Post by Joanna on Jan 8, 2015 23:47:16 GMT -5
Celebrities who predicted their own deaths
I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all. In fact, I’d say I’m a seasoned skeptic about all things coincidental and serendipitous. Because of this, when I read about American writer John Dunne predicting his own death in 2003, I began to research extensively artists who in some capacity, felt they were going to die very soon. It fascinated me that anyone could feel death before it arrived. I found it even more interesting that these people at least experienced something that made them need to say to the world that thought they were on the way out. What is that feeling? And from where does it come? This skepticism led me to some pretty interesting coincidences, and only a handful of truly bizarre “prophecies.” Believing we can ever feel death in any form is quite a personal endeavor and it’s an interesting thought to mull over. In terms of these artists, this is really all we know: all these artists felt an urgent and specific time they would meet their end and all these creative people did actually die between 1 and 30 days of communicating the end was nigh.
Mark Twain. Twain predicted the exact date of his own death. According to the book Mark Twain: A Biography, in 1909 he was quoted as saying: “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.'” Twain’s prophetic assumption was realized and he died from a heart attack April 21, 1910, reportedly just 24 hours after the comet came as close to Earth as it ever had before.
Jackie Wilson. He was one of the best rhythm and blues singers of all time and his death reads kind of like a really awkward joke – at least, this is what the audience he was performing for thought they were witnessing. Known for his stunning dancing and on stage antics, when Wilson started to struggle to stand during a performance of one of his hits “Lonely Teardrops,” while singing the line “my heart is crying,” he was actually dying of a heart attack – on live TV. He was successfully revived on stage by a bystander after a few minutes – once they realized he wasn’t joking – but later died in a hospital. You can read it in the book Icons of R & B and Soul.
John Gregory Dunne. John Gregory Dunne collaborated with his wife Joan Didion, writing as journalists, screenwriters and novelists for 40 years. After Dunne’s unexpected – and prophesied – death in 2003, in which he urgently expressed that he was going to go soon, he died while eating dinner at his home in New York two weeks later, as predicted. Dunne was so convinced he would die that he and Joan went to Paris to visit, as Dunne wanted to see Paris again before he died. Joan Didion wrote in her memoir A Year Of Magical Thinking (for which she won a Pulitzer Prize) of the experience of her daughter and husband dying within 18 months of each other that John had seemed annoyed he’d spent a long time writing about something he didn’t truly care about because he felt he was about to die. “He said that his current piece in The New York Review, a review of Gavin Lambert’s biography of Natalie Wood, was worthless ... 'Why did I waste time on a piece about Natalie Wood,’ he said.” Didion wrote that he “had a feeling” in those two weeks that the end was coming. As Dunne had a heart attack during dinner, Didion called an ambulance, but he died within the hour.
Mikey Welsh. Mikey Welsh (above) was a prolific American artist and musician. He found fame early as the bass player for Weezer and enjoyed a productive painting career. In an uncanny turn of events, on September 26, 2011, Welsh Tweeted about a premonition in a dream that he died of a heart attack in his sleep in Chicago. Two weekends later, he died in his sleep October 8, 2011, in a hotel room in Chicago from a drug overdose. He was only 40-years-old. It was a tragic and untimely death coupled with Welsh’s bizarre Twitter assertion.
Arnold Schoenberg. Austrian composer and artist Arnold Schoenberg had a bad case of triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13. And it apparently killed him. According to his friend Katia Mann, which is recorded in his book, he was terrified of dying in a year that was a multiple of 13. For example he was petrified of his birthday in 1939 (he was turning 65). In 1950, Schoenberg was turning 76 years old and his stupid friend Oskar Adler wrote a letter to Schoenberg warning him the coming year was “critical” because 7 + 6 = 13. This freaked him out and he became convinced he would die on his 76th birthday, Friday the 13th of July. In a letter Schoenberg’s wife wrote Arnold’s sister his wife Gertrude is quoted as saying, “About a quarter to twelve I looked at the clock and said to myself: another quarter of an hour and then the worst is over. Then the doctor called me. Arnold’s throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat and that was the end.” He died at 11.45 p.m., 15 minutes before the day was gone. His death was of natural causes, sometimes recorded as heart failure, probably because he was “scared to death.”
Johnny Cash. In his last interview, Johnny Cash quite poetically explained he felt death was coming. Within a month of the interview Cash died. He didn’t predict the date, or the comet, or the location as others did, but he did speak of a feeling that he expected his life to “end soon.” I don’t think Cash predicted his death in the same way as someone like Mark Twain, but perhaps there is an inexplicable quality about the relationship we have subconsciously with our body.
Have you known someone who felt death approaching? Do you think these are all purely coincidence?
Source: RedBuggle.
