Ominous Owls

This Halloween, let’s look at how owls gained their spooky reputation.

Note: This is a re-run of a post that originally ran on October 31, 2023. 

A great horned owl, from the 1853 book Uncle Sam’s Library for Boys and Girls in His Country.

Last October, I flew back home to South Dakota to visit my parents for apple cider season. My dad planted an apple orchard years ago, and coming back to make apple cider is my favorite fall tradition. My parents live a bit outside of town, and one evening I went for a sunset walk on the long, tree-lined gravel road by their house. Suddenly, I realized I was being watched. High above my head, perched on the top of a leafless tree and silhouetted against the darkening sky, was a great horned owl. I caught my breath as soon as I saw it. Great horned owls aren’t at all heavy. They only weigh about three pounds. But it looked huge from its perch, and it certainly had the drop on me. For a couple minutes, I watched the hulking bird until it silently flew off on its evening hunt.

I’m far from the only person who has been caught off guard by an owl at twilight. In fact, most peoples throughout America’s history thought of owls as powerful and evil omens. Almost universally, they’ve been feared. And whenever they’ve been feared, they’ve also been persecuted. On this spookiest of days, I want to look back at how owls became so closely associated with death.

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Many of America’s indigenous peoples consider owls to be an extremely powerful and dangerous bird. To some, like the Creek and Chickasaw, witches or sorcerers could transform into owls, “flying about to do mischief” at night.¹ In Cherokee, skili is the word used for witches and for great horned owls. To others, owls were spirits of the dead, imbued with the power to kill anyone who heard their chilling call. For the Choctaw, each owl’s call had a distinct and terrible meaning. The great horned owl’s call meant sudden death, while the screech owl foretold the death of a child, and the barred owl indicated the death of a relative.²

A Barred Owl, painted by John James Audubon

Others agreed that owls were spirits, but rather than being malevolent beings with the power to kill, they were messengers carrying news of death to the living.³ A dramatic example can be seen in the 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon. Midway through the movie, we find Lizze, an elderly Osage woman, waiting at death’s door. Sitting in her living room and floating in and out of consciousness, she sees an owl alight on her window sill in broad daylight, then fly into the house. When she awakes, Lizze tells her daughter that she has been visited by an owl, and knows that her death will come soon.

Scene from Killers of the Flower Moon. Incidentally, the owl is played by Eli, who is a Eurasian Eagle-owl. These birds are not native to America, as their name would suggest, and Eli was able to land the role because federal law prohibits any commercial use of America’s native birds, like Great Horned Owls, including as actors in movies.

Seventeenth-century Puritans arrived in New England like one of these dreaded owls, carrying war and disease and environmental destruction. To them, the woodlands surrounding their fledgling villages were not an object of inspiration or even curiosity, but a place to be feared. William Bradford called America “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”⁴  

These European settlers also carried over the beliefs about birds that were prevalent in England at the time of their departure. “Out on ye Owls! nothing but songs of death”, roared Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the English settlers in America did not look upon the birds with any more kindness.⁵ These beliefs were grounded in a worldview that held that human fortune and the natural world were closely tied together, meaning that plants, weather, and birds could all influence or foretell events from the mundane to the critical.⁶

Audubon’s barn owl

These ideas persisted through the centuries, and by the time the American Folk-Lore Society collected a compendium of folk beliefs from around the country in the late 1800s, the belief that it was unlucky to hear an owl hooting was “general in the United States.” In Alabama and Louisiana, these early anthropologists found that  “the hoot of a screech-owl signifies a death in the family,” while in New York “to hear an owl cry at midnight foretells the death of a friend.”⁷

Fortunately, the fates foretold by owls were not inevitable. If you could stop the owl from hooting, you might be able to interrupt the omen. Taking off your shoe and turning it over could make the owl stop crying, while taking off a piece of clothing and putting it back on inside out might make the owl “leave and no harm befall.” If you were at home and heard the owl calling outside, laying a broom against the door or throwing some salt into the fire might work just as well.⁸

For African Americans too, owls held deep associations with death. As part of the Slave Narrative Project In the 1930s, Dave Lawson shared the story of his grandmother Lissa and grandfather Cleve, whose brutal enslaver was planning to sell Lissa at auction and separate the family. The night before Lissa was going to be sold, a screech owl landed on their house and began calling. Before Lissa could scare the bird away, Cleve stopped her, saying “leave him alone. That’s the death bird, he knows what he’s doing.”  Cleve left their house and soon returned with their enslaver carried on his shoulder, bound with rope. Cleve threatened to pour boiling water down the man’s throat unless he agreed to keep their family together, but he refused, and Cleve carried out his threat.⁹

Audubon’s painting of great horned owls

Unsurprisingly, being associated with death usually didn’t work out well for the owls. Christopher Jenkins, who Zora Neale Hurston interviewed as part of her doctoral thesis in Afro-American folklore, explained that it was a “sign uh death every time you hear one hollerin round yo’ house. Ah shoots every one Ah kin find.”¹⁰  And in 1894, Charles Cook wrote that “the halo of superstition that surrounds this bird … condemns all owls as public enemies, and consequently most farmers lose no time in destroying every kind of owl that approaches the dwelling.”¹¹ It was not until 1976 that owls received federal protection, and until then, their friends were few and far between.

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Whenever a people has associated the heavens with divinity, they have seen birds as beings that, literally or symbolically, can bridge the chasm that separates earth-bound mortals with god or gods above. For doves and songbirds, this connection is innocent enough. But for looming, secretive, carnivorous night-dwellers, any supernatural power they have could only be evil. 

Humans make sense of the world by placing things in categories, and anything that doesn’t neatly fit into those categories tends to be unsettling. Owls don’t look or behave like most other birds. They are active at night and are silent except for their unearthly calls. They have round faces, enormous front-facing eyes, and can swivel their head to look directly at you behind their back. Any time they encroach into “human” spaces is particularly ominous, transgressing the familiar boundaries between wild and tame. An owl roosting on a cross or steeple produces the same sort of dread as the midnight visit of Edgar Allan Poe’s window-tapping raven. 

The barn owl’s call is an abrupt, disembodied shriek that sounds far too similar to a human scream. The menacing shadow of a great horned owl, leering down from bare winter branches at twilight, or the tremulous whinny of a screech owl piercing the night are enough to put owls in a class of their own as augers of misfortune. 

I was surprised by how intimidated I felt by the owl I saw in South Dakota. I was, of course, also ecstatic — this was my first time seeing a great horned owl in the wild. But it was a slightly unsettling experience as well, knowing that it had been watching me all along. My visceral reaction to the imposing owl helped me understand that our historic aversion towards the birds may be something more than mere prejudice. All the same, I’m grateful that we have learned to look beyond their ominous aura and see them as beautiful and graceful, worthy of our wonder and protection. 

A linocut print I made of a Great Horned Owl.

1. Krech, Shepard., Krech, Shepard. Spirits of the Air: Birds & American Indians in the South. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2009.

2. Ibid.

3. Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World: A Comprehensive Library of Human Belief and Practice in the Mysteries of Life. United States: J. H. Yewdale & sons Company, 1903.

4. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647. http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/bradford.html

5. Bull, Henry Graves. Notes on the Birds of Herefordshire. United Kingdom: Hamilton, Adams & Company, 1888.

6. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983.

7. Memoirs of the American Folk-lore Society, vol. VII. United States: American Folk-lore Society, 1899.

8. Ibid.

9. Pasierowska, Rachael L. “‘Screech Owls Allus Holler ’round the House before Death’: Birds and the Souls of Black Folk in the 1930s American South.” Journal of Social History 51, no. 1 (2017): 27–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45133285.

10. Pasierowska, Rachael L. “‘Screech Owls Allus Holler 'round the House before Death’: Birds and the Souls of Black Folk in the 1930s American South.” Journal of Social History 51, no. 1 (2017): 27–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45133285.

11. Charles Cook. “Screech-Owl - Scops Asio.” The Cultivator & Country Gentleman. United States: Luther Tucker & Son, September 6, 1894.