Humans have always been anxious about when they will die. To deal with this uncertainty, cultures worldwide have imagined that there are things that can predict death, such as certain animals, dreams, natural phenomena, strange behavior, and odd events. Since ancient times, black cats, crows, owls, and solar eclipses have been considered death omens.
The old royal dynasties of Europe had their own portents of misfortune, usually a spirit attached to the family. This may be a survival of the idea of tutelary spirits—the Greek “daemon” and the Roman “Genius”—guardian entities that guide, protect, and warn. White Ladies abound in folklore. In Ireland, she is called the Banshee, who sings a song of comfort at a family member’s impending death or lets out a gleeful, vengeful shriek.
This list will focus on royal deaths that had a significant impact on history and the legends of the omens that purportedly predicted them.
Related: 10 of the World’s Most Cursed Gemstones
Alexander’s Crown
The sudden death of Alexander the Great in Babylon in 323 BC at the young age of 32 remains a mystery. Malaria, typhoid, and murder by poison have all been suggested as likely causes. But his death was preceded by omens that hinted at his fate.
In Babylon, Alexander was steering a boat with companions through a malaria-infested swamp where legends said the old Assyrian kings lay buried. A strong wind blew Alexander’s hat away, and it got tangled among some reeds. One of the men jumped overboard to retrieve it, placing it on his head to prevent it from getting wet.
If Alexander knew of the old prophecy that foretold doom when “another head, except that of the king, would wear his diadem,” it didn’t seem to bother him. After all, the hat wasn’t exactly a diadem. But the next incident was more ominous.
One day, when Alexander was out of the royal palace, an escaped prisoner sneaked in, sat on the throne, and crowned himself with the diadem. He was caught and claimed that a “supreme god” told him to do it. The prisoner was executed, but Alexander was unnerved and became distrustful, fearing a conspiracy against his life.
On May 29, 323 BC, Alexander drank a lot and came down with a fever the next day. He continued to deteriorate and died eleven days later. Murder or natural causes? The debate goes on.[1]
A Dream of Jupiter
Unsurprisingly, the cruel Roman emperor Caligula was the target of assassination attempts. Suetonius narrates that before the successful attempt, many omens hinted at Caligula’s fate.
A statue of Jupiter being prepared for transport to Rome reportedly laughed, terrifying the workmen. The Capitol at Capua was struck by lightning on the anniversary of Julius Caesar’s murder, seen as a portent of another imperial death. Lightning also struck the doorkeeper’s lodge at the palace in Rome, a sign that disaster was at the door.
Caligula consulted a soothsayer, who told him to expect death soon. The Oracle of Fortune at Antium also warned him: “Beware of Cassius!” Caligula ordered the murder of Cassius Longinus, governor of Asia, but couldn’t escape his doom. One night, he dreamed he was standing in Jupiter’s presence in heaven when the king of the Gods kicked him back down to Earth.
The next day, January 24, AD 41, the blood of a flamingo Caligula was sacrificing spattered him. The tragedy of Cinyras, the play being watched by King Philip of Macedon when he was assassinated, was performed for Caligula at the theater. When Caligula left for lunch, his own Praetorian Guards pounced on him in the narrow passageway to the palace and stabbed him multiple times.
The Guard’s colonel who led the assassins? Cassius Chaerea. [2]
The Red Man of the Tuileries
In France, legend tells of a little man in red who appeared in the Tuileries Palace before royal calamity. One version says L’Homme Rouge was the ghost of a butcher executed on Queen Catherine de Medici’s orders in the 16th century. Another says he was a demon who revealed himself to the queen and dwelt in the central tower used by her astrologers.
With the palace still under construction, the creature told Catherine that she would die near St. Germain. As the Tuileries was in the parish of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Catherine abandoned her dream palace in terror, avoiding the bridges that might take her there.
One day in 1589, she fell ill while staying in a hotel near Saint-Eustache. As she worsened, a Benedictine monk was summoned to give the last rites. Catherine asked his name. It was Laurent de Saint Germain.
The Red Man was also seen on the three nights before Henry IV’s assassination in 1610. In early August 1793, Queen Marie Antoinette and her attendants spotted an impish man in red staring at them with such malevolence that they fled in fear. This was followed by the French Revolution, when Marie and King Louis XVI lost their thrones and heads.
The imp was also said to have guided Napoleon’s career and was seen before Louis VIII’s death in 1824. His last appearance was in 1871, during the uprising of the Paris Commune when the Tuileries burned to the ground. [3]
Catherine the Great’s Doppelganger
Doppelgangers, phantom doubles of living persons, have traditionally been omens of misfortune or death. Though the term is German for “double-walker,” doppelgangers were familiar to ancient Egyptians as the “ka,” to the Norse as the “vardøger,” and to the English and Irish as the “fetch.” Queen Elizabeth I reportedly saw herself lying on her bed “pallid, shivered, and wan” before her death. A century later, we have another royal encounter with the sinister doppelganger.
Catherine the Great was Russia’s czarina who led her nation into a golden age. One night in 1796, Catherine’s attendants came into her room, saying they had seen her enter the throne room. Catherine, more angry than alarmed, hurried to see for herself. Upon the throne was seated her exact double. Enraged, the czarina ordered her guards to shoot. The bullets passed harmlessly through the apparition, which suddenly disappeared.
A few days later, Catherine collapsed from a stroke and fell into a coma. Less than 24 hours later, on November 17, she died at age 67. [4]
The Joke That Came True
On June 29, 1782, Catherine’s son, Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich, and his wife Maria Feodorovna were having dinner with friends in Brussels. The group told stories about scary experiences. Pavel recounted that one night, a stranger in a cloak and hat accosted him on a street in St. Petersburg.
The man, who emanated a deathly coldness, told Pavel, “I am the one who takes part in your destiny and who wants you to be especially unattached to this world because you will not stay in it for long.” Pavel explained, “It means that I shall die young.” Afterward, he admitted it was all a joke and made the Baroness d’Oberkirch promise not to mention it anymore.
Upon Catherine’s death, Pavel succeeded her as Czar Paul I. On March 11, 1801, Paul was having dinner with his inner circle when he looked at himself in the mirror. The mirror’s defect distorted his image, and Paul remarked, “Look how funny the mirror is. I see myself in it with my neck turned on the side.” He began to talk about death to General Mikhail Kutuzov. “Going to the other world isn’t sewing pouches,” were his parting words.
About an hour and a half later, assassins broke into the palace and invaded Paul’s chambers. A scarf was wound around the emperor’s neck, strangling him. Paul was dead at the young age of 47. In her memoirs, Baroness d’Oberkirch remembered Paul’s “joke” that tragically came true. [5]
White Lady of the Hohenzollerns
Countess Kunigunde of Orlamunde was a young widow from the 14th century whose love for Albrecht of Zollern ended tragically when she murdered her two children, whom she mistakenly thought disapproved of the relationship. After her death, she haunts the Hohenzollern family as a harbinger of death for the male members of the family, perhaps as revenge for her rejection.
Through the centuries, the Hohenzollerns dreaded her appearance. King Frederick I of Prussia fell ill from terror on seeing a white-clad woman enter his room and died shortly afterward. The woman he saw turned out to be his wife, Sophia Charlotte. But the most frightening appearance of the White Lady was in July 1857 at Pillnitz Castle in Saxony, where King Frederick William IV and the queen were visiting their cousins.
At about one in the morning, a palace sentry saw a woman in white leading a spectral procession of five men. The sentry was paralyzed with terror upon seeing the men were headless and carrying a coffin. The ghostly procession entered the palace by a side door. When it reemerged, the sentry could see that the open coffin contained a headless body wearing Prussia’s Order of the Black Eagle. Where the head should be, there lay the royal crown, illuminated by the moonlight. The White Lady led the group away from the palace and disappeared.
Frederick William began to experience the first symptoms of the illness that would eventually take him. Three months later, in October, he suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. He turned over the reins of government to his brother, Prince William, while he slowly deteriorated into madness. King Frederick William died on January 2, 1861. [6]
Black Lady of the Wittelsbachs
The ancestral castles of Fürstenried and Nymphenburg in Bavaria are haunted by the Wittelsbach family ghost, an old white-haired woman in a long black medieval dress who announces the coming death of one of its members.
One spring day in 1864, King Maximillian II and his wife, Marie of Prussia, hosted a small luncheon. As the meal progressed, Marie saw a woman in black standing behind the king’s chair, gazing sorrowfully at her. Marie gasped, and the apparition vanished.
She then told Maximillian what she had seen. Knowing what the vision meant, the king demanded that the guards at the door tell him who let the stranger in, but the guards denied allowing anyone access. Maximillian explained that his wife must have been hallucinating. Three days later, on March 10, Maximillian suddenly fell ill and died. The cause was thought to be gastritis.
Maximillian was succeeded by his son Ludwig, the “Mad King” of Bavaria. One June night in 1886, a sentry saw a woman in black gliding along the king’s corridor. He chased the phantom down the stairs into the courtyard, where he challenged her to identify herself. The Black Lady continued without a word but turned to face the guard as she was about to enter the chapel. The sentry shot at her, but the gun backfired, mortally injuring him. He barely managed to tell his story before he died.
The next day, King Ludwig and the doctor who pronounced him insane were found dead on the shallows of Lake Stamberg. The doctor showed signs of violence. It was presumed that Ludwig drowned, but his lungs held no water. To this day, the Mad King’s death is still a mystery. [7]
White Lady of Hofburg
A little past midnight on April 24, 1898, the sentry at Vienna’s Hofburg Palace saw a strange woman in white carrying a candle glide toward him. Upon being challenged, the woman retraced her steps and entered the chapel. A thorough search failed to uncover any traces of the stranger. An hour later, a similar incident occurred in Schonbrunn Palace, a summer residence of the Imperial family.
The sentry didn’t know it, but he had seen the White Lady of Hofburg, the Habsburg family ghost who traditionally portended an imperial death. It had last appeared on January 30, 1889, before the news of the murder-suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf and his sweetheart, Countess Marie Vetsera, broke upon Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, affectionately called Sisi, already trapped in a troubled marriage, could no longer cope with her son’s death. She took to wandering incognito across Europe in an effort to escape her despair. Five months after the sightings at Hofburg and Schonbrunn, Sisi twice saw a woman in white give her a malevolent stare as she vacationed in Switzerland.
On September 10, 1898, Sisi and her lady-in-waiting were about to board a steamer to take them across Lake Geneva to Mont de Caux when an anarchist drove an awl into the empress’s breast. Sisi staggered onto the ship but soon succumbed to internal bleeding. [8]
The Turnfalken
The White Lady wasn’t the only death omen to bedevil the Habsburgs. Many family deaths were announced by a flock of eerie birds called Turnfalken. They were said to be nocturnal creatures, flying only in the daytime to forebode ill tidings with shrill cries.
Legend makes them out to be supernatural ravens out for revenge on the dynasty. Around AD 1000, ravens saved an ancestor from being torn to pieces by vultures. In gratitude, he built a tower in the forest as their sanctuary. But a hundred years later, another Habsburg built his castle on the site, chasing the ravens away and killing some. From then on, as the sinister Turnfalken, the ghostly ravens began to appear before misfortune or death came to the family.
They were seen hovering as Marie Antoinette was led to the guillotine; before Franz Josef’s younger brother, Emperor Maximillian, fell before a Mexican firing squad in 1867; before the deaths of Rudolf and Marie; Sisi’s sister Sophie Charlotte, Duchess d’Alencon, in a fire at a Paris bazaar in 1897; and of Sisi herself. The day before her murder, a huge raven swooped down on Elizabeth, knocking a peach out of her hand.
One June day, Duchess Sophie of Hohenburg was riding in her car when she saw an excited crowd pointing up the sky. Ordering her driver to stop, she tried to see what the spectacle was. Sophie recoiled in horror. Turnfalken! She rushed to warn her husband, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, against going ahead with their planned trip to Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand could not be dissuaded despite her pleas. On the fateful 28th of that month, 1914, he and Sophie were gunned down in Sarajevo.
This time, the Turnfalken had predicted doom not only for the Habsburgs but also for the world. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand was the spark that ignited World War I. [9]
The White Stag
The Turnfalken weren’t the only animals to warn of Franz Ferdinand’s appointment with Death. Around the world, it is considered bad luck to shoot a white deer. In Germany and Austria, hunters believe that anyone who does so is cursed and will die within a year.
Franz Ferdinand loved to hunt animals, killing nearly 300,000 animals. In 1913, Franz Ferdinand shot down a rare white stag, curses be damned.
Also around this time, the expansion of the imperial crypt in Arstetten was completed and ready to receive the bodies of the Archduke and Duchess Sophie. This must have weighed heavily on Franz Ferdinand’s mind, and by late June 1914, he was “extremely depressed and full of forebodings.” He had confided to a relative in May, “I know I shall soon be murdered.”
There were many things that Franz Ferdinand could have done to avoid death in Sarajevo. But the run of bad luck that day gives the impression that the Archduke was being funneled toward Gavrilo Princip’s gun and his doom. He could have chosen any day other than the 28th, the memorial day of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo for patriotic Serbs.
He could have confined himself to the review of military maneuvers at Ilidza, and not gone into Sarajevo at all. He could have heeded the danger after he escaped the bomb thrown at him on the way to City Hall. Instead, he left the safety of the building to visit the wounded from the bombing. But no one told the driver of the new itinerary, and he made the wrong turn—straight to where a surprised Princip was standing.
Was it the curse of the white stag? Or just terrible luck? Eerily, Franz Ferdinand’s death car had the license number A111-118, which might have been predicting Armistice Day 11/11/1918. Or maybe not. [10]
Throughout history, royal families have been plagued by omens foretelling death, from ghostly apparitions to strange animal encounters. These tales blend folklore, historical events, and the enduring human fascination with predicting the unpredictable.
What do you think about these royal omens? Leave your comment below!
