What people say
A bird in the house, a howling dog or a stopped clock announces a death.Animals · 310 searches a month
Death omens
A bird in the house, a howling dog or a stopped clock announces a death.
When it actually starts
How old is this one
First recorded
Antiquity across most cultures
That makes it
about 2,526 years old
Rank by age
4 oldest of 40 dated here
Category
Animals
Searched
310 a month
Stopped clocks, howling dogs, birds indoors, a picture falling. All of them are ordinary events that get remembered only when a death follows.
Why it stuck. The purest survivorship bias in this set: nobody records the thousands of times a dog howled and nothing happened.
What is going on
Dogs do detect illness by smell — trained dogs identify some cancers reliably — so the specific case of a dog behaving oddly around a sick person is not entirely folklore.Where it applies. Universal, with the messenger animal varying by region.
Recorded around the same time
Death omens is the 4th oldest of the 40 dated superstitions here. Of those, 6 are younger than a century and 5 predate the common era.
First-recorded dates are the earliest documented appearance in written sources, not the earliest possible origin — an unrecorded practice can be older. How the dating works and where it is uncertain →