In his novel “Counting Miracles,” published Sept. 24, 2024, author Nicholas Sparks predicted the hurricane that devastated western North Carolina starting Sept. 27, 2024.
In October 2024, a claim circulated on social media that American author Nicholas Sparks predicted Hurricane Helene’s devastation of Asheville, North Carolina, in his novel “Counting Miracles.” The novel’s release date was Sept. 24, 2024, three days before Hurricane Helene began to cause widespread destruction in western North Carolina on Sept. 27, 2024.
One TikTok clip about the claim, dated Oct. 5, 2024, showed the passage in question superimposed with text reading: “Nicholas Sparks!!! How did you know?!?!”
(TikTok user @lovinaloha)
The same passage was the subject of other popular TikTok videos, as well as posts on X (archived), Threads and other social media platforms.
(Threads user @amylynn915)
For example, multiple (archived) Facebook users mentioned the claim in comments (archived) left on unrelated posts on Sparks’ official Facebook page. One such comment, on a post about an upcoming “Counting Miracles” film adaptation, read (archived):
How did you know hurricane Helene was going to his [sic] North Carolina? Nice play on your wording Asheville, north Carolina to Asheboro North Carolina. You released this book just in time for the hurricane to hit. That’s disgusting.
A passage in Sparks’ “Counting Miracles” did indeed describe a hurricane named Helene damaging the North Carolina city of Asheboro (not Asheville, the city the 2024 hurricane devastated). However, the context of the book made it clear that the passage in question did not refer to the 2024 hurricane. Instead, the book described a 1958 storm that coincidentally shared the same name.
For that reason, we have rated the claim false.
The Passage
The passage in question was on Page 167 of “Counting Miracles.” It read as follows:
Jasper had barely settled into his new job, however, when his life was upended again. In September, only a month after Audrey had left, Hurricane Helene unleashed massive rainfall and a nearby creek in Asheboro quickly rose to dangerous levels. Fortunately—or unfortunately, as the case may be—Jasper was at his house in town, not the cabin, when it began to flood. He pushed through water that soon reached his waist, gathering up photographs from the mantel, his father’s Bible, and as many of the carvings they’d made together as he could carry, hauling it all to his truck, which he’d parked on higher ground, just in case. As the storm continued to rage, a loblolly in the yard snapped and crashed through the roof. Days later, after the water finally receded and hot weather returned, mold began growing on the walls and the floors, ruining pretty much everything in the house that the storm hadn’t.
The description of the book that appeared on the website of the book’s publisher noted that the character mentioned in the passage, Jasper, was 83 years old in the book’s present-day storyline, which took place in 2023, according to a heading that appeared at the beginning of the first chapter.
The passage in question, however, did not take place in the present day. Instead, it was a flashback to the year Jasper was 18 — a detail Sparks noted in the paragraph that immediately preceded the passage mentioning Hurricane Helene. As a result, it was clear in context that the novel’s Hurricane Helene took place 65 years before 2023, i.e., in 1958.
Additionally, the location described in this section of the book was Asheboro, N.C. — not Asheville, the city that made headlines due to the devastation that Hurricane Helene wrought there in October 2024.
Asheville is in western North Carolina, not far from the Tennessee border. Asheboro, by contrast, is in the center of the state, roughly 150 miles to Asheville’s east, according to Google Maps. Although Randolph County — of which Asheboro is the county seat — saw some damage from 2024’s Hurricane Helene, the Randolph Record, a newspaper that covers the county, reported that it primarily consisted of power outages and wastewater overflows.
Multiple Hurricanes Named Helene
The World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency established in 1950, assigns official names to tropical cyclones, a category of storms that includes hurricanes, based on predetermined alphabetical lists that rotate every six years. According to the WMO’s official website:
A name can be retired or withdrawn from the active list at the request of any Member State if a tropical cyclone by that name acquires special notoriety because of the human casualties and damage incurred.
Despite its powerful winds, the 1958 Hurricane Helene did not cause severe enough devastation or human casualty for the WMO to consider retiring the name.
A National Weather Service webpage about the 1958 storm explained:
Hurricane Helene was a powerful hurricane that raked the coast of the Carolinas on September 27, 1958. Although the storm never made an official landfall, it produced exceptionally strong winds on land including a 135 mph gust at the Wilmington airport, the strongest ever measured at this location. Helene’s offshore track is the only factor that spared the area from catastrophic damage rivaling or even exceeding that experienced just four years earlier during Hurricane Hazel’s landfall. Due to early warnings and mandatory evacuation of coastal islands, Helene caused no direct fatalities and only one serious injury in the Carolinas.
The same NWS website did not list Randolph County, in which Asheboro is located, among the counties that saw notable damage from the 1958 Helene, suggesting that Sparks took some artistic license when, in his novel, he described the storm flooding Asheboro’s creek.
The WMO also named hurricanes Helene in 1988, 2006 and 2018, according to National Hurricane Center reports.
In summary, since the WMO began naming storms in the 1950s there have been multiple Hurricane Helenes. Contextual details in “Counting Miracles” make it clear that the Hurricane Helene described by the author was specifically the one that occurred in 1958. For this reason, we have rated the claim that Nicholas Sparks predicted 2024’s Hurricane Helene false.
Previously, we investigated similar claims that a 1981 Dean Koontz book predicted COVID-19 and that a book describing the Maui, Hawaii, fires of August 2023 was published before the fires started.