In 1909, Mark Twain told his biographer: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” The comet passed closest to the Sun on April 20, 1910. Twain died of a heart attack at his home in Connecticut the next day. His is the most famous case of a death that seemed to have been predicted, and there are others, though not all of them survive a close look.
1. Mark Twain (1910)
Twain was born on November 30, 1835, two weeks after the comet’s closest approach that year. The quote is recorded by his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, and Twain added that it would be “the greatest disappointment of my life” if he did not go out with the comet. He had been ill with heart trouble for months, so the prediction was partly a sick man’s joke. It still came true almost to the day.
2. Thomas Jefferson (1826)
Jefferson was 83 and dying at Monticello in the summer of 1826. His doctor and family recorded that on the night of July 3 he kept asking, “Is it the Fourth?” He lasted until shortly after noon on July 4, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence he had written. John Adams died the same afternoon.
3. Abraham Lincoln (1865)
Lincoln’s friend Ward Hill Lamon later wrote that, days before he was shot, the president described a dream in which he found a coffin in the East Room of the White House and was told, “The President. He was killed by an assassin.” Lamon’s account was published years after the event and cannot be checked against any other source.
4. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1791)
Mozart was working on a Requiem, a mass for the dead, commissioned by an anonymous patron, when he fell ill in late 1791. According to his wife, Constanze, he told her he was writing it for himself. He died on December 5, 1791, at 35, with the work unfinished. His pupil Franz Xaver Süssmayr completed it.
5. Arnold Schoenberg (1951)
The Austrian composer had a lifelong fear of the number 13. In 1951 an astrologer warned him that his 76th year would be dangerous, because seven and six add up to thirteen. He died on Friday, July 13, 1951, at 76, shortly before midnight, according to his wife, Gertrud, who said he had spent the day in bed waiting for it to pass.
6. Jim Morrison (1971)
After Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died at 27 within weeks of each other in 1970, Morrison reportedly told friends at a bar, “You’re drinking with number three.” He died in Paris on July 3, 1971, at 27.
Most of these stories were told by someone else after the death, which is exactly when a prediction is easiest to remember. Twain’s is the exception: his words were written down a year before the comet came back.