More Dreams, Visions or Spooky Events That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster

In the series of posts below, I discussed dreams, visions or mysterious voices that seemed to foretell a death or disaster:

When Dreams or Visions Foretell a Death

More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Still More Dreams, Visions or Voices That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Even More Dreams and Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death

Some More Dreams or Visions That Seemed to Foretell a Death or Disaster

When the Future Whispers to the Present

When Dreams or Premonitions Seem to Act Prophetically

Dreams, Visions or Premonitions That Seemed to Correctly Predict a Death

Sometimes Dreams, Visions or Premonitions Seem to Foretell a Death

Let us look at some more cases of this type.

A 1906 news story tells this account:

"FALLS CITY, Neb., Feb. s.— When Dr. Kerr and his wife had seated themselves at the breakfast table this morning Mrs. Kerr commenced to relate the story of a dream she had in the night. She had dreamed that their house was on fire and was giving a vivid description of the excitement she had undergone and of the damage done to the house. Her story was interrupted by the unceremonious  arrival of a neighbor's son who burst into the room, exclaiming that their house was in flames. The house had caught fire from a defective electric light wire.

Considerable damage was done to the house and the contents before the flames were extinguished. The psychic phenomenon presented by Mrs. Kerr's dream is causing much discussion."

You can read the account here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LAH19060206.2.117.44&srpos=6&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22strange+vision%22------

Below is a sad account of a mother who seemed to have a dream of her son's death that occurred on the same day 90 miles away:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1907-11-28/ed-1/seq-1/

The account below from 1907 is similar to the one above, with a mother having a vision of the death of her son at the time he died, a vision that proves true. 

The account above can be read here. 

A woman in 1893 told of having a strange vision of the death of her cousin, one that matched the death of that cousin five years later:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94052989/1893-01-15/ed-1/seq-16/

Below is an account of a child who had an unusually vivid dream of his mother and father at a funeral, where there was a "beautiful little white coffin." On the same day he told his mother of the dream, he was killed by an automobile. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93055779/1907-04-17/ed-1/seq-1/

In the account below we have a man claiming to have a very explicit dream in which an angel tells him his wife will soon die. The wife did soon die in a freak accident. 

The newspaper account can be read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016689/1911-05-04/ed-1/seq-1/

The newspaper account below dates from 1911. We have not exactly a vision of foretelling the disaster of a son being sick and without money, but instead a vision in which the father seems to perceive such a state existing thousands of miles away. 

"LOS ANGELES, Jan. 10. —Walter Bulloch is in a local hospital to-day, anxiously awaiting word from his father, a wealthy retired linen merchant in Ireland, following the receipt by Chief of Police Sebastian of a cable from Bulloch senior, in which the father stated that he had a vision of his son, penniless and sick, and requested that the Chief of Police search for the young man. Sebastian had a notice inserted in local papers and young Bulloch saw it and notified the Chief that he was the son of the man whose dream had spanned the ocean separating them. Sebastian cabled the father that his son was ill and without funds here."

You can read the account here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=NWJ19110113.2.76&srpos=4&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22strange+vision%22-------

Below we have an account of a clairvoyant vision of a loss of life in some kind of wreck of accident involving the steamship Continental in 1870. The clairvoyant  in San Francisco claimed the accident took place many miles away, at Cape St. Lucas (the same as Cabo San Lucas, a location at the tip of the Baja peninsula in Mexico, 1542 miles from San Francisco), with the vision supposedly occurring the same day as the accident.  The newspaper account says a matching accident occurred to this ship, in just such a place. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85033673/1870-12-27/ed-1/seq-1/

According to the wikipedia.org page here, the following accident occurred to the Continental on September 29, 1870:

"The steamship foundered 30 nautical miles (56 km) off Cabo San Lucas, Mexico with the loss of eight lives. She was on a voyage from Mazatlán, Mexico to San Francisco, California."

The "Cabo San Lucas" referred to is Cape St. Lucas ("Cabo" means "Cape" in Spanish, and "San" means "St." or "Saint.") 

In the account below we hear of a rose that inexplicably begins to arise from a mirror.  The appearance of each leaf in the rose seems to correspond to the death of a family member. 

Below is an incredibly strange newspaper account of rumors arising that a man had died in a car crash. The man drove to his friends to assure him the rumor was false. But on his way back he died in a car crash, just as the rumor had described. 

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87078082/1909-06-25/ed-1/seq-6/

The account below is found on page 782 of the December 8, 1933 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here:

"A painful impression has been produced in Sordevolo by the sudden death of Signora Cornella Piovano, aged thirty-eight. Signora Piovano dreamed that she had died suddenly, and awakened in great agitation. The next morning, still under the impression of her dream, she recounted it to her family, expressing the conviction that it would be verified. A few hours later the unfortunate woman, while putting her child to bed, was taken suddenly ill and died almost immediately".

The very interesting account below is found on page 171 of the May 29, 1920 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here.

When Frustrated Scientists Make the Most Grandiose Boasts

 A recent article by scientist Alexandra Amon is an example of very bad hubris by a scientist. It is an article with the doubly misleading title "The Dark Universe: Why we're about to solve the biggest mystery in science." The mystery referred to is the so-called mystery of dark matter. Contrary to the groundless boasting of the title, no progress is being made in solving this so-called mystery, which we should always call a so-called mystery because of the lack of a clear evidential basis for believing that dark matter exists. And this so-called mystery of dark matter is almost trifling and insignificant compared to other mysteries of science that are a million times bigger. 

Right from the start, we have an indication that Amon has gone astray. She begins her article saying this:

"Tiny, fuzzy blobs. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at images of tiny, fuzzy blobs. They’re only ever a few pixels wide, like smudges on a photo, but they could be the key that unlocks the mystery of dark matter."

It's a waste of time to ever spend much time on any image that is only a few pixels wide. For many years I've got photographs stranger than that of 99% of all photographers. One of my rules is: never publish any image smaller than about 70 pixels by 70 pixels. Below that size, it is is just too easy to get false alarms. So it is pretty nonsensical to think that images "only ever a few pixels wide" could every unlock some deep cosmic mystery. 

Amon states, "Our theory of the Universe hinges on the existence of dark matter, and we have no idea what dark matter is." But a great rule is: in almost every case, with few exceptions, if you have no idea of what something is, then you do not actually know such a thing exists. And that rule holds true in this case. We do not know that any such thing as dark matter exists. 

Amon is a member of a belief community, the tiny community of scientists that calls themselves cosmologists. The total number of cosmologists around the world is only a few thousand. In tiny groups this small, it is extremely common for groupthink to occur. Groupthink is typically when some belief tradition arises in a small community, and it becomes taboo for people in that little clique to challenge that belief tradition.  People in the little clique may get wildly excited about ideas that are not warranted by observations. 

The cosmologist belief community clings without warrant to several unproven and dubious belief traditions, all of which involve never-observed things.  Those belief traditions include:

• A belief in the existence of dark matter.
• A belief in the existence of dark energy.
• A belief in the existence of primordial cosmic inflation, not to be confused with the more general belief in the Big Bang.   

Cosmologists are very often guilty of egregious misstatements in which they claim to know grand and glorious things that they do not actually know. 

We have this goofy reasoning from Amon:

"Maybe dark matter is simply something we’ve invented out of a misinterpretation of the theory. Maybe it’s not really out there at all.

Sadly, not. Because one thing we do know is that something is out there. We can’t see it and we don’t know what it is, but since Dr Vera Rubin first observed the effects it was having on stars in the late 1970s, there’s no denying it’s there. Rubin set out to study the motions of stars in spiral galaxies, but her measurements suggested that the stars weren’t moving as expected."

Amon refers to the fact that textbook versions of gravitational theory do not correctly predict the orbital motion of stars around the centers of galaxies. But such a failure does not amount to an argument for the likely existence of dark matter. There are many possible theories that might explain such an anomaly, theories different from the dark matter theory. The "there's no denying it's there" claim is false. There is a substantial group of MOND theorists who very much deny that the "it" she refers to (massive amounts of invisible dark matter) is there. 

After describing that outer stars (farther away from the center of the galaxy) orbit the galaxy as quickly as inner stars (closer to the center of the galaxy), Amon claims that  "the only thing that could explain this finding would be if there is a tremendous amount of invisible matter in the outer regions of galaxies beyond the inner clump of visible stars." No, that is not true. There are quite a few different theories that have been created to explain this observational anomaly.  One of them is called MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics. 

Below is a post from one of the main sites of such a MOND theory, the site www.darkmattercrisis.wordpress.com:

Amon speaks above just as if the MOND theory does not exist. This is a common tactic of scientists: just pretend competing theories do not exist, and hope they go away. Amon incorrectly says this about dark matter: "So we know it’s there and that there’s a lot of it." No, we do not know that dark matter exists, and no one has ever observed it. 

Very strangely, referring to the so-called Standard Model of Cosmology, Amon states, "This ‘baby picture’ of the Universe supports the evidence that the cosmos is composed predominantly of dark matter." No, according to such a model the universe is composed predominately of something different from dark matter: dark energy. 

Misspeaking very badly about something never observed, Amon states this "Our observations tell us that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding of the cosmos: it forms a cosmic web of clusters and filaments, with enormous voids in-between, that guide the location of galaxies." To the contrary, there have been no such observations. Dark matter has never been observed. 

Neither dark matter nor dark energy has any place in the Standard Model of Physics, something that is on vastly sounder ground than the so-called Standard Model of Cosmology. Few claims are more laughable than Amon's groundless boast that " we're about to solve the biggest mystery in science." Despite decades of heavy funding, no progress has been made in either observing dark matter or substantiating a physics basis underlying the existence of dark matter.  Nothing currently being done offers much hope for progress on this topic. 

The alleged mystery of dark matter corresponds to what particle or particles make up dark matter, if dark matter exists. That is not a known mystery of the universe, but may well be merely a socially constructed artificial mystery that is the creation of speculating scientists. Ideas about dark matter arose from observations of why stars do not revolve around the center of a galaxy at the expected speed. Such a mystery is not even one of the hundred biggest mysteries of science. 

All of the mysteries below are mysteries a thousand times bigger than any mystery of dark matter:

(1) How are humans instantly able to retrieve lots of information after seeing a single sight or hearing a single name?

(2) How are the most complex cells able to reproduce?

(3) How did the 20,000+ types of protein molecules in the human body ever originate?

(4) How do protein molecules fold correctly to form into the 3D shapes needed for their function, and why do they form into just the right organized protein complexes so often needed for them to perform useful functions in the human body?

(5) How are humans ever able to learn new things, and form new memories that can last a lifetime?

(6) How is a speck-sized zygote ever able to progress to become the vast organization of an adult human body?

(7) How is a human able to think and understand? 

(8) How were the cells and anatomy of any complex visible organism ever able to originate?

(9) How was human language ever able to originate?

(10) Why does there occur the many well-established things that so many scientists senselessly refuse to believe in?

For a discussion of why each of these questions is very much unanswered,  read my post here. 

It's not that Amon is mostly wasting her time. She works on a project called the Dark Energy Survey which describes itself as "an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe."  Such a project is actually doing some solid mapping work. It is simply that such a project has done nothing to prove the existence of either dark matter or dark energy, which was its grand ambition.  Scientists working on not-meeting-their-grand-goals projects should not be boasting so loudly, as Amon has done. 

If there were a monthly magazine on the search for dark matter, it might look like this:

Some More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

 What if your whole earthly life is the mere infancy of your soul's existence? Then when you die, it may be like progressing from being a baby to being a toddler. 

In the series of posts listed below I gave many examples of people who saw an apparition of someone they did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the person had died about the same time the apparition was seen:

An Apparition Was Their Death Notice

25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

Yet Another 25 Who Were “Ghost-Told” of a Death

Scientific American's Very Lame "Ghost Explanations"

They Also Were "Ghost Told" of a Death

More Accounts of Veridical Apparitions

Even More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Serve as Announcements

Still More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Act as News Bulletins

They Too Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

They Seemed to Ghost-Learn of Someone's Death

It Seemed Her Suicide Was Not Her End

Veridical Apparitions Are Not Very Rare

Let us look at some more cases of this type. Here is an account of someone "ghost-told" of a death, with the interesting twist that the ghost viewer then died:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85040614/1908-12-04/ed-1/seq-2/

The account below is from the newspaper story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn88064537/1885-08-22/ed-1/seq-8/

The account below seems to qualify as a case of being "ghost-told" of a death:

The full newspaper story can be read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026749/1926-12-10/ed-1/seq-22/

The account below was told by  Doctor Elliot Coues, a biologist member of the National Academy of Sciences,  in a story printed in 1900 in the Washington Post. Although in the same article Coues refers to "death wraiths," which he says appear "a little before or a little after the death of the sender," it is not quite clear whether he knew of the death of the person mentioned below before the apparition was seen. 

The full account can be read below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84026965/1900-02-14/ed-1/seq-2/

Later in the same article the biologist makes these interesting statements:

The National Academy of Sciences biologist then makes this startling claim:

The volumes referred to are Volume One of Phantasms of the Living, which can be read online here, and Volume Two of the work which can be read here. A significant fraction of the 700+ cases reported in that two-volume work are cases in which someone reports seeing or hearing an apparition of a particular person they did not know was dead, only to find out later that just such a person had died on about the same day or exactly the same day (and often on the same hour and day).

The 1872 newspaper account below appeared with a title of "Seeing a Sister's Apparition and Then Hearing of Her Sudden Death."

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84027008/1872-10-10/ed-1/seq-1/

Here is yet another case of being "ghost-told" of a death:

You can read the account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1931-11-15/ed-1/seq-21/

On page 592 of the document here, we read a Dr. Coleman state the following case of a young boy who saw the apparition of a teacher who had very recently died, a boy who had never been told of the teacher's death:

"The day before the little boy died he and his mother and the nurse were alone together in the room. The child said his Sunday school teacher was in the room with them, told how she was dressed,

etc. At the time this took place the teacher, who had suddenly died, was lying in her casket. The child had not been informed of her death."

The next case in this post does not quite qualify as being "ghost-told of a death" as no one at the time knew that either a ghost had been seen or that a death had occurred. But the case does seem like evidence of an apparition of a person appearing near a relative at about the time of that person's death. The case is found as Case #  242 in Volume I of the famous work Phantasms of the Living, and can be read on the page here: 

"October 30th, 1885.

(242)  In the month of August, 1864, about 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I was sitting reading in the verandah of our house in Barbadoes. My black nurse was driving my little girl, about 18 months or so old, in her perambulator in the garden. I got up after some time to go into the house, not having noticed anything at all — when this black woman said to me, ' Missis, who was that gentleman that was talking to you just now ?' ' There was no one talking to me,' I said. ' Oh, yes, dere was, Missis — a very pale gentleman, very tall, and he talked to you, and you was very rude, for you never answered him.' I repeated there was no one, and got rather cross with the woman, and she begged me to write down the day, for she knew she had seen someone. I did, and in a few days I heard of the death of my brother in Tobago. Now, the curious part is this, that I did not see him, but she — a stranger to him — did ; and she said that he seemed very anxious for me to notice him.

"MAY CLERKE."

On the same page someone else corroborates the tale:

"I well remember that on the day on which Mr. John Beresford, my wife's brother, died in Tobago — after a short illness of which we were not aware — our black nurse declared she saw, at as nearly as possible the time of his death, a gentleman, exactly answering to Mr. Beresford's description, leaning over the back of Mrs. Clerke's easy-chair in the open verandah. The figure was not seen by any one else.

SHADWELL H. CLERKE."

On pages 547 to 559 of Volume XI of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (1895), which can be read here, we have a most unusual and complex report of being ghost-told of a death. In this case the witness does not report seeing an apparition of someone she knew (as typically occurs), but of someone unknown to her. Reportedly the apparition made a series of predictions that were verified, such as that the witness would learn of the death of a child who was buried in a particular graveyard she would soon visit. The case seems to have been diligently checked out by members of the Society, who found quite a lot of corroborating evidence. But the account is too complex for me to summarize here. 

A drawing from an old newspaper story

The great majority of accounts in this post and the posts mentioned at the top of this post involve cases in which someone reports seeing an earthly apparition of someone he did not know was dead, and then soon learns the person died at about the time the apparition was seen.  A very similar type of account I have rarely heard of may have a form such as this:

(1) Person X may have a near-death experience in which he reports seeing some person who he knew had died, perhaps in some mystical realm. This Person X may also report seeing in such a place a Person Y who he did not know was dead. 

(2) It may then soon be confirmed that this Person Y had died, unknown to Person X when he had this near-death experience. 

The quote below from a 2024 article seems to describe a case of this type, which we might describe as "spirit-told of a death" rather than "ghost-told of a death":

"A young nine-year-old boy named Eddie was seriously ill in a hospital. Recovering from a thirty-six-hour fever, Eddie immediately told those in the hospital room that he had been to heaven, recounting seeing his grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle there. But then his startled and agitated father heard Eddie report that his nineteen-year-old sister Teresa, away at college, was in heaven too, and she told Eddie that he had to return. But the father had just spoken to Teresa two days prior. Checking with the college, the father found out that his daughter had been killed in a car accident the previous day, but that the college could not reach the family at their home, presumably because of Eddie’s hospital stay!"

Scientist Flubs and Flops, #7

 

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•  "In real time how the chaperones fold the newly synthesized polypeptide sequences into a particular three-dimensional shape within a fraction of second is still a mystery for biologists as well as mathematicians."   -- Arun Upadhyay, "Structure of proteins: Evolution with unsolved mysteries," 2019.
• "The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found." -- Two scientists, "On a generalized Levinthal's paradox," 2018. 
• "A wide variety of protein structures exist in nature, however the evolutionary origins of this panoply of proteins remain unknown."  -- Four Harvard scientists, "The role of evolutionary selection in the dynamics of protein structure evolution." 
• "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
• "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link). 
• "Protein assemblies are at the basis of numerous biological machines by performing actions that none of the individual proteins would be able to do. There are thousands, perhaps millions of different types and states of proteins in a living organism, and the number of possible interactions between them is enormous...The strong synergy within the protein complex makes it irreducible to an incremental process. They are rather to be acknowledged as fine-tuned initial conditions of the constituting protein sequences. These structures are biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have created. Such systems pose a serious challenge to a Darwinian account of evolution, since irreducibly complex systems have no direct series of selectable intermediates, and in addition, as we saw in Section 4.1, each module (protein) is of low probability by itself." -- Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjerm, "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems,"  Journal of Theoretical Biology.
• "Yet while these are several examples of well-understood processes, our study of animal morphogenesis is really in its infancy." -- David Bilder and Saori L. Haigo1, "Expanding the Morphogenetic Repertoire: Perspectives from the Drosophila Egg."