Nick Belton

In 2005, a six-month-old kitten named Oscar was adopted by a nursing home in the US to be raised as a therapy cat. However, the workers noticed something peculiar about him. While Oscar usually preferred to be alone, he occasionally crawled into a resident's bed and snuggled beside them. The eerie thing about this is that the resident that Oscar would cuddle with would usually die within hours. Initially, the staff didn't think much of it, but after this happened 20 times, they started to believe that Oscar knew when someone was close to passing away, and so when they noticed the cat next to a resident, they would call their loved ones to warn them. Researchers speculate that Oscar could smell biochemicals released by dying cells and so chose to comfort lonely residents. On one occasion, the staff was convinced that a resident was about to pass away, but Oscar refused to sit with them. Instead, he chose another resident who looked healthier, and that person passed away first. Oscar died in 2022, and over the course of his life he accurately predicted over 100 deaths.