When Birds Mean Death
This Halloween, let’s look at how owls gained their spooky reputation.
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 with family and friends is my favorite fall tradition. My parents live a bit outside of town, and one evening at twilight, I went for a 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 — both from wonder, and from a bit of alarm. Great Horned Owls aren’t at all heavy — they weigh around three pounds, the same as a toaster. But it looked huge from its perch in the tree, and it certainly had the drop on me. For a couple minutes, I watched the hulking bird in amazement, until it flew off in perfect silence on its evening hunt.
I’m far from the only person who has been caught off guard by seeing or hearing an owl. In fact, for most peoples throughout America’s history, owls have been powerful omens of death. Almost universally, they’ve been feared. And whenever they’ve been feared, they’ve also been persecuted. To help commemorate Halloween, I wanted to look back at how owls became so closely associated with death.
Omens of Death
For many of America’s indigenous peoples, owls are the most powerful and dangerous birds. All owl species were at best dreaded omens, and the Great Horned Owl was the most feared. To some, like the Creek and Chickasaw, witches or sorcerers could transform into owls, “flying about to do mischief” at night. They might also be spirits of the dead, imbued with the power to kill anyone who heard their chilling call.1 For the Cherokee, owls were feared because of their association with malevolent supernatural power — their word for witch is the same as their word for Great Horned Owl. 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
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 film Killers of the Flower Moon, which is currently in theaters. Midway through the movie, we find Lizze, an elderly and sickly 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 in through her open window. When she awakes, she tells her daughter that she has been visited by an owl, and knows that her death will come soon. 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.
Nothing but Songs of Death
The Puritans arriving in New England in the early 1600s landed like one of these dreaded owls, carrying war and disease and environmental destruction. To the English colonizers, the woodlands surrounding their fledgling villages were not an object of inspiration or even curiosity, but a place to be feared. In the words of William Bradford, they were “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.”4 The forest was the opposite of civilization — a proper home for animals, but not for men.
These European settlers brought over the same myths and folk beliefs about birds and other animals that were prevalent in England at the time of their departure. In England, owls had long been considered evil omens, and Shakespeare made liberal reference to these beliefs in his work. “Out on ye Owls! nothing but songs of death”, roared 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 and animals, weather and birds could all influence or foretell events from the mundane to the critical.6 For most people in this era, there was no distinction between symbolic and scientific knowledge.
By the late 19th century, the American Folk-Lore Society had collected a large number of folk beliefs from around the country, and they found that many Americans, both Black and White, retained beliefs about the dangers of hearing an owl’s call. It was popularly believed in Alabama and Louisiana, for example, that “the hoot of a screech-owl signifies a death in the family,” and in New York that “to hear an owl cry at midnight foretells the death of a friend.” Regardless of where you were, however, the idea that “an owl hooting is an unlucky omen” was “General in the United States.”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 (Alabama), while taking off a piece of clothing and putting it back on inside out might make the owl “leave and no harm befall” (Kansas). 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
Death Bird
For African Americans too, owls held deep associations with death. In the 1930s, Dave Lawson shared the story of his grandmother Lissa and grandfather Cleve, whose brutal enslaver, “Marse Drew” was planning to sell Lissa at auction and separate the family. The night before Lissa was to be sold, “a scritch owl come an’ set on de roof an’ scritched. Lissa run out to skeer it away, but Cleve caught her arm. He say, ‘Don’t do dat, Lissa, leave him alone. Dat’s de death bird, he knows what he’s doin’.” Cleve left their house and soon returned with their enslaver carried on his shoulder, bound with rope. Cleve threatened to pour boiling water down Marse Drew’s throat unless he agreed to keep their family together, but Marse Drew refused, and Cleve carried out his threat.9 In this case, Cleve knew the Screech Owl to be a prophet of death, but not necessarily a malevolent one, as it foretold the death of his enemy. But it was common knowledge that an owl’s visit “was a sign … dat somebody gwine to die,” and more often than not, that somebody was a family member.10
It’s hard to know widespread these beliefs were at any given time, and the educated always looked down on them as mere superstitions. “From time immemorial there has been in the minds of the ignorant a superstitious dread associated with the owl,” wrote Charles Cook in an 1894 issue of The Cultivator & Country Gentleman.11 Unfortunately, these wise birds were condemned to death for their prophecies much more often than they actually brought death to their listeners. “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.”12 Christopher Jenkins, who Zora Neale Hurston interviewed as part of her doctoral thesis in Afro-American folklore, reported that it was a “sign uh death every time you hear one hollerin round yo’ house. Ah shoots every one Ah kin find.”13 It was not until 1976 that owls received federal protection, and until then, their friends were few and far between.
Why Are Owls So Scary?
Birds have always carried a connection with the supernatural. 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 have an ingrained need to make sense of the world by placing things into categories. Anomalies – things that don’t fit into the categories that we think they should – are particularly 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 heads, enormous front-facing eyes, and can swivel their head to look directly at you while facing the other way. Any time they encroach into “human” spaces is particularly ominous, transgressing the familiar boundaries between wild and tame. Just like a flock of blackbirds suddenly descending on a town or a crow tapping at a window, an owl roosting on a cross or steeple14 naturally produces the sort of dread evoked by the midnight visit of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven.
Other beliefs likely stemmed from bird behaviors that touched on instincts or fears that are more deeply rooted in the human psyche. The call of a barn owl — an abrupt, disembodied shriek cutting through the darkness of night, sounding eerily similar to a human scream — proved unsettling enough to European settlers and indigenous Americans alike to be counted as an evil omen. 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.
Beautiful Beasts
I was surprised by how intimidated I felt by the Great Horned 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 also see them as beautiful and graceful, worthy of our wonder and our protection.
Krech, Shepard., Krech, Shepard. Spirits of the Air: Birds & American Indians in the South. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
Ibid.
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.
Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647. http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/bradford.html
Bull, Henry Graves. Notes on the Birds of Herefordshire. United Kingdom: Hamilton, Adams & Company, 1888.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800. London: Allen Lane, 1983.
Memoirs of the American Folk-lore Society, vol. VII. United States: American Folk-lore Society, 1899.
Ibid.
Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 2, Jackson-Yellerday. 1936, p. 44-50. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn112/.
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.
Charles Cook. “Screech-Owl – Scops Asio.” The Cultivator & Country Gentleman. United States: Luther Tucker & Son, September 6, 1894.
Ibid.
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.
Thomas, Man and the Natural World
I'm really appreciating these newsletters. Always something interesting.