Throughout history, a surprising number of fiction novelists have managed to spin plot elements into their stories which, though they had no idea at the time, would later prove to have startling ramifications in the real world.
In many instances where such startling similarities have occurred, names, dates, and places have even accurately been named, as though the authors had somehow tapped into actual future events and predicted their outcome.
One of the more startling instances of such “psychic novelist” activity involved Edgar Allan Poe, who managed to predict with frightening detail an exact series of events that later transpired at sea aboard a seagoing vessel called the Mignonette. In his longest (and arguably his strangest) story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the ship carrying the narrator and its crew encountered a freakish squall, in which only a handful of men survived. Among them was a lowly cabin boy named Richard Parker, who later was cannibalized in what was then known as the grim “custom of the sea.” Though this series of events was conjured from Poe’s mind, decades later the Mignonette was destroyed under almost identical circumstances, where a sudden 40-foot wave capsized the ship. Among the survivors–and first to be killed and cannibalized–was the cabin boy, whose name was none other than Richard Parker! Captain Tom Dudley, along with those who had helped devour young Parker, were later discovered alive, and were tried for murder.
Continue reading…
