Laura Wright 
A Clock in My Own Family
I don’t have to rely entirely upon old folklore for a story about a clock and death. Something remarkably similar happened in my own family.
My father had received a mantel clock from his employer in recognition of twenty years with the company. It belonged to him and had a particular connection with an important part of his life.
During the final week my father was hospitalized, the clock stopped.
It stopped at 11:47.
At the time, there was no obvious reason to attach any particular importance to that hour. My father was still alive, and we expected him to recover sufficiently to return home.
Then came the day he was scheduled to do exactly that.
Instead, my father died in the hospital.
The recorded time was 11:47 in the morning.
I cannot explain why the clock stopped when it did. A clock is a mechanical object, and mechanical objects stop. Coincidences happen. Memory also has a way of fastening itself to meaningful details after a loss.
All of those explanations are reasonable.
But none changes what happened.
The clock stopped first.
My father died later.
And both stopped at 11:47.
Perhaps it was coincidence. Perhaps an aging mechanism simply chose an extraordinarily memorable time to fail.
Or perhaps there are moments when the old stories seem a little less old and a little less easily dismissed.
I still don’t know.
And perhaps that is exactly where this story belongs.
There was a time when death changed a household.
The curtains might be drawn.
Mirrors were covered.
Neighbors arrived with food.
The body remained at home while relatives and friends came to pay their respects.
And somewhere in the house, someone stopped the clocks.
Today, it seems like an eerie little superstition from another age. But stopping a clock after a death was once sufficiently familiar that generations of families practiced some version of it.
In Appalachia, as elsewhere, the custom became entangled with something stranger.
Sometimes, according to the old stories, nobody stopped the clock at all.
It stopped by itself.
And when it did, people remembered the time.
Stopping the Clock
The original version of this article mentioned an old Appalachian death custom: when someone died, clocks in the household might be stopped, covered, or otherwise left untouched for a period of mourning. It also noted the belief that a clock stopping independently could foretell another death.
The tradition was certainly not confined to Appalachia.
Versions of stopping clocks after a death can be found in Britain, Ireland, continental Europe and other places from which Appalachian settlers brought customs, beliefs and fragments of folklore.
Exactly why clocks were stopped is less certain.
And, as happens so often with old customs, there probably wasn’t one explanation.
What stayed with us afterward was the inevitable thought: if only we had known. The clock had stopped at 11:47 while my father was still alive, but there was no reason then to believe the time meant anything. Only after he died at 11:47 did those motionless hands seem to become a message we had been unable to read. Perhaps that is the cruelest part of an omen, if omens exist at all. They rarely announce themselves clearly. Their meaning becomes apparent only when it is too late to do anything about it.
Time Had Stopped for the Dead
One of the simplest interpretations is symbolic.
The clock represented the life of the deceased.
Its hands moved while the person lived.
When that life ended, the clock stopped too.
The time displayed could therefore become a permanent record of the moment of death.
There is something almost beautiful about the idea.
For everyone outside the house, the world continued normally. People went to work. Meals were cooked. Children played. Trains arrived.
Inside the mourning household, however, ordinary life had been interrupted.
For a little while, time itself was allowed to stop.
Don’t Disturb the Spirit
Other explanations move considerably closer to the supernatural.
Death was traditionally regarded as a period of transition rather than an instantaneous separation between body and spirit.
The dead might linger.
The soul might require time to depart.
Doors and windows could acquire symbolic importance because they offered routes through which the spirit might leave the house.
Mirrors were sometimes covered because reflections were thought capable of confusing, capturing or otherwise interfering with the departing soul. The older version of this article preserved exactly that explanation.
Clocks may have belonged to the same collection of household rituals.
The ordinary machinery of the living world was suspended while the dead departed from it.
The Clock That Stops by Itself
But intentionally stopping a clock is one thing.
Finding one already stopped is another.
Stories of clocks stopping at the precise moment someone dies appear repeatedly in death folklore.
A family returns home from the hospital and discovers that an old clock stopped at 2:17.
Later they realize that 2:17 was the recorded time of death.
A grandfather clock that has run faithfully for decades suddenly stops.
A few minutes later the telephone rings.
Someone has died.
Sometimes the clock belonged to the deceased.
Sometimes it had been a gift from them.
Sometimes it was simply the household clock.
These stories are difficult to investigate because they are usually recognized as significant after the death occurs.
But they have been told for generations.
An Omen of Another Death
There was also a darker interpretation.
A clock stopping unexpectedly could be an omen.
According to the tradition preserved in the original article, if a clock stopped after someone in the household had already died, another death might follow within the year.
More disturbing still, the second death was sometimes expected to occur at the same hour shown by the stopped clock.
That turns an ordinary broken clock into something dreadful.
Imagine living in a house where a clock inexplicably stopped at 3:40 shortly after a funeral.
Every day afterward, the hands remain there.
3:40.
Nothing happens.
Weeks pass.
Then months.
But nobody quite forgets what the old people said.
Death Knocks Three Times
Clocklore belongs to a much larger collection of death omens.
Appalachian folklore is filled with warnings that death may announce itself before arriving.
Three unexplained knocks at the door or wall.
A bird entering the house.
A dog howling strangely at night.
A picture falling from the wall.
A mirror breaking without apparent cause.
A strange dream.
A clock stopping.
Not every family believed every sign. Folklore varies enormously from one community, and sometimes one household, to another.
But the underlying idea remains remarkably consistent:
Death casts a shadow before it arrives.
Something changes.
Something behaves incorrectly.
The world gives a small warning.
Only afterward do people understand what it meant.
Covering the Mirrors
Of all the customs associated with death in the home, covering mirrors is perhaps the best known.
The old explanation preserved on Mysterious Discoveries was that the spirit gradually separated from the body and might become trapped or confused by its reflection rather than continuing onward.
Other traditions provide different explanations.
A mourner who saw himself reflected in a mirror near the dead might be the next to die.
The dead person’s spirit might appear in the glass.
Mirrors might provide openings through which spirits could pass.
Or covering them may simply have prevented vanity and ordinary concerns with personal appearance from intruding upon mourning.
It is entirely possible that several explanations existed simultaneously.
Folklore rarely behaves like theology.
Nobody convened a committee and established the official rules for ghosts and mirrors.
Families simply knew:
When someone dies, cover the mirrors.
Why?
Because that’s what you do.
Turn the Portraits Around
Other household objects might also be altered.
Photographs could be turned toward the wall.
Certain objects belonging to the deceased were left untouched.
Windows might be opened shortly after death so the soul could leave.
Water in the house might be discarded.
Animals could be moved or informed of the death.
Some of these customs traveled enormous distances and survived for centuries after their original meanings had become obscure.
By the time a grandmother taught the practice to her granddaughter, neither necessarily knew where it had begun.
The custom itself had become the explanation.
Why Clocks Became So Important
Clocks occupy an unusual position in folklore because they do something humans have always found mysterious.
They measure something we cannot see.
Time has no shape.
We cannot hold it.
We only know it is passing because things change.
A mechanical clock gives that invisible force a sound.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
In an otherwise silent house, an old clock can seem almost alive.
Then it stops.
The silence is immediately noticeable.
Perhaps that is one reason clocks became such natural companions to death folklore.
The ticking resembles a heartbeat.
The hands move through a lifetime.
And eventually both stop.
The Deathwatch
The association between repetitive sounds and approaching death extends beyond clocks.
One particularly old superstition surrounds the deathwatch beetle.
These small wood-boring beetles can produce a tapping sound inside old timber. In a quiet house, particularly during the long vigil beside someone who was seriously ill or dying, the sound could be remarkably noticeable.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
People came to regard it as an omen of death.
Hence the name.
The explanation is entirely natural.
But knowing what produces the tapping doesn’t erase the atmosphere that created the belief.
Imagine sitting awake beside a dying relative in a dark wooden house two hundred years ago while something unseen begins knocking inside the walls.
You might remember it too.
Clocks and Premonitions
Some clock stories become considerably harder to categorize.
Families occasionally preserve accounts in which a clock stopped before anyone in the house knew a death had occurred elsewhere.
These stories are usually impossible to verify after generations have passed.
Mechanical clocks stop.
Springs fail.
Pendulums stall.
Batteries die.
Power fails.
Memories also become tidier with time.
Perhaps the clock stopped at approximately the time of death and later became remembered as exact.
Perhaps someone noticed the clock only after receiving the news.
Perhaps coincidence did the rest.
Those are reasonable explanations.
But reasonable explanations are not always the same thing as knowing precisely what happened in a particular house on a particular night.
And that is where clocklore becomes interesting.
The Moment That Shouldn’t Matter
Suppose a clock stops tonight at 11:43.
You probably reset it.
Perhaps you replace the battery.
Perhaps you complain that the old thing has finally broken.
By tomorrow, you have forgotten about it.
But suppose the telephone rings five minutes later.
Someone you love died at 11:43.
The stopped clock hasn’t changed.
You have.
Now the time means something.
You will probably remember it for the rest of your life.
If you tell the story to your children, they may remember it too.
A mechanical failure has become a family story.
Or perhaps it wasn’t a mechanical failure.
There is the mystery.
The Problem With Coincidence
Coincidence undoubtedly explains many supernatural omens.
Millions of clocks stop every year.
Millions of people die every year.
Eventually those events must occasionally happen at approximately the same time.
But coincidence has an uncomfortable habit of becoming deeply personal.
Statistics can tell us that something can happen.
They cannot always tell us what a particular event meant, if anything, to the people who experienced it.
That distinction is important in folklore.
We don’t need to insist that a stopped clock proves supernatural communication.
But neither do we need to pretend that every strange coincidence has been individually solved simply because a plausible explanation exists.
Sometimes the most accurate conclusion remains:
We don’t know.
When the Old Clock Starts Again
There are stranger variations.
In some family stories, a long-broken clock suddenly begins running around the time of a death.
A clock associated with someone who has died chimes unexpectedly.
A watch stops while being worn.
An inherited clock begins behaving strangely around anniversaries.
Such stories are particularly vulnerable to embellishment, and mechanical clocks are notoriously capable of peculiar behavior.
Temperature changes affect mechanisms.
Old lubricants move.
Parts slip.
Vibration can restart a stalled mechanism.
But people have been telling stories about clocks behaving strangely around death for a very long time.
Perhaps machinery simply provides enough opportunities for coincidence.
Perhaps people notice those coincidences because death makes us attentive to everything surrounding it.
Or perhaps our ancestors were right to find something unsettling about timepieces.
The folklore leaves all three possibilities available.
The Last Generation Who Knew the Rules
Many traditional death customs began disappearing during the twentieth century as death itself moved away from the home.
People increasingly died in hospitals.
Funeral homes prepared bodies.
Wakes moved from parlors into funeral establishments.
Electric clocks replaced mechanical ones.
Families moved farther apart.
The elaborate household rituals surrounding death gradually became unnecessary or were simply forgotten.
There was probably a final generation in many Appalachian families who still knew exactly what should happen.
Stop the clock.
Cover the mirror.
Open the window.
Draw the curtains.
Sit with the dead.
Then their children remembered some of it.
Their grandchildren remembered the stories.
And eventually someone asks:
Why did Grandma always say you had to cover a mirror when someone died?
At that point, custom has become folklore.
Something Remains
Perhaps none of these practices affected the dead at all.
Perhaps clocks were stopped simply as symbols of mourning.
Perhaps mirrors were covered because grief was supposed to turn attention away from vanity and everyday life.
Perhaps windows were opened because rooms containing the sick and dying needed fresh air.
Practical customs frequently acquire supernatural explanations.
But the reverse can happen too.
A ritual may survive long after its original spiritual meaning has been forgotten, leaving later generations to invent practical explanations for something their ancestors regarded very differently.
With traditions this old, certainty is often impossible.
And that is part of their fascination.
Clocklore
The clock has always been a peculiar object.
It measures our lives without participating in them.
It doesn’t care whether the hour it records contains a birth, a wedding, an ordinary Tuesday afternoon or a death.
It simply continues.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Perhaps that is why stopping the clock after a death once felt appropriate.
For a little while, the household refused to continue with the rest of the world.
Someone was gone.
Time could wait.
But the stranger stories are the ones in which nobody touched the clock.
Someone dies miles away.
A pendulum slows.
The mechanism stops.
The hands settle upon an hour.
Later the telephone rings.
There are sensible explanations for such stories.
There are mechanical explanations.
There are psychological explanations.
There is coincidence.
And perhaps, among the thousands of stories accumulated over centuries, there are a few for which none of those explanations fits quite comfortably.
The old people would probably have understood.
They might simply have looked at the motionless hands and said that the clock knew.
We don’t have to go quite that far.
But neither must we insist that every old mystery surrender its secrets.
Sometimes a clock stops.
Sometimes someone dies.
And every once in a while, according to generations of families who remembered such things, they stop together.
Sometimes the clock stops at the moment of death.
And sometimes, stranger still, it seems to know the hour before we do.
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