HOWZAT

23: Sep 28, 1992: "Rockin" Rollen Stewart, an eccentric evangelist who started the craze for holding up signs representing bible verses at public events [John 3:16 was the most popular of these] was certain that The Rapture would occur on this day. He went on to instigate a campaign of stink-bombing churches and other religiously inspired acts of madness, which culminated with his imprisonment for kidnapping.

24: March – May 1997: The year of the comet Hale-Bopp gave rise to a welter of "end of the world" theories all based on a mistaken observation by amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek. When his assertion that the comet was being trailed by a companion object found its way onto Usenet message boards, it was magnified by the full power of the then-young internet into a worldwide hullabaloo. Another contributory factor was the suggestion that the Solar System was about to pass through a mysterious and entirely imaginary region of space called the Photon Belt. The Heaven’s Gate cult seized on these combined rumours as their signal to commit mass suicide in March of this year. It was also the 6,000th anniversary of the Creation, as calculated by Bishop Ussher, leading to another wave of "Last Days" panic.

25: 12:01am, Mar 31, 1998. One of the more precise predictions of the Second Coming. Hon-Ming Chen, leader of the Taiwanese cult "The True Way" - claimed that God would announce his imminent return on every television in the USA at this moment, prior to an actual landing in his spacecraft. Chen had the good grace to admit his mistake and offer to be crucified when the deity failed to materialise, but no-one seemed enthusiastic.

26: 1999: Throughout 1998 and 1999 the predictions of Apocalypse came so thick and fast as to dwarf any previous doomsday craze. For Nostradamus, arguably the best-known seer of all time, July was the chosen date of Armageddon. No sooner was the July panic over when the rumour began to spread that the Cassini space probe would crash to Earth, spilling its radioactive fuel and fulfilling the prediction in Revelation 8:11 “And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.”

Times Archive, 1815: Joanna Southcott, her funeral

After dissection, the body was put in a plain coffin, and pitch applied to the edges and rim

• Death and dissection of Joanna Southcott

• 1927: "Joanna Southcott Box" opened

Related Links

• Millennium by Tom Holland

27: 2000: No less a luminary than Sir Isaac Newton believed that the year 2000 would see the events foretold in the Book of Revelation as detailed in his book Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John.

28: Feb 12, 2006: Clinton Ortiz claimed on his website that Prince William, whom he suggests is the Antichrist of Revelation, would come to power on this day. He also quotes William’s mother – Diana, Princess of Wales – as having said: "I believe Wills can rebuild Camelot and I will be his Merlin. Together we will return to the chivalry, pageantry, and the glory that was King Arthur's Court. William will remake the Monarchy by showing love, leadership, and compassion."

29: Friday 13th April 2007: An un-named punter placed a £10 bet at 10,000/1 with Ladbrokes, the bookmakers, that the world would end on that day. It is unclear how he expected to collect.

30: Mar 21, 2008. A minor Christian sect The Lords' Witnesses announced this date for the end of days on their website, which is still online.

A number of websites proved invaluable in research for this piece, most notably The Times Archive, A Brief History of the Apocalypse and Religious Tolerance.org