21 Million Americans Are Terrified and They Don’t Know Why
13 strange things that happened on Friday the 13th.
Note: If you’d like to read this on Medium, it’s here…
Happy Friday the 13th!
A little off the beaten track this week…
Very superstitious, writings on the wall, very superstitious, ladders ‘bout to fall, 13 month old baby broke the lookin’ glass, seven years of bad luck, the good things in your past. — Stevie Wonder
A woman I knew once broke an 8 foot mirror. Came crashing down and hit the floor with a roar, spraying shards of glass around her. She stood there, white as a ghost, whispering the same words over and over again. 7 years. 7 years.
I thought she was going to die of the fear alone.
Put all the superstitions together. Black cats, ladders, and broken mirrors.
They’re nothing compared to Friday the 13th.
21 million Americans are terrified of that day. It’s bad luck, they say.
They don’t even know why.
Before the pandemic, people stayed home on Friday the 13th. In fear.
According to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, N.C., hundreds of millions of dollars, up to $900 million are lost every Friday the 13th due to people’s fear of going about “business as usual” that day.
Fear of bad luck.
But why? No one knows…
In China, it’s the number 4 that’s bad luck. That one’s easy to explain. When you say the number 4, it sounds the same as saying death. So why 13? And why Friday the 13th?
Why aren’t we terrified on the 13th of every month? Or every Friday?
How did Friday and the 13th get connected?
The 13th guest? The Last Supper? Valhalla?
Some people believe Friday became bad luck because that’s the day Jesus died. And Judas was the 13th guest at the Last Supper. And thus, Friday and 13 melded together to become a harbinger of bad luck. So they say.
No, no, others say. Much farther back.
Nordic mythology tells the story of the 12 gods gathering for a dinner party at Valhalla, when a 13th guest walked in. Loki, the trickster god took up bow and arrow and shot Balder the Beautiful, bringing darkness and mourning into the world. The 13th guest. A god who died on Friday.
The truth? No one really knows…
There are many theories dating back to earlier centuries, but most of them have been debunked. The truth is, historians don’t know.
All they know is that Friday the 13th fear and hysteria started in the 20th century. There are no documented historical records before that.
Were we punked by an author?
Thomas William Lawson was a shady stockbroker turned whistleblower, turned author. In 1907 he published a book called Friday the 13th. The book was about a broker who crashed the market on Friday the 13th, earning a fortune for himself while plunging the country into financial despair.
The book sold 28,000 copies in its first week. It was after the book was published that stories of Friday the 13th being “bad luck” are documented in writing, according to historians. Were we just punked by an author?
It’s just superstition, right? And yet…
13 strange things that happened on Friday the 13th
They tell us it’s superstition. Rooted in ignorance, fear of the unknown, or a false conception of causation. That’s all it is. Right?
And yet…
1) Friday, 13th July, 1821 — One of the most notorious figures in history was born: Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan.
2) Friday, 13th Sept., 1940 — the Germans bombed Buckingham Palace
3) Friday, 13th July, 1951 —swollen rivers in Kansas poured over their banks, consuming the cities of Topeka, Lawrence, and Manhattan.
4) Friday, 13th June, 1952 —the Soviet Union shot down a Swedish military transport plane. Of the 8 on board, 4 bodies were found at the bottom of the sea with the plane. The remaining 4 were never found.
5) Friday, 13th March, 1964 —The murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York while bystanders watched. A case so strange it would become the basis of behavioral studies for decades to come.
6) Friday, 13th November, 1970 —the deadliest tropical cyclone in history hit Bangladesh, killing more than 300,000 people.
7) Friday, 13th Oct., 1972. —A Chilean Air Force plane disappears in the Andes, never to be seen again.
8) Friday, 13th Oct, 1989 — the stock market fell a whopping 6.91%. At the time, it was the second-worst day in history.
9) Friday, 13th Sept, 1996—rapper Tupac Shakur was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting that remains unsolved.
10) Friday, 13th October, 2006 — a freak blizzard hit Buffalo New York. A storm so unprecedented that NOAA responds with: “Words cannot do justice”. Over one million people were without power for almost a week.
11) On Friday, 13th August, 2010 — a 13-year-old boy in Suffolk, England, was struck by lightning. The lightning hit at 13:13 in military time. The boy survived unharmed.
12) Friday, 13th January, 2012 — the Costa Concordia cruise ship struck a reef off the Isola del Giglio. The captain was arrested for manslaughter.
13) On Friday the 13th, 2029 an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it was an egg cup will fly so close to Earth it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, they named it Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death.
Superstition is foolish, childish, primitive, and irrational - but how much does it cost you to knock on wood?
—Judith Viorst
What I wrote this week…
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Have a great weekend!
xo,
Linda