Voices from Beyond: Coronavirus may have been predicted

Emily Moosbrugger, Opinion Writer

With a pandemic sweeping the globe, cancelling all of our big plans and keeping us locked up, most of us are probably thinking:

“Wow, I didn’t see that one coming!”

However, interestingly enough, there are people who did.

“In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes resisting all known treatments,” wrote Sylvia Browne in 2008. Browne is an American author and psychic. She has made appearances on Larry King Live, The Montel Williams Show and Hay House Radio.

Readers of her novel say Browne’s prediction may have just been a lucky guess since it was written after the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. However, it seems a bit too accurate to be merely a “lucky guess.” Browne later died in 2013 and never got to see her prediction come true. However, the psychic also made some predictions for later on down the road.

“Almost more baffling than the illness itself will be the fact that it will suddenly vanish as quickly as it arrived, attack ten years later, and then disappear completely,” Browne said.

A less direct prediction is in an episode of the Simpsons from 1993. In an episode called “Marge in Chains,” a worker coughs into a box which is then shipped to Springfield, where the germs are quickly spread. Though co-writer of the show, Bill Oakley says these claims are false, and the episode is meant to be “absurd” and “cartoonish,” many fans still believe the show is a prediction of today’s events.

The Simpsons have managed to predict many other events, including Trump’s presidency, Lady Gaga’s superbowl halftime performance and even the Ebola outbreak. In season 9, episode 3 of the show, Marge offers Bart a book titled “Curious George and the Ebola Virus.” This episode aired years before the outbreak became widespread.

You might remember the 2010 Disney film, “Tangled,” about Rapunzel being captured by Mother Gothel as a baby and locked away in her tower in complete isolation. Although more extreme, the scenario resembles one quite similar to ours: stuck inside all day, quarantined and separated from the world. What you might not remember from the film is that the name of the kingdom Rapunzel was kidnapped from was Corona.

But there’s more: Mother Gothel grows a magical flower on her land to maintain her youthfulness. The flower is later stolen by soldiers to use on their queen. When Mother Gothel goes back to retrieve her flower, she finds it has disappeared. This is similar to today’s scenarios with the more financially stable stocking up on supplies and hoarding them, only to leave those who can’t afford to buy as much at one time with nothing.

Whether these predictions are just coincidences or are truly visions from psychic minds, it’s cool to think about what other crazy occurrences have been predicted and what will happen in the future that people are already talking about.