then there are the times when animals act completely normal, but it still counts as a death omen. A dog howls four times and then stops. A crow, raven, or whippoorwill sits on the roof, or someone sees a magpie, peacock, heron, pigeon, or three butterflies, or hears an owl. A dog rolling in the same spot over and over means they’re marking out a grave. To my mind, these make a little more sense if someone in the house is ill. If you’re worried about a sick relative and then see a raven perched on the roof, that might be a little more ominous.

Most feared among the “animals acting normally” category is, of course, the deathwatch beetle. This little guy lives in old wooden houses and makes ticking noises to attract mates. The problem is, those noises imitate one of the most common supernatural signs of impending death: knocking on the wall.

So let’s get into the spooky stuff: important families are said to have their own noisy death omens, like banshees or the Drummer of Cortachy, but anybody at all can hear those three knocks that mean death is on its way. Sometimes it’s supposed that ghosts of relatives return to escort their dying loved ones to the other side and kindly announce themselves with knocks, or a telephone ringing with no one on the other end, or an empty rocking chair by the fireside rocking away.

So far, all these death omens have been very general, meaning they could apply to someone who is ill or someone who is healthy but doomed to die by accident. In other words, these omens don’t name names. But there are some that do, and these are the really creepy ones.

For example, if a portrait of you falls off the wall, that’s not a good sign. Same with someone toasting you, and then dropping their glass, which breaks. It’s not great if a knife set spinning on the table stops with its blade pointing to you, or if you hear a ringing in your ears, which is called the “death bell” (or tinnitus).

You particularly don’t want to be walking down the road and witness a phantom funeral pass by, see a ghost light, encounter a spectral black dog, or glimpse your own doppelganger (a double of you). And you definitely don’t want to discover that you’re casting a shadow that doesn’t have a head!

On that cheery note, it’s time for some ominous writing prompts!

• What’s wrong with your dog? So animals can, in fact, sense things humans can’t. There are stories of dogs sniffing out illness, birds acting weird before earthquakes, and, particularly relevant to this article, cats knowing which nursing home inmate will be next to die. A lot of death omens predict someone in a certain household or extended family will die before the next major holiday, or within the next year. You could write a story about an animal trainer who made a living by providing those kinds of answers. Kind of like Groundhog Day, but creepier (or maybe not). How much would those answers cost? Who would buy them? And what if the answers were wrong?

• Fair warning. So let’s say your character’s pet hen refuses to conform to gender norms, and the portrait of their Great Aunt Grizelda falls off the wall. So yes, they’re getting some clear signs that death is on the way. But again, why? Why would the universe want them to know Aunt Grizelda is not long for this world? Is it a courtesy? Is it just a thing the universe does? Or is it an opportunity to change the prediction? If your character makes sure Grizelda is vaccinated and checks the brakes on her car, will that avert her death? It might be hard to tell if Grizelda is elderly and near the end anyhow. But what if the death omens point to someone young and healthy?

• When you believe it, then you will see it. Most people don’t believe in death omens, or at least, they say they don’t. But that doesn’t mean death omens can’t be dangerous. If you’ve got a character who really believes in this stuff, then they’re at risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, if they’re convinced they’re going to die, they might take foolish risks, stop eating, or refuse treatment for an illness. But what if the signs pointed to someone else? Say you’ve got a character who truly believes Aunt Grizelda has been marked for death—and they stand to inherit her fortune. What might they do then when she stubbornly remains healthy?

• And then there were none. How about this for a mystery? A family has received death omens, but they don’t know who they’re for. Maybe they’re having a family reunion, so there were about 10 people in the room when they heard the death knocks, eight when a bird flew into the house, and twelve when Grandma Janine dropped the scissors and the blade stuck into the floor. So it’s a process of elimination. And what if Aunt Grizelda with her fortune is one of the possibilities? Might someone want to bump her off and say it was meant to be?

• Double double. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was said to have seen his doppelganger before his death. (See my related article on fetches, which are apparitions of the living at the time of great peril or death.) This might be the strangest death omen of all. It makes sense for a death omen to be ghostly lights or a spectral dog, but why would seeing your own double mean doom? Is the double a manifestation of the soul, which will soon be separated from the body? You could have a story where a character sees their doppelganger and tries to interact with it or stop what awful fate is coming. You could even write the story from the point of view of the double.

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! I was going to say I hope you don’t meet a phantom funeral on your way home, but actually that sounds kind of cool.

Sources & further reading:

Bergen, Fanny D., et al. “Current Superstitions. I. Omens of Death.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 2, no. 4, 1889, pp. 12–22. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/533697. Accessed 15 Nov. 2024.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/533697 

Bergen, Fanny D., and W. W. Newell. “Current Superstitions. II. Omens of Death (Continued).” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 2, no. 5, 1889, pp. 105–12. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/533318. Accessed 15 Nov. 2024. https://www.jstor.org/stable/533318 

Buckland, Raymond. Signs, Symbols & Omens: An Illustrated Guide to Magical & Spiritual Symbolism. Llewellyn Publications, 2003. On Goodreads

Opie, Iona, and Tatem, Moira. A Dictionary of Superstitions. Oxford University Press, 1996. On Goodreads

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