20 Bizarre Doomsday Predictions That Had People Convinced The World Was Ending

Isaac Newton, the physicist who first explained gravity, also worked for many years on his own interpretation of the Bible. In an unpublished manuscript from around 1704, he took the Book of Daniel’s “a time, times, and half a time” to mean 1,260 years and started his count at 800 AD, when Charlemagne was crowned emperor by the pope. His calculations yielded 2060 as the earliest possible year that our present world order would come to an end, a minimum date to discourage those prone to date-setting.

Panic broke out around the world in May 1910 when French astronomer Camille Flammarion announced that spectrographs showed cyanogen gas, which is toxic, in Halley’s Comet’s tail as Earth prepared to cross its path. He theorized that the gas could permeate our atmosphere, although astronomers at Yerkes Observatory were quick to point out that the tail wasn’t dense enough to affect anything. Newspapers didn’t care. Headlines about cyanogen in our air went viral, anti-comet pills became bestsellers, and people wore gas masks and covered their windows tight.

The Baptist preacher William Miller, a New York farmer, had interpreted the Book of Daniel’s “2,300 evening-mornings” as an indicator of when Christ would return. Miller had come up with a range of possible years and waited for the first. When that year passed without incident, a Millerite preacher named Samuel Snow calculated a precise date: October 22, 1844. From 50,000 to 100,000 Millerites sold their farms, dressed in white and waited on hilltops. There was nothing, and the disappointment was profound, but there was no violence.

In 1555, the French physician and astrologer Nostradamus released a collection of cryptic four-line predictions. In one quatrain, atypical of his work in that it specified an exact date, he wrote, “In the year 1999, seventh month / From the sky will come a great King of Terror.” For over four centuries, readers and popular writers alike have revisited that line and turned it into predictions of an asteroid strike, nuclear apocalypse, or worldwide destruction that summer.

When Charles Hindley, a London publisher, reprinted the purported prophecies of Mother Shipton, an English folk heroine who was said to have predicted the future several hundred years prior, he added the line: “The world to an end shall come, in eighteen hundred and eighty-one.” News of this prediction quickly circulated around the world. With 1881 drawing closer, British and North American farmers deserted their farms, leaving behind their cattle. Although Hindley had already publicly confessed to having added the line himself several years before, the hysteria took hold anyway.

A Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin, writing under the pseudonym Marian Keech, claimed she received messages from alien beings via automatic writing. The extraterrestrials, who lived on a planet named Clarion, told her that the Earth was doomed by a flood on December 21, 1954. Martin’s devotees, known as “Seekers,” gave away their possessions in order to prepare for their imminent salvation by flying saucer. There was no flood, but Martin said their faith had saved the world. A psychologist who had secretly been monitoring the Seekers used their reaction to come up with the concept of cognitive dissonance.

In 1806, in Leeds, England, a fraud named Mary Bateman told people that she had a chicken that laid eggs on which Christ’s return was written. She’d let people see these eggs and charged a penny. She also sold paper “letters from heaven” promising salvation for a fee. Eventually, a doctor discovered the truth, as Bateman was using vinegar to etch the words onto eggshells and then shoving them back inside the hen. Once the ruse was exposed, Bateman’s scheme collapsed, and she was publicly disgraced.

Radical Dutch preachers Jan Matthys and Jan van Leiden took over the German city of Münster and proclaimed it the “New Jerusalem,” the only safe haven in a world soon to be purged by God. They invited true believers throughout northern Europe to relocate there, abolished all private property and money, and required polygamy. The Prince-Bishop of Münster besieged the city for over a year. When the walls were eventually breached, after months of starvation, the leaders were tortured and killed.

Johannes Stöffler, a German mathematician who taught at the University of Tübingen, figured in 1499 that a series of 20 conjunctions of planets, mostly in the water sign of Pisces, would cause a flood that would sweep over the earth in February 1524. More than fifty printed tracts warned of the impending disaster. A German count of Iggelheim reportedly built an ark three stories high on the banks of the Rhine, which was swarmed by a frenzied mob in February when it rained, sparking a riot. Nothing happened.

In 1883, the volcano Krakatoa erupted in Indonesia, spewing tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. For months, the ash cloud circled the earth, turning skies blood red in Europe and North America, turning the sun green, and stretching twilight long past sunset. Nobody knew why, since they had no way of knowing that an explosive volcanic eruption was taking place thousands of miles away. The phenomenon inspired many to believe the Bible’s prophecy about the blood of heaven, leading to emergency church services during the winter of 1883.

In 1814, Joanna Southcott, 64, a farmer’s daughter from Devon, England, announced that God had impregnated her. The child, whom she called Shiloh, would usher in the Second Coming. More than 100,000 people bought her “seals.” Physicians who examined her found evidence consistent with pregnancy. Then the due date came and went without a baby. That winter, Southcott took ill and died. An autopsy revealed severe pseudocyesis, which is a rare but real disorder in which the body experiences all the symptoms of pregnancy without a fetus.

Albert Porta, a professional meteorologist and former university professor, warned in late 1919 that a rare conjunction between six planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Earth among them, would cause some kind of cosmic force to penetrate the Sun. He said this would trigger explosions that would set the whole globe on fire on December 17, 1919. People around the world reportedly held all-night prayer vigils, and some reportedly committed suicide. Nothing happened on December 17, 1919, and Porta’s professional reputation never quite recovered.

William Bell, a soldier in England’s Life Guards who thought himself possessed of divine inspiration, noticed that two actual earthquakes had occurred in London at intervals of a month. He predicted that a third, more devastating one would occur exactly 28 days later on April 5, 1761, and wipe out the city. Thousands left their homes for the open countryside; others slept in boats on the River Thames. But when April 5 came and went, there was no earthquake. Bell was arrested and put into an asylum known as Bedlam.

Müntzer was a radical priest of the German Reformation who persuaded some 8,000 ill-equipped peasants that their fight against the nobility was the final fight against the ungodly. In 1525, at the Battle of Frankenhausen, a rainbow-shaped halo formed in the sky around Müntzer’s banner, which bore the same symbol, and he proclaimed it a sign of certain victory. The noble cannons mowed down thousands of peasants. Müntzer was captured, tortured, and executed.

Around 1000, a Burgundian monk named Rodulfus Glaber reported a surge of religious anxiety in some parts of Western Europe. It was fueled by a passage in the Book of Revelation which prophesied that after the lapse of a thousand years, Satan would be released from prison and deceive the nations. People took pilgrimages, absolved debts, and thronged to churches where they waited in awe for signals of the coming Antichrist. The fear was real but localized and uneven, not a continent-wide shutdown, and centuries later romantic historians turned it into a myth.

Charles Taze Russell founded a movement that led to the formation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He calculated that October 1914 would be when the end of all earthly political power occurred, and that God’s Kingdom would have begun. He based this prediction on the seven times of Daniel, interpreted as 2,520 years after 607 BC. When WWI broke out in August, many people thought this had been validated by the occurrence. Later on, though, the movement decided that the beginning of Christ’s invisible reign in heaven was what happened in 1914.

The English mathematician Dr. John Dee, who famously advised Queen Elizabeth I, spent years doing spirit sessions with a medium named Edward Kelley using obsidian stones and crystal mirrors, writing down the messages in a language they called Enochian. The entities allegedly told them that Earth was entering its last few days, and that God would soon release the biblical apocalypse, specifically vials of wrath, before Christ came back to judge mankind. For Dee, a renowned scholar of his time, such information wasn’t a crackpot diversion from the real world. It was cutting-edge research.

When the feared apocalypse of the year 1000 passed without incident, theologians then worked out the date based on Christ’s death (which was thought to have occurred in 33 AD), so the true apocalyptic date would be 1033. The monk Rodulfus Glaber, who had written about the earlier anxiety, noted severe famines and solar eclipses that year as apocalyptic signs. There was another mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as thousands of people of all classes set off to see the beginning of the end of time.

In an important 1696 book, William Whiston, Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, argued that the miracles in the Bible were not magic, but had a rational, physical basis. He suggested that a passing comet might have provided the water for Noah’s Flood around 2349 BC. And a future comet visitation might draw the Earth too close to the Sun, or ignite its atmosphere, producing an Armageddon similar to that described in the Book of Revelation. He did not give a date for this.

Sometime around 170 AD, in the Roman province of Phrygia, a new Christian called Montanus proclaimed he was the spokesperson of the Holy Spirit and was soon joined by two prophetesses, Prisca and Maximilla. He prophesied that the New Jerusalem described in the Book of Revelation would come down upon the plain between the villages of Pepuza and Tymion, and thousands of Christians gave up their homes and possessions, gathered in tents in that spot, and awaited its arrival. The movement became known as Montanism, and spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire until it was eventually declared a heresy.

This content was created with the help of AI.