Disturbingly Accurate Website Predicted the Passing of Bush Sr. and Stan Lee

Ever heard of the “death list?” It’s a website founded before almost anything on the Internet ever became famous, pre-dating Google, Facebook, YouTube, and just about every other major website being founded in 1987, and in the past couple years it has predicted the passing of several celebrities and figures with a disturbing degree of accuracy.

It certainly wasn’t difficult to predict the deaths of certain individuals, people in extremely old age, in their 90’s, ect, but there’s a certain degree of accuracy that this website reaches that makes you wonder.

The website currently, in its classic bad taste, reads “12/50 dead.”

(Image credit: deathlist)

If you’ve never heard of the list, it is ultimately a list of 50 celebrities in which what they describe as their “expert committee” has selected, expecting them to pass away in one year.

A few rules are specified in their description of the list, and that is that the nominees must be famous enough for their passing to be reported on in UK media (maybe that’s where the list is based?). In addition, they cannot be famous solely for the reason that they are expected to pass away, and much more importantly, only 25 candidates from the previous year’s list can re-appear.

25 candidates re-appearing every year, half, is a lot so the accuracy of this thing may simply be due to the fact that all these people are near passing.

(Image credit: koaa)

However, here’s where it gets weird: who could have predicted the passing of Stan Lee? He was on the list as well. I mean, he was extremely old as well, but they predicted it.

In 2017, the Death List “smashed” a record as they phrase it, successfully predicting the passing of 17 people. They’re promoting it like some kind of thing to get excited about, waiting to see if 2018’s list would be as accurate. Well, it’s almost the end of the year and it’s only 12 people, not that close to 17, so the list will probably not break its past record.

One of the strangest things about this website is the time when it was created. 1987: it was created over 30 years ago, how is that even possible?

Actor Kirk Douglas, age 101, has been on the list for 16 straight years. It was reported earlier this year in mainstream news articles that Stan Lee’s passing was predicted by the list, as a Yahoo article says Kirk Douglas was listed “with other celebrities predicted to pass away in 2018 including 97-year-old Prince Philip, 59-year-old Linda Nolan, and 96-year-old Marvel comic book writer Stan Lee.”

(Image credit: Yahoo)

In 1988 and 1991, the site failed to make one correct guess, but prior to 2017, the record of the list was 14 out of 50 correct predictions, the same number in 2003, 2008, and 2015.

If this was some person with inside knowledge they probably would not fail to make accurate predictions so often. There’s not a lot to take away from this, but it’s a massive mystery who in the world would found such a website, this idea out of all potential ideas, when people hadn’t even conceived of the possibility of social media yet.