What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Do Celebrities Always Die in Threes?
Death is a special moment . Hulk Hogan, Ozzy Osbourne, and Malcolm Jamal-Warner all died within days of each other, and celebrity death misinformation is having a special moment, too. Let’s delve into the folklore, superstitions, and conspiracy theories surrounding celebrities taking the “lights out walk.”
In early January 2016, David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Alan Rickman all died within the same week. Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon all launched their careers within two dark days in June 2009. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper all died at the same moment in 1959. So what’s going on? Is Death really saving up to create heavenly trios?
I bet you already guessed that I would say “no.” The “Rule of Three” arises from a combination of our tendency to invent patterns based on random information and large sample sizes, driven by the fear of death.
Because celebrity deaths are spread out randomly over time, the occasional “clusters” of celebrity deaths are as inevitable as a lucky streak for a gambler who plays long enough. If there were no clusters of celebrity deaths—say, if celebrities only died on days when no other celebrities died—it would be so unusual that I would believe there was some pattern. But the timing of celebrity deaths is consistent with randomness.
Apophenia (finding patterns where none exist) is especially easy to implement on a large sample such as “all famous people.” Famous people die every day, so it is always possible to find two more “stars” to accompany the one who starts, especially since the time interval during which a death “counts” in the trio is subjective.
There’s also the problem of defining who’s famous and who’s not. Wait, musician Chuck Mangione died on July 22; does he count? What about Connie Francis, who died on July 16? What about Tom Lehrer , who died on July 26? To me, he’s famous.
With Mangione, Leher, and Francis, we now have six celebrities who died within 10 days of each other. “That’s two groups of three,” you might say, but what about the death of British jazz legend Cleo Laine on July 25? And what about “beloved therapy bunny” Alex the Great ? You can make that group as big as you like, but celebrity deaths don’t actually happen in sixes or twelves or threes; like all deaths, they happen one at a time.
Do celebrities still die?
More celebrities are dying now than they were a few generations ago, but that’s because more celebrities are dying. Before radio, television, and the internet, the people “everyone had heard of” were presidents and other prominent politicians, a few athletes, maybe a few stage actors or opera singers—the kind you wrote about in the newspapers. Now there are new categories of celebrity, like reality TV stars and YouTube celebrities. Every actor from every TV show you watched when you were 10 is here. And 100 percent of them are going to die.
Were these deaths caused by the COVID-19 vaccine?
In certain corners of the internet, it’s fashionable to attribute the death of any celebrity to a COVID-19 vaccine, no matter how ridiculous — Betty White was 99, but that didn’t stop people from blaming the vaccine . Of this trio of fatalities, Ozzy Osbourne is the focus of the “vaccine” theorists. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wrote : “The famous Ozzy Osbourne has died suddenly after years of illness that mysteriously began after a vaccine.”
But Ozzy’s illness didn’t start after the vaccine. Ozzy told Billboard he was glad to get the COVID vaccine in 2021. In 2020, Osbourne revealed he suffers from Parkinson’s disease , writing that he was originally diagnosed in 2003 . He said he had blood clots in his legs in 2019 . Oz has had a staph infection , been hospitalized with the flu , and recovered from a serious ATV accident , all before he got the vaccine. And he has a history of substance abuse, which he’s self-documented. If it took four years for a vaccine to kill a hard-living 76-year-old man with a number of serious health issues, then it’s the worst bioweapon in history.
…or was it the Deep State?
You can’t blame the vaccine for Hogan’s demise; he was an outspoken anti-vaxxer . And it seems impossible that Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s drowning death could have been caused by a vaccine. But there has to be something —in the world of conspiracy, death is never natural, so if the vaccine hadn’t done it, maybe the CIA killed the Hulkster with a heart gun . It doesn’t matter that Hogan reported decades of health problems , took steroids , and abused drugs , or that Malcolm-Jamal Warner drowned in a rip current: Someone had to be hiding something . Was there a murder plot ? Were all three killed in a ritual sacrifice to hide the Epstein files ? Anything is preferable to the inconvenient truth that people just die.
The Chaotic Nature of Death
Pattern recognition and conspiracy thinking explain the expression of our folklore about death, but the force behind modern death folklore is simple and primal: we fear death. We fear its complete disregard for our plans and precautions, its randomness, its inevitability, and its finality. Death doesn’t come in threes, it just walks , so we defend ourselves against it. We cling to any explanation for death other than “everyone just dies,” even if that means thinking that Hulk Hogan’s heart stopped because of an insidious conspiracy rather than his drug and steroid abuse, and even if he hadn’t, all hearts eventually stop beating, and death comes for everyone, kings, paupers, and wrestling superstars.