Read any of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales and it won’t take long for you to realize that the guy’s writing tended towards the twisted and the creepy.

But did you know that Poe had the ability to predict the future? All right, maybe that’s going a little too far, but he did write a story that very closely resembles an event that took place 46 years after he wrote it.

In 1838, Edgar Allan Poe wrote his only complete novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” The book follows the life of the title character, Arthur Pym, a child who stows away on a whaling ship with his friend Augustus. Since this is a story by Poe, you can’t expect it to be a typical nautical adventure. While Pym is hiding aboard the ship, a mutiny occurs resulting in the slaughtering of much of the crew. Together, he and Augustus team up with a regretful mutineer named Dirk Peters to reclaim the ship.

They managed to kill all of the mutineers except Richard Parker, a man they kept alive to help them control the ship. However, after a terrible storm, the remaining four find themselves without adequate provisions or food. To avoid starvation, Parker suggests that they draw straws to decide which one of them should be killed for the others to consume and survive. Parker probably would not have made that suggestion had he known that he would end up with the shortest straw.