Can young adult NPCs die randomly?

@63meganHi!  So toddlers and babies are the only sims that can't die in the game.  Everyone else is fair game and I've had a number of Young Adult sims randomly show up as ghosts.  Child sims can die too but the causes are limited compared to teen and older.  Also, I usually have aging turned off, so those sims must have had an accident or perhaps died from an extreme emotion such as hysteria or rage.  Probably the easiest thing to do would be to revert to a previous save when Michael was still alive in the game.  You can do this from the Main Menu.  Click on Load Game, then click on the game save you want to recover.  Then click on Recover Save disk icon.

The game keeps the last five save points, so then you'll just need to pick the one with the date / time right before you got the message that Michael passed away.

When you click Recover on the save you want, you will get a notice that this creates a new save slot for the game.  The name will have the word Recovered at the end of the save's title.

I have been playing TS4 since it was released back in 2014. Only today have I noticed this. I had multiple townies die just within the hour or so that I played today. It's odd that this is only happening to me after an update. And the exact thing happened to me where I was really close to another Sim and was waiting for a proposal - but I already had eight Sims in my household.