Throughout history, many prophecies were made about how the future would look, who would die when, or which wars would happen at what time.
Many of them were simply empty predictions, while some correctly guessed some important events, even to the smallest details.
From dreams to visions and gut feelings, here are the strange prophecies that actually came true.
1. Nostradamus and the Great Fire of London
In the 1500s, Nostradamus composed a poem with four lines about a “great fire” that will destroy London. In 1666, more than a hundred years later, the Great Fire of London raced through the city and destroyed thousands of homes.
People got goosebumps when the disaster happened because he said, “The blood of the just will be demanded of London, burnt by fire in the year 66.”
Some people say the phrase is too ambiguous, but the fact that it was the right year made it unforgettable. Nostradamus is still one of the most well-known prophets in history, and this occurrence made his forecasts much more well-known.
2. The Titanic Disaster Foretold in Fiction
Morgan Robertson wrote a novella called Futility in 1898. It was about a luxury ship known as the Titan that sank in the North Atlantic after colliding with an iceberg.
The real Titanic suffered the same end fourteen years later. It was said that both the made-up Titan and the real Titanic were “unsinkable” ships with too few lifeboats. Readers all over the world were astonished by how similar the book was to the tragedy.
Some people thought Robertson had seen the catastrophe coming, while others thought it showed how arrogant people can be. Either way, the scary details still make people wonder if it was really just a coincidence.
3. The Death of Abraham Lincoln
A few days before he was killed in 1865, Lincoln had a scary dream. He is said to have told his wife and close friends that he dreamed he walked into the East Room of the White House and saw a dead body covered by soldiers.
He asked the dream figure who had died, and it responded, “The President.” John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre not long after.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that the unsettling dream was a warning from the future. It is one of the most frightening examples of intuition or prophecy coming true that history has recorded.
4. Mark Twain Predicting His Own Death
Halley’s Comet passed Earth in 1835, the year Mark Twain was born. He joked a lot about his life, saying that he would die when the comet came back.
He wrote in 1909, “The Almighty has said… ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'” Twain died in April 1910, only one day after Halley’s Comet came closest to Earth, as he had said he would.
A lot of people thought the timing was too strange to ignore. His prognosis turned out to be one of the most personal and accurate prophecies in recent history, which only added to his mystique.
5. World War II Predicted by H.G. Wells
H.G. Wells, who is generally called the “father of science fiction,” made quite accurate guesses about what would happen in the future. Wells wrote of a conflict that will happen in the future in his 1914 book The World Set Free.
This happened many years before nuclear weapons were made. He talked about cities being devastated by radioactive fire, which looked a lot like what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
It felt like he could see into the future when he thought about technology and how dangerous it may be. Wells may not have had visions, but his prophecies about world conflict and nuclear catastrophe came true in a scary way.
6. The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
In 1914, it was believed that Mother Shipton, an English seer from the 1500s, had predicted that a “great ruler” would die and that that event would start a world war.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo started World War I. People disagree over the specifics of Shipton’s prophecies, but many think her writings fit the event.
The idea that a prophecy from hundreds of years ago could come true at such a world-changing time adds to the intrigue. Her words are still echoing, along with many other creepy predictions about war and change.
7. Jules Verne and Space Travel
From the Earth to the Moon, a book by French author Jules Verne, came out in 1865. It told the story of a rocket launch from Florida that sent three men into space.
NASA sent astronauts to the moon on Apollo missions from Cape Canaveral, Florida, almost 100 years later. Verne’s novel included things like the design of the spacecraft and the weightlessness of space that were true to reality.
At the time, his inventive idea of space travel appeared like a fantasy, but it turned out to be a prophecy that inspired many others. Verne’s work reveals that sometimes imagination feels like seeing into the future.
Born and raised in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ever since I was a little girl, my imagination knew no bounds. I remember vividly how I’d scribble down short stories, each page bursting with adventures and characters conjured up from the whimsy of my mind. These stories weren’t just for me; they were my way of connecting with my friends, offering them a slice of my fantasy world during our playtimes. The joy and excitement on their faces as we dived into my fictional realms motivated me to keep writing. This early passion for storytelling naturally evolved into my pursuit of writing, turning a childhood hobby into a fulfilling career.