Signs From the Universe That You're About to Die

Death omens are traditional beliefs with no scientific backing: crows cannot sense the energy of a dying person, and a howling dog does not announce a death. Their real interest lies in cultural history, not in prediction.

There is a scene that repeats itself in many homes: it is three in the morning, the city is asleep, and suddenly a bird starts singing as if it were noon. Whoever hears it feels a chill and remembers the long list of omens they have heard all their life. The tradition is old and well documented: Greeks and Romans already read the flight and song of birds as messages from the gods. That is where the word augury comes from.

## Crows, roosters and dogs restless in the small hours

The classic repertoire includes crows and roosters crowing at impossible hours, always in the middle of a city and never at six in the morning. The traditional explanation holds that they perceive changes in the energy of someone about to die and grow restless in their own sleep. Biology offers another reading: urban birds are proge by artificial light, noise or predators, and roosters do not need dawn to crow.

Dogs deserve a chapter of their own. They are credited with a distinct, whining bark on full-moon nights, and some claim they announce a death that arrives hours later. No study has ever linked canine howling to deaths. Dogs do detect changes in smell and behaviour in sick people, but from there to predicting a death is an enormous leap.

## The deathwatch beetle and the falling photograph

The **Xestobium rufovillosum** is a wood-boring beetle commonly known as the deathwatch beetle. Its mating tapping, similar to the tick-tock of a clock, was interpreted for centuries as a countdown. The insect announces nothing: it drills into beams and furniture.

The list also includes a photograph that falls or is damaged for no reason, an owl appearing on a roof where it is not usually seen, and flashes of light that disturb a funeral, read as a warning that the next to go will be whoever sees them. These are coincidences turned into rules.

## Thirteen at the table and the double that replaces you

The belief that if thirteen people sit at a table, the first to rise will die within a year has Christian roots: the Last Supper. It is a widespread superstition with no empirical basis.

The doppelgänger, the demonic double, appears in Darren Aronofsky's film **Black Swan** (**2011**), which mirrors Tchaikovsky's ballet: the black swan betrays and takes over from the white swan. According to the belief, when that entity leaves your body, you die and it takes your soul with it. Dreaming that you dress a corpse, holding a séance or creating a tulpa complete the catalogue, with the idea that you open the door to evil.

None of this has scientific backing. Omens work through confirmation bias: we remember the bird when someone dies and forget the hundred nights it sang with no consequence. If any of this distresses you, talk to a mental health professional.