A dog howling at night
A dog howling outside a house at night, especially one that does not normally howl, warns of a death.
Animals superstition
Death omens
Death omens: a bird in the house, a howling dog or a stopped clock announces a death. First recorded: Antiquity across most cultures. That makes it more than 1,500 years old — joint 2nd oldest of the 45 superstitions we have dated.
- Earliest record
- Antiquity across most cultures
- Written down in
- 1867 Harland and Wilkinson, Lancashire
Record: John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore (London: Frederick Warne, 1867).
When it actually starts
How old is this one
First recorded
Antiquity across most cultures
That makes it
more than 1,500 years old
Rank by age
Joint 2nd oldest of 45 dated here
Category
Animals
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.
1 of the dated superstitions here were written down earlier and 32 later, while 11 share its date.
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Primary source
As it was written down in 1867
“If a dog howl under the window at night, a death will shortly happen in the house.”
“The death tick is not yet forgotten in the district around Burnley. Very recently the insect has disturbed the imagination of a young lady, and its ticks have led to more than one gloomy conjecture. It is a curious circumstance that the real death tick must only tick three times on each occasion.”
John Harland and T. T. Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore (London: Frederick Warne, 1867) — read the original text.
Two death omens from Lancashire in the 1860s: the howling dog, and the “death tick” — the tapping of the death-watch beetle in old timber.
The versions people follow
What exactly is believed
A picture falling
A portrait falling from the wall is a sign of death for the person pictured.
Three knocks
Three knocks with nobody at the door foretell a death in the family.
A bird in the house
A wild bird flying into the house brings news of a death.
How the bad luck is traditionally undone
Folk practice includes turning a shoe upside down under the bed to stop a dog howling, and opening a window so the bird can find its way out.
Where it lives today
Death omens are mostly remembered after a loss rather than acted on beforehand — a pattern psychologists describe as looking for meaning in hindsight.
What people say
A bird in the house, a howling dog or a stopped clock announces a death.What is going on
Dogs do detect illness by smell, and trained dogs have picked out some cancers in studies, so a dog behaving oddly around a sick person is not entirely folklore.Where it applies. Universal, with the messenger animal varying by region.
Nearest in age
Death omens are joint 2nd oldest of the 45 dated superstitions here. Of those, 3 date from 1900 or later and 14 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 →
Sources
Statements of fact on this page were checked against these sources in October 2026. How we choose and check sources: editorial policy.
Cite this page
AstroHot. “Death Omens: Origin, Meaning and When It Began.” Accessed October 29, 2026. https://astrohot.com/superstitions/death-omens/
For Wikipedia
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