What if you could predict your own death? Would it be coincidence, or some sort of sixth-sense intuition? These 10 people had their deaths predicted, and while skeptics may see these stories as mere coincidences, the predictions are just so bizarre you can’t help but wonder otherwise.
10. Frank Pastore
Frank Pastore was a famous baseball player for the Cincinnati Reds who later went on to host his own Christian radio show on in Los Angeles. He made a comment about getting into a fatal motorcycle crash following a discussion about the afterlife with his viewers, saying, “Look, you guys know I ride a motorcycle, right? So, at any moment, especially with the idiot people who cross the diamond lane into my lane, all right, without any blinkers — not that I’m angry about it — at any minute I could be spread all over the 210.”
Only three hours later, Pastore was hit on his motorcycle by a woman who lost control of her car. Pastore suffered major head injuries and died a short time later. Maybe it was just an odd coincidence, but others think his comment was much too detailed to be anything but fate.
9. Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was a famous composer and a superstitious man who looked for symbolism throughout his life. He suffered from a debilitating case of triskaidekaphobia, a fear of the number 13. His avoidance of the number consumed him, as he was born on September 13, 1874 and believed he would die on a year that was a multiple of thirteen. He would even change the names of his songs to keep them from having 13 letters.
Every 13 years Schoenberg became consumed with the fear and paranoia that the year would be his last. He prepared himself for death in 1951, and had an astronomer by the name of Dane Rudhyar make him a horoscope. To Schoenberg’s horror, Rudhyar informed him that years with the multiple of 13 were the least of his worries and it’s the ages that add up to 13 that he was really in danger from. Schoenberg soon found himself sick in bed on Friday the 13th of July 1951 at the age of 76 (seven and six make 13). Schoenberg was minutes away from midnight and surviving his superstitions when he suddenly passed away, just as he predicted.
8. Abraham de Moivre
Abraham de Moivre was an accomplished mathematician who’s most known for his work in chance and probability. He worked with numbers his whole life and made large contributions to the world of mathematics. Not only was Moivre able to use numbers to his benefit, he was able to use them to predict his own death.
As Moivre began to age, he body began slowing down. Unlike most people who simply disregard the fatigue, Moivre somehow knew that his time was near. The more fatigued he became, the more hours he needed of sleep, allotting himself 15 extra minutes each day. Moivre predicted that when those 15 minute intervals added up to a full 24 hours on November 27,1754, he would die. Incredibly, this inventor of mortality statistics passed away on that exact date.
7. William Thomas Stead
William Thomas Stead was a writer and a man of great superstitious beliefs. He believed himself to be clairvoyant and have the ability to talk to ghosts and spirits. Also known as the father of the modern tabloid, Stead was said to have sometimes gotten his information from sources in the after-life. While that claim seems a bit far-fetched, the coincidental predictions he made regarding his own death are undeniable.
The first article he wrote foreshadowing his death covered the danger of not having enough lifeboats aboard ships after two ships collided in the Atlantic and left hundreds dead. The second and even more eerie prediction came in a story he had written called From the Old World to the New. It was about a ship that collided with an iceberg, leaving many passengers dead while the survivors were rescued by a captain named Edward Smith.
Stead boarded the Titanic in 1912 to set sail to America for a peace conference, and was in his cabin when the ship hit the infamous iceberg. When he reached the deck, he found that there weren’t enough life rafts to go around. To Stead’s horror, he realized that his previous stories were coming true before his very eyes. While he believed in the superstitious, Stead failed to realize his very own predictions — the captain of the Titanic was even named Edward Smith. Accepting his fate, Stead sat down to read a book in the first class smoking room until the waters overtook him.
6. Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln had a dream about his assassination almost two weeks before he was shot. In the midst of the Civil War and facing an overwhelming amount of stress, it’s not surprising that Lincoln was prone to violent and vivid dreams. He recalled that he felt a “death-like stillness” as he walked down stairs and heard the sounds of sobbing. He found no one as he searched the house, yet everything in it seemed very familiar to him. When he reached the East Room he found a coffin being guarded by soldiers and holding a corpse in “funeral vestments.” He found people mourning in the room and when he asked a guard who had died in the White House he answered, “The President, he was killed by an assassin.” Lincoln was immensely bothered by this dream, and it came true on April 14, 1865, after which his coffin was placed in the East Room of the White House and guarded by soldiers.
5. Sugar Ray Robinson and Jimmy Doyle
Champion boxer Sugar Ray Robinson made a bizarre prediction regarding his opponent’s death. On June 25, 1947, he was supposed to fight Jimmy Doyle. In the days before the fight, Robinson made several complaints about a realistic dream he had where he killed Doyle in the fight with a left hook. The dream had troubled him so much that he made several attempts to back out of the fight.
A priest was brought in to reassure him that the dream wouldn’t come true and that he should proceed with the fight, to which he eventually agreed. Robinson was winning the fight, and in the eighth round he delivered a massive left hook to Doyle’s head, knocking him unconscious. As the referee deemed Robinson the winner, it was soon realized that Doyle was a lot more than just out cold. He was rushed to a hospital where he died without regaining consciousness. Robinson’s dream had played out exactly as he had imagined it.
4. Pete Maravich
Pete Maravich played basketball for both the Utah Jazz and Atlanta Hawks throughout the 1970s, and he’s commonly regarded as one of the best basketball players of all time. In an interview with the Beaver County Times newspaper in 1974 Maravich made an odd comment regarding his death, saying, “I don’t want to play 10 years in the NBA and die of a heart attack at 40.” In what’s either an incredible coincidence or a very sick joke, Maravich died in 1988, after 10 years in the NBA, at the age of 40. Even more disturbingly, Maravich died despite being in seemingly perfect health because he was suffering from a rare and undiagnosed heart condition after being born without his left coronary artery.
3. Mark Twain
While Mark Twain is most known for his accomplishments in writing, it’s a little-known fact that he’s also said to have accurately predicted his own death. Twain was born in 1835 following the appearance of Halley’s Comet, which comes about once every 75 years. A year prior to his death in 1909, Twain reportedly said, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.” Sure enough, the day following the comet’s closest appearance to the Earth Twain had a heart attack, killing him on April 21, 1910, at the age of 75.
2. Princess Diana
In what seems to be more of a conspiracy theory than a prediction, it was recently discovered that Princess Diana predicted her demise months before it actually happened. A letter written by the Princess to her trusted butler, Paul Burrell, explained strange feelings she had about getting into some sort of car accident. It was thought that Diana had been given some information by people who were close to the Princess about a plot that was in the works against her.
Written in October, 1996 following her separation from Prince Charles, she claimed, “This phase in my life is the most dangerous,” and that someone was “planning an accident in my car.” The letter even went as far as to name the individuals she thought would be responsible for the assassination. With the multitude of ways Princess Diana could have died or been assassinated, it seems odd that she died in the exact way she had expected. Now on one hand, the letter itself has been proven to be written in Diana’s handwriting, but on the other it only surfaced when Burrell needed to market a book he wrote about her. Whether you call it conspiracy or coincidence you can’t deny that it was a bizarre prediction.
1. Mikey Welsh
Mikey Welsh, the bassist for Weezer, received a lot of media attention in 2011 after he supposedly predicted his death on Twitter based on a dream he had. Many years of drugs and battling personality disorders had taken their toll on the 40 year-old musician, though he had seemed in pretty good health. On September 26, 2011, Welsh tweeted that he had “dreamt I died in Chicago next weekend (heart attack in my sleep). Need to write my will today.” He then quickly corrected his statement to “the weekend after next.”
In addition to these odd predictions, he had made a recent Facebook post advertising a piece of $250 art he had made that said, “if I am still alive at time of purchase, price to increase exponentially if I expire prematurely.” Welsh then died in a Chicago hotel room at the exact time he had predicted. While the police feel drugs may have been involved, the toxicology report was inconclusive and the exact reasons remain a mystery.
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