The grandmother communicated the warning of the Misfit via the news stories and such she had heard about with regard to his escape from prison, but her activities were various signs of foreshadowing of the end approaching. The grandmother warned about the Misfit in the first paragraph of the story: "'Here this fellow calls himself the Misfit is loose from the federal pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people.'" This was the first sign of an obvious foreshadowing element at the start of the story, which was ignored by everybody, even the grandmother. On the day of the trip to Florida, the grandmother was the first one to be in the car and also dressed very nicely with “...a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet.” In reality, it would not be necessary to wear very decent clothing for the purpose of going on a long trip.
The locales through which the family traveled had elements that seemed to predict the doom foretold in the story. It is said that the family "... passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it,