On September 26, 2011, former Weezer bassist Mikey Welsh posted about a dream in which he died in Chicago: “dreamt i died in chicago next weekend (heart attack in my sleep). need to write my will today.” Later that day, he corrected the timing: “correction – the weekend after next.”
On Saturday, October 8, hotel staff found Welsh unresponsive at Chicago’s Raffaello Hotel after he missed a 1 p.m. checkout. He was pronounced dead there at 2:50 p.m., 12 days after the tweets. He was 40 and had come to Chicago to see Weezer play Riot Fest the following night.
The date and city matched his corrected tweet. The cause described in his dream wasn’t established: police suspected narcotics, and the initial autopsy was inconclusive pending toxicology results.
Welsh joined a strange lineage of people who seemed to call their own deaths. Mark Twain said in 1909 that he came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835 and expected to “go out with it”; he died of a heart attack the day after the comet’s closest approach in 1910. Abraham Lincoln told his bodyguard he’d dreamed of his own assassination for three nights running, then said “Goodbye” instead of his usual “Goodnight” on the way to Ford’s Theatre. John Lennon told a reporter in 1965 that the Beatles would “either go in a plane crash, or we’ll be popped off by some loony,” and can be heard saying “shoot me” at the top of “Come Together.” Tupac Shakur told rapper Smooth B, “I ain’t gonna live past 25,” and was killed at 25. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, weeks before dying in a 2002 car crash in Honduras, told friends she felt the “spirit of death” was chasing her.
Welsh had played bass for Weezer from 1998 to 2001, including on the band’s Green Album.