Omens of Death: From Broken Clocks to Butterflies

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Hey, y’all, it’s Weird Wednesday! Where on some Wednesdays, I blog about weird stuff and give writing prompts.

Today: 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. 

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some writing prompts, such as:

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?

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