Warwick Price and Dove Thiselton want you to know, before we go any further with this, that they don’t wish anyone dead. They want you to know there is a big difference between guessing someone could die soon and actually wanting a person to die. That’s important to understand if we’re going to talk about their Ghoul Pool, now in its eighth year. See, they didn’t invent the idea of a Ghoul Pool, but they may be among its most meticulous practitioners. The Ghoul Pool, which they run from their horror shop Ghoulish Mortals in St. Charles, is, as they put it, “a celebrity death prediction game.”
The other night, 24 hours before entries were due for the 2026 edition of the Ghoul Pool, Dove called over to her husband, curious about the ballots they already received:
“Warwick, so far, do you know the No. 1 person people want dead this year?”
Warwick, who had just arrived at Ghoulish Mortals from his day job as an IT guy for a food distributor, said, “Wait, I can tell you in a short amount of time,” and slid behind the front counter and punched up the Ghoulish Mortals database that he had built himself.
He nodded at the results. On a dark monitor, in tiny data type, the results showed that, as of Jan. 13, 6:44 p.m., Bruce Willis and Donald Trump were tied with 37 predictions each. The Ghoul Pool had already received 62 ballots but anticipated many more before the deadline.
The game is thus: Each contestant predicts 13 people — movie stars, musicians, athletes, politicians, influencers, CEOs, anyone with a Wikipedia page (to verify their death) — then waits until 11:59 p.m. Dec. 31, 2026, to see how many passings they guessed correctly. Unlike a Super Bowl or March Madness office pool, cash is not involved. The Ghoul Pool is free to enter, but winners only receive gift cards to Ghoulish Mortals, which sells stuff like artist prints of the “Stranger Things” cast and Bigfoot tchotchkes and “Friday the 13th” magnets.
“Not just any store could pull off something like this,” Dove said while cutting out felt flames for a Valentine’s Day display featuring a devilish Elmo named Hellmo. “I mean, I doubt I could do this if I were the manager of a neighborhood savings and loan. Of course, I also don’t get to participate in the pool myself. But I do have my own list of predictions, and I’ve had Dick Van Dyke every year — I’ve thinking 2026 will be my year.”
Dick Van Dyke, who is 100 years old, is the fourth most predicted death for 2026; he received 24 predictions. Actor Eric Dane, who played Dr. Sloan on “Grey’s Anatomy” and Captain Tom on “The Last Ship,” is the third, behind Trump and Willis, probably because Dane announced last spring that he has ALS, and subsequent reports have noted that he requires round-the-clock medical care.
The Ghoul Pool, as it says right in the name, gets kinda ghoulish.
“But the point is to have fun with something that happens to everyone,” Warwick said. “It is sort of twisted, and also a part of everyone’s life — people who do well in the Ghoul Pool tend to be those who do a fair amount of research and think hard about who they believe could die in the next 12 months, not who they want to see die by December 31.”
When annual results are compiled each January, winners tend to be amateur grim reapers who predicted a mix of shocking young deaths and the passings of anyone over 90. That’s why Dane, who is only 53, received more predictions than a centenarian like Van Dyke. It’s also why, alarmingly, Ariana Grande, 32, has as many predictions (8) as someone like David Attenborough, 99. Every correct prediction is awarded a different number of points, calculated by subtracting the age of the deceased from 105. Dane, therefore, is worth 52 points, while Van Dyke is only worth 4. Youth is a trophy in Ghoul Pool. Warwick used to decide how much a death was worth by starting with a baseline of 104 points, on the assumption that the absolute oldest celebrity death would be 103. They wanted to make sure contestants received at least one point for a correct prediction. But after Kirk Douglas died at 103 in 2020, they were spooked and decided to move the goal posts a bit, so now Ghoul Pool calculations begin with 105.
The winner of the 2025 Ghoul Pool, a man from Indiana, got six of his 13 predictions correct — which is a decent showing. “The most anyone has ever gotten right was eight out of 13 picks,” Dove said. “Which is like the finger of death right there.”
Ghoul Pools, or death pools, or dead pools, organized or casual, have been around for centuries, long before the water-cooler pool itself. They are, you could argue, a way of gamifying the dark thoughts everyone lets slip out from time to time, a stab at justifying two of our most immortal, uneasy fascinations: famous people and dead famous people.
Italians were betting on the expiration dates of popes as early as the 1400s, a practice popular enough for Pope Gregory XIV, 170 years later, to outlaw widespread gambling on clerical deaths. French writer Guy de Maupassant included a death pool in his 1885 novel “Bel-Ami.” Two decades earlier, Mark Twain had a husband considering the odds of a wife’s recovery in one of his best short stories, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” There are newspaper accounts of Ghoul Pools in 1930s America. By 1988, the last Dirty Harry movie, “The Dead Pool,” used the titular game as a plot device. (“Sounds pretty sick to me,” Clint Eastwood’s detective sneered.) Even Deadpool himself, super anti-hero, who debuted in 1990, got his name from a dead pool in the Marvel Universe.
The couple themselves got the idea for a Ghoul Pool from a radio show in Los Angeles, where they lived before Warwick’s job relocated him to the western suburbs of Chicago.
Dove said it was always a dream to create a Ghoul Pool, though she admits: “Now that we have one, my own annual lists are more of a wish-list than anything strategic.” Also, once they began, they did not want to simply award points for each death, so like other death pools — such as the annual celebrity death pool that’s gone on for years at the Straight Dope Message Board, named after the longtime Chicago Reader column — contestants now receive bonuses based on the manner of a celebrity death. There’s the “Be Still My Heart” bonus (10 points) if a celebrity dies of a heart attack, and the “Dead of Night” bonus (10 points) if they die in their sleep. To be honest, it gets queasy: hangings receive 30 extra points, drownings 20 points.
A movie star who dies while making a movie — “essentially the Tom Cruise Award, if he had died doing a stunt,” Warwick said — is worth 25 additional points. Celebrities who die in a particularly unusual way (“The Final Destination Award”) are worth a $50 gift card. “Since we have a ‘Last Person to Die’ award, Betty White threw everything into disarray by dying on December 31 (2021),” Warwick said. There was also a time someone picked a Hamas leader: the United States military reported the man was killed, but Hamas insisted he was not; after Wikipedia changed his status to alive, points were adjusted.
Every year brings surprises.
As we picked over entries for 2026, I noticed someone put Marion Ross — who played Mrs. Cunningham on “Happy Days” — on their list. I thought she had died years ago. “You know, I did too!” Warwick said. (In fact, Ross is a mere 97.) He noted Gene Simmons got only two votes this year; he’s gotten more in previous years. Woody Allen and William Shatner, too. Keith Richards — who has looked good (relatively speaking) in his recent online posts, and perhaps graduated from collective death watch to eternal shaman — received a mere four votes, three fewer votes than Billy Joel and Phil Collins.
“Oh,” Warwick said, “Vladimir Putin has the same number of votes as Billy Ray Cyrus!”
For the record, judging by the number of votes received, several people are not expecting Chevy Chase to be long for this world. Same for Jesse Jackson. And Mel Brooks. And Sean Combs. But what do we make of more people betting Britney Spears (age 44) will die before Steven Tyler (77)? Or that Buzz Aldrin (age 96) has a better chance of seeing 2027 than King Charles III (77)? Warwick shrugged and pecked at his laptop.
“It’s just people dying,” he said.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com