Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel, where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past.
Today’s video from History Calling is a little more whimsical than some of my others,
because we’re going to be asking is Friday 13th really unlucky and looking at the history
of this famous (or rather infamous) date.
Why is it associated with doom, is there any evidence that you really should be worried
about it and what do Jesus, the Knights Templar, Geoffrey Chaucer, an Apollo space mission
and Loki from the Avengers have to do with it?
Stay tuned to find out.
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The fear of Friday 13th is so widespread nowadays that it actually has its own word which is
ironically, rather terrifying to pronounce and which comes from the Greek words for Friday
and 13.
If you suffer from a fear of this date, then you have a nasty case of Paraskevidekatriaphobia
and I don’t wanna hear about it in the comments if I mispronounced that, cause it was hands
down the worst word I’ve ever had to attempt for you.
But where does this fear come from and how far back can we trace it?
The fear of Friday 13th actually seems to be a combination of two other superstitions
which have been melded together to form one super-superstition.
These are a fear of the number 13 and a fear of Friday, or at least a belief that it’s
an unlucky day.
Let’s look at the number 13 first, the fear of which is called triskaidekaphobia; another
Greek combo, this time of the words for 3 and ‘and’ and 10, plus of course, the
word phobia, so it literally means 3 and 10 phobia, or 13 phobia.
When hunting around the internet, you’ll find all sorts of explanations as to why this
number is felt to be unlucky.
One story is that it comes from Norse mythology and an incident involving the prankster Loki,
now made famous thanks to Tom Hiddleston’s portrayal of him in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
films.
According to the original story, Loki arrived at a dinner at Valhalla as the 13th and uninvited
guest and through his shenanigans, tricked the blind God Hodr (feel free to indulge in
some Game of Thrones’ jokes here) into killing his brother Balder who was the favoured son
of King Odin of Asgard and his wife, Queen Frigg.
We’ll come back to this Queen in a minute by the way.
Balder’s death then initiated the fall of the Gods, known as the Ragnarök (again, you
can see the links to the Thor films here).
Another explanation given is that 13 refers to the number of guests at the Last Supper
in the New Testament, eaten the day before Jesus was crucified.
These guests were Jesus himself, plus his twelve disciples, including the treacherous
Judas Iscariot, who was supposedly the 13th guest to arrive.
Having checked the Bible though, I don’t see any reference to Judas arriving separately
from the others, but do let me know if I’ve missed something.
Then we have the claims of numerologists, who argue that the number 12 is perfect (think
of the 12 months of the year, 12 days of Christmas, 12 zodiac signs and the aforementioned 12
disciples of Jesus) and that the number 13 is therefore unlucky because it is beyond
perfection and not in a good way.
Whether you believe in it or not, this superstition has undoubtedly affected the world around
us, including architecture.
An article in the New York Times from June 1977 said that:
Many—if not most—highrise residences in New York are thirteenless.
On West End Avenue, on East 86th Street, in Greenwich Village, buildings old, buildings
new: Their elevators read “11, 12, 14.
. .” The fear apparently, was that apartments on
the 13th floor would be harder to rent or sell.
I’d be fascinated to hear in the comments from any listener who lives in a high-rise
building (whether in New York or elsewhere) if this is true in your experience.
Does your building have a 13th floor and if it doesn’t do you know how old it is?
You might also be interested to know that New York’s Flat Iron building and the Empire
State building do both have 13th floors, so we can be sure that not everyone buys into
this fear.
I’ve read too that the French dislike having 13 at a dinner table, but I’ve seen no empirical
proof of that.
Perhaps if I have any French listeners, or listeners with French connections, they can
let me know if that story is true as well.
There are also cases in which those who believe in the superstition will point to infamous
events which have some association with the number 13 and cite them as apparent evidence
of its dangers.
One of the best known of these was the Apollo 13 lunar mission.
This actually launched on Saturday 11 April 1970, albeit at 8.13pm but soon suffered a
near catastrophic explosion whilst in space.
This disaster almost killed its three man crew and put paid to any ideas they had of
going to the moon, however they all made it back to Earth and so if anything, we might
say that they were incredibly lucky, rather than the reverse.
There’s even a hit movie starring Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon about their experience which
I’ll leave linked below for you.
As for how long reasons such as these have been given as evidence for this superstition,
according to Steve Roud in his book, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and
Ireland (also linked below), while mythological and biblical events may be used to support
a fear of 13, it was only in the 1690s that a superstition around having that number of
people at a dinner table began to appear in the documentary evidence and only in the mid-19th
century that a more widespread fear of the number started to become commonplace.
People weren’t generally afraid of it 2000 years ago.
The evidence has just been retroactively found and fitted to the superstition.
So that takes care of the number 13, but what about Fridays?
Why are they unpopular, despite being the start of the weekend for most of us and should
I have chosen a different day to upload my YouTube videos?
As with 13, there are numerous supposed explanations for some people’s lukewarm feelings towards
Fridays.
Funnily enough though, it wasn’t always looked upon with suspicion.
Remember King Odin’s wife, Frigg, Queen of Asgard?
Well she inspired the English word Friday (it literally means ‘day of Frigg’) and
was a powerful goddess of love and fertility in Norse mythology.
With the coming of Christianity though, these pagan connections were no longer popular and
the Queen’s story was altered to make her a mountain-dwelling witch who planned her
upcoming evil every Friday.
Returning to the Bible, Jesus was of course crucified on a Friday, though somewhat incongruously
that day is now referred as Good Friday.
I’ve also read some pretty ludicrous and utterly unsupported theories that things like
Eve giving Adam the apple, their son Cain killing his brother Able and the great flood
all happened on a Friday, but please pay no attention to these tall tales.
Writing over 1300 years after the time of Jesus in his most famous work, The Canterbury
Tales, English author, Geoffrey Chaucer said of some misfortune which had befallen his
characters that ‘And on a Friday fell all this mischance’.
Then, in 1592, a pamphlet entitled Greene's Groats-worth of Wit published in London and
supposedly written by another English author, Robert Greene, included the line ‘The Foxe
made a Friday face, counterfeiting sorrow’.
Literary references such as these only added to the general perception that it is somehow
a bad day, as did its traditional use as the hangman’s day in Britain and later America.
So we’ve established that a dislike of the number 13 and of Fridays has been around for
centuries, but when did these two superstitions combine into an all-out fear of Friday 13th?
Well, the answer is, not that long ago actually.
The genesis of Friday 13th as a day of bad luck can only be traced back to the second
half of the 19th century making it all the Victorians’ fault.
Funnily enough, it may well have been an attempt by a group of people to disprove the superstitions
around the number 13 and Fridays (along with many others) which inadvertently gave rise
to the Friday 13th beliefs.
In 1882 William Fowler of New York City started a society known as the Thirteen Club.
Its purpose was to disprove as many superstitions as it could.
It had 13 members, held dinners on the 13th of a month, with 13 courses and of course
the 13 guests at the table.
According to an article in the Los Angeles Herald, written to celebrate the club’s
13th anniversary in 1895, ‘At the dinners of the club it has been a regular custom to
spill salt, to cross forks and to break looking glasses’ and its initiation fee was $1.13.
More interestingly still, this article explains that the club had taken aim at the two separate
superstitions surrounding 13 and Fridays, but makes no mention of there being a third
fear specifically of Friday 13th.
Instead, in their eagerness to combat as many superstitions as possible, the club had met
when it could on that date (which only occurs between 1 and 3 times in a year by the way),
but only because this allowed them to kill two birds with one stone.
There doesn’t seem to have been a particular fear of the combination of that day and number
in earlier decades.
It may well be then, that the actions of the Thirteen Club accidentally made Friday 13th
a point of superstition, particularly as the popularity of the club spread and new branches
of it began to meet in other cities, including London.
They were successful in other areas though and were credited by the LA Herald with helping
to encourage executions to be carried out on days other than Fridays so that by 1895,
it was no longer known as Hangman’s Day.
Certainly within a few decades of the original club’s creation, the idea that this date
was cursed somehow had taken on a life of its own and soon the day was being used in
all sorts of ways and blamed for all kinds of mishaps, current and historical.
In 1907 author Thomas Lawson published his book, entitled Friday, the Thirteenth, which
only fuelled the fires of suspicion further and by 1926, the Hull Daily Mail newspaper
in England could report that the crew of a French tug boat had refused to carry out their
dangerous job of recovering gold from a shipwreck on Friday 13th and the task had therefore
been put off until the following day.
The paranoia around the date (and its use for financial gains) has only increased in
the decades since.
In 1980 the Friday the 13th horror film franchise was launched and in 2003 Dan Brown’s book
The Da Vinci Code noted that some of the Knights Templar were arrested on Friday 13th October
1307, a fact which has since been used as a another piece of pseudo-evidence to support
the idea that there is something wrong with the date.
So fierce has the paranoia around Friday 13th become that there have even been studies to
try to establish if it affects humans in any tangible way.
One oft-quoted article in the British Medical Journal from December 1993 suggested that
there was a 52% higher risk of a traffic accident on that day, however the authors freely admitted
that the data sets they used were very limited, their statistical analysis was very simple
and the whole tone of the article strongly suggests that it was intended to be a bit
of tongue-in-cheek fun for the BMJ’s Christmas edition.
They only looked at a handful of Friday the 13ths, using traffic data for a little bit
of the M25 motorway and stats from some shopping centres and hospitals, then compared that
data to similar data from one week earlier in each case.
It was far from an exhaustive study, nor was it meant to be.
In 2008 another report came out, this time from the Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics.
It found that there are fewer accidents, fires and thefts on Friday the 13th (though the
value of goods lost on that day was slightly higher) and contrary to the BMJ article, concluded
that driving is actually slightly safer.
What I take from all this, is that you can argue that Friday 13th is luckier, unluckier
or just the same as any other day, depending on what evidence you want to look at and indeed
how loosely you want to define the word evidence.
There’s nothing conclusive either way and I’m certainly not worried about having my
videos come out on a Friday, though I don’t doubt that if this one, released on Friday
13th May 2022, doesn’t do particularly well, people will cite that as evidence of the curse.
Let me know in the comments below if you are superstitious about Friday 13th (or indeed
anything else) and if so, why.
I’ll be back next week with a new video and until then, keep learning.