8 Strange Dark Days Throughout History

Thanks to modern technology, nowadays we can usually identify why a dark day has occurred—be that a solar eclipse, smoke from wildfires, or ash from a volcanic eruption—and we can even predict many of them. But in the past, people sometimes had no idea why the sky had suddenly and strangely lost its light during the middle of the day. 

Although we can now identify when solar eclipses would have occurred in past centuries (which explains some historic reports of daytime darkness), there are still some events that either remain unexplained or were particularly unusual. Here are eight such instances throughout history. 

1. Detroit’s Black Rain // 1762
2. New England’s Dark Day // 1780
3. Baghdad’s Blackout // 1857
4. Oshkosh’s Dark Day // 1886
5. Black Sunday // 1935
6. The Siberian Darkening // 1938
7. The Great Smog of London // 1952
8. Yakutia’s Blackout // 2018

Detroit’s Black Rain // 1762

On October 19, 1762, a strange darkness fell over Detroit, Michigan. In a letter detailing the day, merchant James Stirling described the appearance of the sun as “red as blood, and more than three times as large as usual.” The day was so dark that candles had to be lit and the air was “a dirty yellowish green color.” Most unusual of all, a dark rain fell that filled the air with a sulfurous smell and turned a piece of paper black when Stirling held it out.

Fellow merchant John Porteous reported that the darkness was so thick “that you could not frequently distinguish a man from a woman at the distance only of 10 yds on the Street.” He said that the black rain “appear’d on white paper like new Ink.” There were also reports of the same strange weather just across the border in Canada, with the phenomenon dubbed pluie de suie in French (which translates to “rain of soot”).

To this day, there isn’t a definitive explanation for the darkness and black rain. Explorer Jonathan Carver superstitiously thought that the rain was an omen ahead of Pontiac’s Rebellion, which started in spring the following year. Stirling recorded various theories in his letter—including a plague brought by the English, a forest fire, or (in his opinion) “the eruption of some volcano, or subterraneous fire,” the sulfurous matter of which “meeting with some watery clouds, it has fallen down together with the rain.”

New England’s Dark Day // 1780

One of the best-known mysterious dark days in history occurred across New England on May 19, 1780. The sun rose as normal, but it wasn’t long before heavy clouds rolled in and blocked out the light. In his diary, George Washington—then fighting the Revolutionary War in New Jersey—described the clouds as “dark & at the same time a bright and reddish kind of light intermixed with them—brightning & darkning alternately.” Massachusetts physician Cotton Tufts similarly reported the clouds having “a brassy Appearance” and also commented on a bad smell in the air, “some resembling it to the smell proceeding from a Chimney on Fire, others to that which arises from Swamps on Fire.”

Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, was also in Massachusetts on the dark day and described it being like a total eclipse. “By Eleven oclock candles were light up in every House, the cattle retired to the Barns, the fouls to roost and the frogs croaked,” she wrote. In Connecticut, the state legislature was in session and considered an adjournment, which Abraham Davenport was against. “The Day of Judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought,” he stated. 

The cause of the darkness was unknown for many years. But around 20 years ago, scientists proposed a promising theory: the existence of fire scars on trees rings from 1780 in the Lake States and Canada point to a forest fire as the likely culprit.

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Baghdad’s Blackout // 1857

British Envoy Charles A. Murray was working as a diplomat in Baghdad, Iraq, when the sun was mysteriously blacked out on May 20, 1857. Quoted in Charles Fort’s The Book of the Damned (1919), Murray described the event as “a darkness more intense than ordinary midnight, when neither stars nor moon are visible.” The pitch-blackness only lasted for a short period of time and was then “succeeded by a red, lurid gloom, such as I never saw in any part of the world.”

Even stranger, a huge amount of red sand then fell from the sky. Fort proposed the theory that it was a simoon—a dust-laden wind—that had picked up an unusually large amount of sand, but Murray had experienced simoons before and rejected this explanation. 

Oshkosh’s Dark Day // 1886

At around 3 p.m. on March 19, 1886, the city of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was suddenly blanketed in darkness. The Oshkosh Daily Northwestern reported that “in the space of less than five minutes the sun had become so obscured that within doors it was almost as dark as at night.” According to the newspaper, the nearby towns of Eureka and Berlin experienced the same strange dark phenomenon.  

Oshkosh residents said that the loss of light was caused by a “dense black cloud or mist” that came from the west. Some people believed the dark clouds were caused by cyclonic winds that were too high in the sky to be felt at ground level, but a concrete explanation has never been confirmed. 

Black Sunday // 1935

People living on the Great Plains in the 1930s were used to Dust Bowl storms—caused by poor agricultural practices damaging the topsoil and a series of extreme droughts—but the one that rolled through on April 14, 1935, was unusually severe. Later dubbed Black Sunday, the storm that day was comprised of 300,000 tons of black dust, was more than 10,000 feet high, and moved at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour.

People fled to their homes, stuffing any open gap with rags in an attempt to keep the dust out. Folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie was in Texas when the black blizzard tore through and recalled that “it got so dark that you couldn’t see your hand before your face, you couldn’t see anybody in the room.” He even wrote a song about the scary storm, which included lyrics such as, “It fell across our city like a curtain of black rolled down / We thought it was our judgment, we thought it was our doom.” Apparently one woman was so convinced that it was the start of Armageddon that she considered killing her baby to spare them the coming horror (although there’s no evidence that she followed through with this idea).

In Kansas, 17 people are reported as having died from dust pneumonia and a further three were suffocated to death. The storm also led to the demise of countless animals—cows, birds, mice, and rabbits were choked to death by the black dust. Not long afterwards, Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act, which sought to reduce the soil damage being done through poor farming methods.

The Siberian Darkening // 1938

On September 18, 1938, the residents of the Yamalo-Nenets region of Siberian Russia experienced an unexplained weather event that was later known as the Siberian Darkening. That morning, people started to notice the clouds were taking on a yellowish-brown hue and were gradually turning a reddish-brown. By 10:30 a.m., the dense clouds had turned black; all light was blocked out. Even stranger, the area was plunged into radio silence, with no signals getting through.

Meteorologists fired a few flares into the sky, but they simply disappeared into the dense clouds. After about an hour—during which the weather was completely calm—the darkness started to lift. To this day, what caused the strange weather and silence isn’t known.

The Great Smog of London // 1952

London had been no stranger to air pollution, but the smog that descended on the city for a few days at the end of 1952 was unusually severe. A thick greenish-yellow fog—nicknamed “pea-soup” for its appearance—was a common sight in the city, but it suddenly worsened on the morning of December 5. The fumes belched out by factories and the smoke from domestic fires became trapped low to the ground due to an anticyclone, a high-pressure system that traps cold air below warm air.

Mortician’s assistant Stan Cribb was driving to a wake when the smog started to thicken. It wasn’t long before he couldn’t even see the road in front of him. “It’s like you were blind,” he later recalled. The smog blocked out the sun until December 9, with daily life in London massively disrupted by the thick darkness that even hurricane lanterns couldn’t penetrate.  

The initial death toll of the lethal fog was reported to be 4000, but a 2001 study estimated that around 12,000 people died from cardiac and respiratory conditions. Four years after the Great Smog, the British government passed the Clean Air Act, which brought in restrictions and mandates to reduce air pollution.

Yakutia’s Blackout // 2018

During the summer months, the sun stays in the sky for up to 20 hours in Yakutia (also known as Sakha), a republic in Siberian Russia. But the sun mysteriously disappeared for three hours—from around 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.—on July 20, 2018. As well as being ominously dark, there were also reports of a grimy black dust hanging in the air.

What exactly caused the total blackout isn’t known. One resident blamed “devilry,” while others pointed to the possibility of smoke from forest fires polluting the atmosphere. But weather board official Yuri Degterenko rejected that explanation: “If it was smog from fires, people would know. There would be smoke and a burning smell. Our meteorological stations did not trace such a thing.”

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