Stopped clock
Stopping the clock was once a way to mark a death, and a 1903 collection notes the custom in New Hampshire. A clock that halts on its own can turn your thoughts to the moments you have never taken the time to mark.
What it may mean
A stopped clock freezes one minute and holds it there, which is exactly why families once stopped their clocks on purpose. When someone died, the hands were halted at that hour, as if to say this moment mattered too much to slide past with all the others. Most clocks that stop today just need a new battery. Still, frozen hands may send your thoughts to the moments you rushed past: a goodbye, a finished project, the close of a long chapter that you marked with nothing more than the next item on the list. Not every ending needs a ceremony, but some deserve more than a shrug.
Depending on how you saw it
Stopped right after a move
A clock that quits soon after a move or a renovation has often been jolted or hung slightly off level. New settings take some adjusting, even for machines. Which habit has not quite restarted since your last big change?
A battery clock stuck around the nine
On a weak battery, the second hand of many wall clocks stalls around the nine, where it has to lift its own weight back up toward twelve. It can still fall; it cannot climb. Which stretch of your week runs fine on the flat and stalls on every uphill?
An old wind-up clock that has run down
A mechanical clock stops when nobody winds it, often after years of a weekly ritual that one person in the family kept up. Its silence can be the first sign that a routine has lapsed. Has a family ritual lapsed because the person who kept it no longer can, and could someone pick it up?
Why it happens in nature
Battery wall clocks most often stop because the battery is weak, and the second hand tends to stall around the nine, where it needs the most power to climb. Mechanical clocks run down when they are not wound, and a pendulum clock can stop if it is knocked off level. Dust, old oil and sudden changes in temperature can also make an old movement stick.
What folk beliefs say
New Hampshire, United States
In New Hampshire, people stopped the clock at the time of a death.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 187. View the page
Rural United States
A popular song of the rural United States, quoted in 1903, carried the old belief that clocks are in sympathy with their owners: the clock stopped, never to go again, when the old man died.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 1 (1903), vol. 1, p. 427. View the page
To reflect on
Which ending in your recent past did you hurry past without marking at all?