Celebrity deaths in clusters of three.

There are otherwise-rational people (I’m being generous here), who honestly believe that celebrity deaths occur in clusters of three. Obviously, there are no facts to support this belief, so how did this idea ever get started?

From observation. Given a long enough span of time, it’s bound to happen. But there have been a convincing number of occasions for some “otherwise-rational people” (including me) to wait for the other shoe(s) to drop when one of them departs. I can’t remember a time in recent years when there haven’t been groups of three (sometimes more) to leave within a week.

No doubt the numbers support that.

I think it has to do with the influence of “magical” numbers in society. Nobody knows for sure why it is, but cultures tend to place greater significance on a particular number and its multiples. In the United States, this number is three. So numbers like 3, 6, 9, and 12 are used more often in terms of naming and design. (The Native Americans tended to use 4.)

Anyway, the celebrity three-death thing easily falls apart, depending on who you consider important enough to county. I seem to remember Buddy Hackett, Buddy Ebsen, Katherine Hepburn, and Barry White. So that’s four.

Celebrity deaths actually happen in clumps of 4,901. It takes longer than you thought.

One can’t establish firm numbers without first agreeing on definitions.

Who qualifies as a celebrity? Actors and singers, sure. What about authors? Politicians? How famous does one have to be?

What period of time can elapse between deaths and still count as a cluster?

In my experience, the answers to the questions above are constantly changing, always in favor of supporting the notion of “deaths in threes”. If three well-known actors and one obscure actor die, the lesser-known one doesn’t count. If only two famous actors die, then the obscure one does count.

But if two famous actors and one obscure actor dies, leading to the obscure one being counted, and then another famous actor dies, it is retroactively decided that the obscure one doesn’t count and never did count.

Hey, we could set up a test. Agree on the span of time, anyway, and let the debatability of their status follow the event. How does three days sound? A week?

It’s sort of like that probabilty thing that in a randomly chosen group of 50 or more people, there will be at least two who share a birthday. The odds are greater than 95% that it will occur.

It also reminds me of the thing: Just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

Deciding a person’s status after his or her death leaves too much room open. Sure, for the first person you can fairly decide whether they qualify. But after we already have two established celebrities dead, I suspect the standards would drop.

Like this. Herbie Mann might be number three, except then Buddy Ebsen dies and we realize Mann doesn’t count. Eve’s post there also curiously omits Barry White.

At the very least, we need to agree beforehand on what professions count. Preferably we should establish standards on how famous a person must be, although I realize that’s hard to do.

Oh, goodness, no one actually believes it, it’s an amusing old folk tale. All references to it are strictly tongue-in-cheek, but I guess not using smilies misleads some people.

The earliest reference to it I’ve read is from 1934, when Dorothy Dell went to the funerals of Lilyan Tashman and Lowell Sherman and jokingly asked who the third would be (it was, of course, her, a few days later). But the legend was already well-known by 1934, so I wonder where and when it orginated?

Tradnor, I agree it would be hard to do. But not impossible for the sake of some testing over the next few weeks.

How about: TV/movie actors whose careers have included some major films/shows and whose name would appear in the credits before you get to the bit roles. That’s a start. Maybe we could stretch it some. IMDB would be a reasonable source to help determine how “major” a person was.

The way to do it is to start with a list of deceased celebrities (from something like Who’s Who), then plot the dates of their deaths; or include live ones, and add their dates as they die. You have to establish who’s a celebrity *before *you know their date of death. That way it’s double-blind (you and the deceased).

And yes, I’ve known people who actually believe this sort of thing.

You can get data like that at IMDB.

Are you suggesting that a list be made of all candidates in advance? I guess that would include several hundred people, minimum, if current age isn’t a factor, since death comes to all ages.

Speaking only for myself, it’s not so much a matter of believing this happens. I just notice that when one “big name celebrity goes” it’s only a matter of days before at least two others are also gone.

If you have the patience for it, and the time, you could build that list and watch what happens over the next six months or so.

Then you could decide for yourself if you believe it – whether or not others do. Beliefs aren’t majority rule, IMHO.

you made up those names, didn’t you.:smiley:

As I’ve noted before, the reason for the seeming"groups" of celebrity deaths is that there are so MANY people nowadays who qualify as “celebrities,” even if it’s only for a short time.

A hundred years ago, if you weren’t a king or a President, it was unlikely that more than a few people would ever know who you were. Today, in the age of mass media, many, MANY people have become “celebrities!” I mean, everyone who ever starred in a movie or TV show, everyone who ever wrote or recorded a popular song, everyone who ever wrote a popular book or story, everyone who ever had a few good seasons as a professional athlete… ALL those people are “celebrities.”

And that, in turn, means that practically every day now, somebody dies who was once famous.

astorian, to add to your point, the span of time that we’ve had that phenomenon now extends to better than a century, thus providing a goodly number of candidiates for the old-age syndrome to get people. Back in 1934 that would have been less a factor.

I still feel that if we (somebody – not me) select the candidate group in advance (as panache45 suggests) and give it a span of six months, and select some reasonable period for the three to happen within (three or four days?) that the results would outweigh chance significantly.

That way we could eliminate the debate over “celebrity status” up front and let the chips fall where they may.

I’m no gambler, but I feel pretty confident that the results would bear out the old notion. In any event it would be a fun test.

I think the reason is simple: It takes three data points to establish a ‘pattern’.

In other words, when that third celebrity dies in the same proximity as the first two, the brain goes, “Ah ha! A pattern!”.

Lots of things supposedly ‘happen in threes’, and I suspect the same reason applies to all of them.