Many death omens date back to before the scientific revolution of the Renaissance, but this one is comparatively recent. It wasn’t until the late sixteenth century that clocks began to appear in people’s homes; before then early mechanical clocks were used in church bells (the word ‘clock’ comes from the French word ‘cloche’, meaning bell), which were the only means, aside from the movement of the sun, for people to tell the time. In Tudor times it was only the wealthy who could afford a complex time-piece and for most people, working in the daylight hours and resting at dusk was as accurate as they needed to be with their time-keeping.
Grandfather clocks were becoming popular in the homes of the rich by the middle of the seventeenth century but it wasn’t until the mid-eighteenth century that mechanical clocks were a regular feature of ordinary homes. These early clocks needed regular winding to keep time and the winding mechanisms were vulnerable to damage. Over-winding or winding the wrong way could cause the workings of the chime to become unsynchronized or cause the clock to stop completely. To many people, this seemed a sinister sign: having relied for so many generations on the position of the sun to tell the time, the notion that time might stop was alarming. A stopped clock was associated with a life at its end and if one that had long been silent suddenly chimed, it was taken as a message from beyond the grave that a death was imminent.
A book written by the American minister Reverend Samuel Watson in 1873 called The Clock Struck One, and Christian Spiritualist: Being a Synopsis of the Investigations of Spirit Intercourse by an Episcopal Bishop, Three Ministers, Five Doctors, and Others, at Memphis, Tenn. illustrates how seriously the superstition was taken. As its curious title suggests, the book is a collection of what we might now call ‘paranormal’ events, including several accounts of old clocks striking just before a death, including before the deaths of Watson’s wife and two of his children.
‘It is popular with some people to ridicule facts when they have no evidence of disproving them, or argument to overthrow them,’ Watson writes. ‘There are many things occurring equally “singular and mysterious” but people do not like to be called “superstitious” and hence rarely mention them.’