Musicians Who Predicted Their Own Deaths

Tupac Shakur will go down in history as one of the greatest rappers of all time, and part of what made him such an iconic figure was his intelligent understanding of society and culture, as he always had his finger on the pulse of everything going on around him. For example, the man who made "Thug Life" into a household phrase had a strong feeling early on in his life that he'd never make it to old age. According to BET, back in 1994 Tupac told an interviewer that the best-case scenario he saw for himself in 15 years was either in a cemetery or cremated. Sure, he quickly corrected this to say he'd rather be a multimillionaire than dead. Still, that says something about a person's life. 

This wasn't the only time Tupac expressed such certainty about an early death. According to Oxygen, in 1995 Tupac told Vibe magazine that he was giving them his final interview, expressing a desire to have his story told accurately before he died. Then, in 1996, he filmed the music video "I Ain't Mad at Cha," which depicted him in the afterlife, communicating with his loved ones. Just a few weeks later, Tupac was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. He was only 25 years old.

Lisa Lopes, known best as "Left Eye," the rapper of TLC, was only 30 years old in 2002, but her life had already become an explosive cocktail of controversial headlines, domestic abuse, and public fallouts. Fighting to carve out a new career for herself as a solo artist, according to Dazed, Lopes knew she needed a minute to get away from it all, so she flew out to Honduras for a recovery sabbatical. At this point, sadly, things took a dark turn. A van she was riding in collided with a young boy, and the boy, whose last name was also Lopes, died from his injuries. Though Lopes had merely been a passenger in the van, she still paid for all of the boy's hospital and funeral costs. Lopes, according to the New York Times, was a firm believer in astrology and numerology, and was noticeably chilled by the fact that she and the boy's surname was Lopez. She became convinced that some sort of malevolent spirit was following her, meaning to kill her instead of the boy. 

While still in Honduras on another road trip to get more footage, the car Lisa Lopes was riding in swerved off the side of the road, and she died in the crash.

Jeff Buckley was yet another talented artist taken from the world far, far too soon. One song in particular that sticks out, though, is "Dream Brother," a haunting melody about drowning. It's hard not to be struck by the lyrics regarding a dark angel of death with black, feathery wings, but perhaps the most eerie line of all is "Asleep in the sand, with the ocean washing over," a sentence that strangely foretold exactly what was coming in Buckley's future.

Rolling Stone reported in 1997 that Buckley and a friend had decided to go take a dip in the Wolf River channel of the Mississippi River, with disastrous consequences. The river, known for being a risky place to swim, carried Buckley away and he disappeared. After six days of searching, his body was found washed up on the shore. At the time of his death, he was only 30 years old.

Warren Zevon, the artist most famous for "Werewolves of London," also wrote a song called "The Factory" in 1987. Despite its seemingly upbeat sound, the lyrics of "The Factory" tell the story of a man following in his father's footsteps, slaving away in a factory to support his family and eventually inhaling cancerous substances like polyvinyl chloride, plastic, and asbestos.

Decades later, tragedy struck ... or at least, a prior tragedy made itself publicly known. What Warren Zevon didn't realize when he wrote the song was that his own exposure to asbestos — which probably happened during his childhood, when asbestos was all over the place — had caused irreversible damage to his lungs. According to Mesothelioma.com, Zevon was diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma in 2002 and given a terminal prognosis. Zevon declined treatment and spent the last months of his life finishing up his final album, "The Wind," which he released just before he died in 2003.

Despite the fact that Patsy Cline's career only lasted about five years, she has come to be recognized as one of the most iconic country music singers of all time, and she could've easily continued singing for decades. Everyone thought Cline had a long career ahead of her, except Cline herself. According to her friends, Cline herself always had a strange sense she was going to die soon, as described in Country Living, and in 1963 she reportedly told fellow singer Ray Walker that after surviving two car accidents, she expected a third one to kill her. A week after telling him that, she died in a plane crash.

It gets stranger. Some time before that, Cline was riding on a commercial flight to Kansas City, according to Douglas Gomery's "Patsy Cline: The Making of an Icon," when she was suddenly so overcome with a desire to write out her will that she scrawled it onto a piece of stationery. Patsy Cline was 30 years old.

XXXTentacion, or Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, was a character, to put it mildly. The rapper rose to prominence after dropping his first track on SoundCloud in 2014, and he released his first studio album in August 2017. But his musical success wasn't the only thing that came to define him. In 2016 it emerged that XXX had a penchant for assaulting and abusing his girlfriend, Geneva Ayala, which she said was a frequent occurrence. Among other things, she said he beat her and threatened to cut out her tongue because she was singing another musician's song. He would also reportedly threaten to kill himself to keep Ayala from breaking up with him. In October that year, he allegedly strangled her, severely beat her, and locked her up for two days because she was pregnant. She went to the police, and XXX was arrested. 

The trial over the harrowing incident kept getting pushed back, through 2017 all the way into 2018. At some point in early 2018, XXX posted a video to Instagram of him apparently driving a car and speaking straight to the camera: "Worst thing comes to worst, I f***ing die a tragic death or some s**t, and I'm not able to see out my dreams, I at least want to know that the kids perceived my message and were able to make something of themselves and able to take my message and use it and turn it into something positive. To have a good life. ... If I'm gonna die, or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least ... 5 million kids happy — or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life. Regardless of the negative around my name."

The court case never happened. On June 18, 2018, XXX was shot to death in Florida in what police believe was a drive-by shooting. Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy was 20 years old.

Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1977 album was full of creepy stuff, which not only seemed to foretell doom but also seemed to predict how it was all going to go down.

The album "Street Survivors" was released just three days before the horrible plane crash that killed front man Ronnie Van Zant. And what's especially awful about the story is that the band wasn't exactly blindsided by the accident because just two days before the crash Rolling Stone says they'd all seen 10-foot flames shooting out of the right engine of their Convair. The good news is that they were going to trade their flaming death trap of a plane for a Learjet after using it for just one final trip. The bad news is during that one final trip the Convair fell out of the sky into a Mississippi swamp, killing six people.

How did the album connect to the tragedy? Well for a start, the cover featured a photo of the band engulfed in flames. And if that doesn't give you chills, the track titled "That Smell" contained the words, "Say you'll be all right come tomorrow, but tomorrow might not be here for you," "Angel of darkness upon you," and "The smell of death surrounds you."

Now, it's not that weird for rock stars to sing about death, but the timing of this particular album and its prophetic lyrics does seem pretty creepy.

The D12 rapper Proof was in a nightclub in his hometown when he was shot and killed during an argument. Two years before that, on the 2004 album "D12 World," he rapped: "I'm in the club to beef, you gotta murder me there," which is really creepily specific considering that he was very much murdered in a club.

The circumstances of Proof's death were made a little weirder by his participation in Eminem's 2005 music video for "Like Toy Soldiers," which is about the murder of D12 member Bugz. Proof plays the deceased rapper, even re-enacting his murder for the music video. Seeing Proof acting out a situation similar to his own death years later is a bit eerie.

Now we don't want to make something creepy seem less creepy, but it's worth noting that Proof spent a lot of time in clubs, so statistically speaking it maybe wasn't that weird that he was murdered in a club because of how much time he spent there. On the other hand, murder is not a super-common cause of death (in the U.S., it's around 6 for every 100,000 people), and Proof's friend H. Mack told the Guardian that Proof wasn't the sort of guy who would initiate a gun fight over something stupid, so there's not much reason to feel like that was an especially likely way for Proof to go. So was that line from the song prophetic or merely a weird coincidence? That probably depends on how much you believe in prophecies and weird coincidences.

Type O Negative front man Peter Steele was preoccupied by death — he not only wrote a lot of songs about death and dying, he also regularly predicted his own death, attempted suicide, and at one point even faked his own death. According to Loudwire, in 2005 the band posted an announcement on their website that Steele had died when he had, in fact, been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

So really, it's not that weird that Peter Steele predicted his own death because he'd been doing it for years. What is maybe weirder is that he seemed to predict the exact manner of his death. It was the lyrics from the 2003 song "I Don't Wanna Be Me" that were especially creepy: "Two steps forward, two steps back. Without warning, heart attack."

Seven years later the 48-year-old singer was sick in bed with the flu, when he unexpectedly died from an aortic aneurysm. That's not technically the same thing as a heart attack — an aortic aneurysm is actually a bulge in the aorta that can burst, or lead to other problems including heart attack and stroke. It's not clear which of these secondary problems led to Steele's death, but let's just say that those lyrics from 2003 came close enough.

Lots of people believed that Bob Marley was a kind of prophet, sort of like Nostradamus only with musical talent and cool hair. According to the book "Bob Marley: Musician," Marley's mother often claimed that he was able predict the future even as a small child, and some people believe he also predicted the modern wars in Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria. But perhaps the weirdest of all his predictions was the one about his own death. At the age of 24, he told friends exactly what age he'd be when he died. "I know I'm going to die at 36," he said.

In 1977, Marley was diagnosed with melanoma under the nail of his big toe. Doctors recommended amputation, which is unfortunate because as a Rastafarian, Marley believed that amputation was sinful. So he refused treatment, and by the summer of 1980 the cancer had metastasized throughout his body. He flew to Germany in the hope that a doctor who peddled "controversial" cancer treatments might offer a cure, but (shockingly) holistic medicine didn't seem to help. Marley decided to return to Jamaica to die, but he didn't make it that far — he died en route during a stopover in Miami, on May 11, 1981. He was 36.

In April 2016, the whole "Prince predicted his own death" thing was all over the Internet, which certainly made for some sensational headlines and probably also contributed to a gigantic spike in Prince album sales. But did he really predict his own death? Yes, if you think that acknowledging one's own mortality is somehow prophetic. "Sometimes I wish life was never-ending," he sang in "Sometimes it Snows in April," from the 1986 album "Parade." "And all good things, they say, never last." Umm ... okay. So the fact that he sang about how life doesn't go on forever was somehow predictive of his death several decades later?

That's not the only set of song lyrics that some fans seemed to think was prophetic, though. In "Let's go Crazy," he sings about an elevator. And he was found unresponsive in an elevator. So is that spine-tingling or is the sensation more of an eye-roll? We'll let you decide.

According to E! News, though, there's just one final piece of evidence that points to a prophecy — three years before he died from an overdose of fentanyl, Prince's sister says he called her and said, "I think I've done everything I've come to do." Which would have been eerie if it had happened three days before his death, but it seems that Prince had at least three years' worth of things to do, after all.

A lot of people get a kind of uneasy feeling on Friday the 13th. Even if nothing bad has ever really happened to you on that particular day, you probably still look at your calendar and think, "Crap, I should be extra careful going down the stairs this morning," or, "Maybe I should avoid answering the phone." Arnold Schoenberg, though, was so afraid of 13 that his fear might have killed him.

Schoenberg was an Austrian composer famous for writing music that sounds kind of like it belongs on the soundtrack of an "Indiana Jones" sequel. According to the Mahler Foundation, he suffered from triskaidekaphobia, which is the fear of the number 13. And it wasn't the number 13 alone, either — he was also afraid of multiples of the number 13. Schoenberg especially dreaded the year 1939 because 39 is three times 13, and that equals BAD.

When 1939 ended and Schoenberg was still alive, he moved on to believing that he'd die at 76 because seven plus six equals 13. This time, he was right — he died on Friday, July 13, 1951, two months before his 77th birthday. His wife appears to have also been convinced that the date was somehow responsible for his demise — on the night of his death, she recalled noting that it was 11:45 PM and thinking that the worst would be over in a quarter of an hour. But her husband didn't make it that far. He died only minutes later.

Toward the end of her life, Debbie Reynolds was probably better known for being Carrie Fisher's mother than she was for her music. But early in her career, she was a singer, and in 1952, she starred opposite Gene Kelly in the musical "Singin' in the Rain." She was in a lot of musicals, in fact, and she starred on Broadway, too, before doing some more mainstream films like "The Bodyguard" and "Behind the Candelabra." Along the way, she also became a parent, and her daughter became an even bigger star than her mom was.

According to People, Reynolds referred to Carrie Fisher's history of substance abuse as her "demons" and often worried about losing her daughter. "It's not natural to outlive your child," she wrote in her 2013 autobiography "Unsinkable." "This has always been my greatest fear ... I don't know if I could survive that." Just three years later, Fisher went into cardiac arrest while on a flight from London to Los Angeles and died at the age of 60. A day after her daughter's death, Reynolds was at her son's home planning the funeral when she suffered a stroke. She died at the hospital later that day, but not before telling her son, "I miss her so much. I want to be with Carrie." Her son told ABC News (via HuffPost) that she died from "heartache."

Just about everyone has had a death dream that seemed terrifyingly real, but for most of us, nothing ever comes of such things. A dream about drowning is much more likely to be metaphorical than prophetic. But according to "Take a Walk on the Dark Side: Rock and Roll Myths, Legends, and Curses," Buddy Holly had a dream that turned out to be prophetic in a terrifyingly specific way, and just in case that wasn't enough to make you a believer, his wife Maria Elena also had a prophetic dream about his death ... on the exact same night.

In Maria Elena's dream, she was standing in a field, and people were running past her. She looked up and saw a fireball falling from the sky, and then she heard a crash and an explosion. When she woke Holly to tell him about the dream, he said he'd also had a nightmare. In his dream, he was in an airplane with Maria Elena and his brother, but for some reason, he decided to leave Maria Elena behind, dropping her off on the top of a building. The thought that he would leave his wife behind upset him so much that as he described the dream to her, he burst into tears.

Then, on February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly got in an airplane, leaving his wife behind. And the plane crashed in a field.

In David Bowie's final video, he floats above the sheets of a hospital bed and backs into a wardrobe that looks an awful lot like a coffin. You might say this was Bowie foretelling his own death, but that's silly — Bowie had a terminal diagnosis and was well-aware that he was dying as he was filming the video. "Lazarus" was released just four days before he died, and the only future knowledge it contained was the same foreknowledge all terminal patients have when they finally reach the end of a long illness.

But Bowie had known for years how old he would be when he died. According to NME, in the late 1970s, a psychic told him he would live to be 69 or 70. (It might also have been a prophetic dream. Versions of the story vary.) And Bowie didn't just ha-ha the news — he made plans. Mike Garson, who played piano for Bowie on nine of his albums, later said the psychic Bowie consulted with was "real," and, "David knew it and didn't doubt it for a second. He told me about it with certainty, accepted it, and planned for his future based on that." As it turned out, the age-of-death prediction turned out to be eerily accurate, and he was right to pay attention. Bowie was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2014 and died from the disease just 18 months later at the age of 69.

T. Rex was one of the U.K.'s most memorable glam rock bands of the 1970s. Fronted by Marc Bolan (who formed the band in 1967), the group "sold four million odd records" in 1971 alone — something that Rolling Stone notes is "more than four percent of the entire British market." According to AllMusic, Bolan himself was incredibly influential, and his on-stage persona and fashion sense would eventually inspire a variety of different genres, ranging from metal to even new wave.

T. Rex continued to make music throughout the '70s (albeit with some of the lineup changing), yet Bolan never got a chance to see how his band would fare in the following decade. On September 16, 1977, Bolan and his girlfriend, Gloria Jones — a keyboardist in T. Rex — got in a car in London with Jones behind the wheel. As reported by BBC, the vehicle tragically crashed into a tree after veering from the road. While Jones survived, Bolan died instantly.

It turns out that the singer was never comfortable in cars, with his former manager, Tony Secunda, telling BBC that he never bothered learning to drive due to a fear that "he would die in a car crash." What's more, the lyrics to T. Rex's 1972 song, "Solid Gold Easy Action," seemingly predicted the circumstances of his death. "Life is the same and it always will be / Easy as picking foxes from a tree," Bolan croons. Thinking about his lyrics and the correlation between speaking about life and a tree seems eerily prescient.

Aaliyah Dana Haughton, known as Aaliyah by her legions of fans, will forever be remembered as the "Princess of R&B." According to Spin, at only 22 years old, the singer "already had one gold and two platinum albums to her credit," while also embarking on what was to be a fruitful career as an actor, too. Simply put, Aaliyah was at the peak of her success.

With three albums under her belt, in August of 2001, Aaliyah jetted off to the Bahamas to film a music video for her single, "Rock the Boat," per Rolling Stone. As revealed by VH1's "Behind the Music," the singer was "anxious" to first board the plane heading to Abaco Island, yet reluctantly agreed. Aaliyah's boyfriend, Damon Dash, told "The Real" in 2016, "She was like, 'I don't like that plane ... It was a complicated situation, but she had to go do that video."

Sadly, Aaliyah's fears came true. On August 25, the singer and her crew were prepped to head back to Florida, boarding a 10-seat twin-engine Cessna 402B. Under a minute after takeoff, the plane crashed, with Aaliyah killed instantly (via Rolling Stone). According to MTV, the music video's director, Hype Williams, still released "Rock the Boat," hoping Aaliyah's fans "would enjoy it." Noting the obvious "pain" of the final product, he added, "that's all the more reason people would appreciate what we've done as a group."

While Big L may not have achieved such mainstream success as that of The Notorious B.I.G. or 2Pac, for example, he's still considered a great within '90s rap circles. Per Rolling Stone, while the rapper (real name Lamont Coleman) only released one album during his lifetime, his legacy has grown in the years since, with many hip-hop aficionados dubbing him "your favorite rapper's favorite rapper."

Sadly, Big L's life was cut short before he could make an even more significant impact within the hip-hop community. On February 15, 1999, the rapper was fatally shot in front of his home in Harlem (via MTV). Like his peers of the decade, Big L frequently rapped about violence, yet as his posthumous album revealed, it seems like the artist may have predicted exactly how he would die. According to MTV, the sophomore effort was dubbed "The Big Picture," including the song "Casualties of a Dice Game." In the song, he raps, "I watched all of them, run for they share / And all I can do was stare / I got weak and fell on my rear / Now I can hear the sirens, that means here comes the Jakes / But it's too late, I'm knockin' on the pearly gates."

In 2002, a BBC article highlighted "violence and hip-hop," citing Big L's death alongside some of his contemporaries as a byproduct of their music. Yet, as hip-hop critic Angus Batey explained, "you can't blame the music for something like this."

While INXS formed in the late 1970s, it took about a decade for the Aussies to become international musical heavyweights with the release of their sixth album, "Kick," in 1987 (via Rolling Stone). Fronted by Michael Hutchence, INXS was a welcome blend of genres, dabbling in new wave, a "danceable" type of rock, and even funk.

However, it appeared that success was starting to weigh heavily on Hutchence. The documentary about the rocker, "Mystify," was released in 2020, with Rolling Stone's review revealing that although Hutchence "was a natural" when it came to singing and writing lyrics, being a part of a successful rock band was draining for the star. Sadly on November 22, 1997, Hutchence was found dead in his hotel room in ​​Double Bay, Australia. According to the Herald Sun, the singer had hung himself with his body "found kneeling on the floor and facing the door." While some have suggested his death was the result of an accidental "act of auto eroticism," others believe it was a planned suicide. According to the singer's girlfriend at the time, Michelle Bennett, Hutchence had never hinted at the latter.

Interestingly enough, two INXS songs seemingly corroborate the two separate theories surrounding his death. In the song "Bang the Drum," Hutchence sang, "Oh baby, grab a noose cause we're looking for a different end," while on "She Is Rising," he hints towards death and reincarnation.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

February 3, 1959, will forever be remembered as "The Day the Music Died" by pop culture historians around the globe. According to Biography, this was the day that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson all died in a tragic plane crash shortly after takeoff in Clear Lake, Iowa.

The accident heavily affected "Twenty Flight Rock" rockabilly crooner Eddie Cochran, to the point that he too believed he would die prematurely. According to "Gene Vincent & Eddie Cochran," by John Collis, the musician developed a "fatalistic attitude" after Holly's death, especially considering that there was a rumor at the time that Cochran himself was supposed to be on the plane. This attitude only grew, with the singer even having nightmares "about crashing."

Per History, in April 1960, Cochran traveled across the pond, where he was staying at the Milverton Lodge for a show he had to play in Bristol, England. As "Gene Vincent & Eddie Cochran" reveals, the musician spoke to Arnold Burlin at one point, with their conversation leaving an impact on the hotel manager. "Cochran was obsessed and in a dreadful state over a strong feeling he had that he was going to die," Burlin remembered. It turns out that Cochran's fears were accurate, and on April 17, while in a cab en route to the airport, the musician was in a horrific car accident, dying at the hospital shortly afterward (via History).

It's no secret that singer Elliott Smith was a melancholy soul. According to The Guardian, the "Say Yes" singer was considered by some the "unhappiest man in the land," so it didn't come as much of a surprise to those who knew him when Smith died by suicide on October 21, 2003. Sadly, it was that same brooding that made Smith such a tour de force. As Rolling Stone detailed in a biography about the artist (via Independent), "There are few tunesmiths who can tackle delicate issues – heroin addiction, alcoholism, heartbreak and self-loathing – with more sincerity and sensitivity than folk crooner Elliott Smith."

With that considered, did Smith truly predict his own death? According to Vice, the last song he recorded was "King's Crossing," where he seemingly may have hinted what was to come. On the track, Smith croons, "I can't prepare for death any more than I already have," later singing, "Give me one good reason not to do it / (Because I love you) / So do it." As revealed by Vice, the line, "Because I love you," was said by Smith's girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Chiba, whom he invited in the studio to record the line. Chiba's voice is so "buried" that it's hard to hear her. Instead, "all you'll hear is Smith responding to himself: 'So, do it.'"

As one fan hypothesized on Genius, the line wasn't ever meant to be heard, and Smith's response is one "because no reason could be heard."

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

Lil Peep (born Gustav Åhr) achieved bewildering success during his short time as an A-list rapper. According to Rolling Stone, the artist was considered en route to being the Kurt Cobain of the Soundcloud generation, landing a Top 40 album and snagging close to 2 million followers on Instagram in a mere two years since beginning his rap journey. Yet, much like Cobain, Peep struggled with depression and used various drugs, self-medicating as a means to deal with his anxiety and the pressures of fame.

In September 2017, Vice's i-D caught up with the rapper, who spoke to the outlet of his "horrible anxiety." He admitted to using an abundance of Xanax as a means to cope but noted that he "[doesn't] abuse it anymore." Revealing that it was music who got him "out of serious drug addiction," Peep mused that it was music that ultimately saved his life. Sure enough, on a YungJZAisDead song, "Apparition Love" (which was released two years prior and saw Peep rapping a verse he wrote), the artist was remarkably self-aware, knowing what would happen if he kept using. As he rapped, "I need help real soon / I'ma die in my room."

Hauntingly enough, his lyrics would come to be prophetic. On November 15, 2017, Lil Peep died of an overdose. The Pima County Medical Examiner noted that the actual cause of death was "combined toxic effects of fentanyl and [Xanax]" (via TMZ).

If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).