I Can Sense When Someone Is Dying — What Folklore and Science Reveal

By Sarah Knapton and Joe Pinkstone

Reader question: Daniela

“Since I was small, I have had the ability, unfortunately, to feel that somebody was in danger or dying. I was only eight when I said, ‘This week three people will die on this street’. I was frightened when it emerged they really did die that week. The same happened to me last year in Italy. I don’t know why but I feel our neighbour won’t last long.” — Daniela

We’ll begin with a little levity: Daniela, you must be a hit at parties — haunting the room like a prequel to The Sixth Sense, announcing, “I see dying people.” Jokes aside, that kind of sense sounds deeply unsettling. You describe it as unfortunate and frightening, and that’s understandable.

Folklore and cultural echoes

Stories of people who sense impending death are woven through British and Irish tradition. In Ireland, the wail of a banshee was said to herald a family death. In Scotland the Bean Nighe — the washerwoman of the ford — appears scrubbing the bloodied garments of those who will soon die, and the caoineag predicts deaths in battle. English lore tells of Black Shuck, a great hound that appears before death, while Wales has the white, red‑eyed Cŵn Annwn. Many of these figures are female, perhaps reflecting a historical perception that women were attuned to subtle household changes.

Biology and heightened perception

There are modern, testable parallels to seemingly uncanny detection. In 2017 Joy Milne, a woman from Perth, Scotland, noticed an unusual scent from her husband years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Laboratory work at Manchester University then identified a set of molecules elevated on the skin of Parkinson’s patients. Milne was found to have hyperosmia — an unusually sensitive sense of smell.

On average women have been shown to have slightly better olfactory sensitivity than men, and some conditions (pregnancy, migraine, certain genetic traits) can temporarily or permanently boost smell. Many illnesses produce characteristic odour changes. Dogs, for example, can be trained to detect cancers, diabetes emergencies, impending epileptic seizures, malaria and even Covid‑19 by scent alone.

How this links to death omens

It’s plausible that humans with unusually acute smell or other heightened senses could subconsciously detect chemical or behavioural changes in people who are becoming very ill. That could explain why animals in folklore — a stray hound that lingers near a sick person, for instance — became remembered as death omens: the animal reacts to a cue (smell, posture, lethargy) that people later associate with the fatal outcome.

Care workers occasionally anticipate a resident’s death through phenomena called terminal lucidity or “the surge,” where someone briefly becomes clearer or more energetic shortly before dying. Staff have also reported a distinctive smell from dying patients — variously described as sweet, fruity or like nail‑polish remover — as the body shuts down.

A 2014 study from the Karolinska Institute found humans can detect when someone is becoming ill with an infection, suggesting an evolved sensitivity that may help avoid contagious individuals. Whether that mechanism extends to predicting imminent death depends on the cause and the signs present.

Weighing the evidence

To evaluate your experiences, Daniela, it would help to know how your neighbours actually died. If their deaths were due to sudden accidents (for example, young people killed in a traffic collision) that would not fit an odour‑ or illness‑based explanation and would point to other causes, such as coincidence or pattern recognition. But if they were ill beforehand, your account could reflect heightened sensory perception or strong subconscious reading of behavioural cues.

Another possibility is that you are especially attuned to subtle changes in posture, skin tone, breath, smell or routine — signals most people miss. Combined with memory and patterning, this heightened awareness can feel like a premonition when a tragic outcome follows.

Practical notes and support

If these experiences are distressing, consider keeping a confidential journal recording when you have such feelings and what actually happened afterward. That can help you and any clinician or counsellor assess whether the impressions correlate with observable signs (illness, changes in behaviour) or appear random. If they cause anxiety, a conversation with a mental‑health professional may also help you cope.

Verdict: Partly explicable — a mix of heightened sensory perception, subconscious pattern recognition and, sometimes, coincidence.