Episode 13 | Thirteen

Episode Transcript

Hello my friends, and welcome back to another episode of Strange Origins.

For this particular episode, I’ve got a topic that I think a lot of you can relate to. In honor of this being my thirteenth episode, I thought that I would look into the history of the number thirteen, and really, just unlucky numbers in general.

I don’t exactly remember my first experience with thirteen, but I strongly believe that’s because it was so ingrained into my life from a young age, I have never really questioned what makes the number thirteen such a disruptive concept. I do vividly remember dreading my thirteenth birthday and being disappointed that I was to graduate high school in 2013. 

I’m not alone in my experiences with dreading the number. Thirteen has managed to make a lot of people skittish about milestones in their lives. One of the most common fears includes turning a certain age that is divisible by thirteen, which includes 26, 39, 52, and so on. A lot of people will also avoid, at all costs, buying a house with the number in its address, or even getting married on a date that involves the number. A lot of American neighborhoods and apartment complexes avoid involving thirteen in their planning, instead opting for structures labeled 12a or simply just skipping the number altogether.

One of my favorite nods towards this superstition is in Stephen King’s short story titled 1408. In it a paranormal skeptic stays the night in a hotel room that is known for causing many deaths and is thought to be extremely haunted by those who enter, but never check out. It’s later recognized that the numbers of the room, one, four, and eight, add up to a grand total of thirteen.

Triskaidekaphobia

About ten years ago it was estimated that around 17-21 million American’s suffer from a fear of the number, though it’s been around for much longer than that. Triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen was coined more than a century ago. Later the term Friggatriskadekaphobia, which is the fear of Friday the Thirteenth, was also coined. The first portion of this word, Frigga, comes from a Greek and Norse combination of words meaning Friday. In Norse mythology, in fact, Frigga is the wife of Odin, and the goddess of family, fertility, motherhood, marriage, and love.

It’s ironic that the number thirteen can be attributed to femininity in the Norse culture, seeing as in China thirteen is also the number is associated with fertility, blood, and lunar potency. This, in part, could be attributed to the fact that’s common that women to experience thirteen menstrual cycles in a single year. To celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival and to represent the thirteen months in a full lunar year, certain Chinese women are known to make cakes with the number thirteen on them or to make mooncakes and stack them to look like a pagoda, which is a Hindu or Buddhist temple.

So where did the Western fear of this seemingly random number come from? To be honest, there’s not really a singular source. It comes from quite a few sources, and it’s a bit more complicated than you might think. 

Mathematically speaking, Ancient Sumerians considered the number twelve to be the perfect number. In my opinion, this makes total sense. Twelve is divisible by two, and four, which makes organizing the two twelve hours sets of the day and the four sections of the twelve months of the year extremely easy. So if you add one more, making thirteen, things get a bit more complicated. 

Party of Thirteen

According to historians, it was also mythology that brought thirteen to the forefront of people’s minds. In Norse mythology, a famous story recounts a dinner party at Valhalla, a hall in Asgard that was said to be ruled by the God Odin and his son, the famous Thor. While twelve gods were present at this party, and everyone was happily eating, drinking, and telling stories, the trickster Loki decided to appear. Of course, this caused there to be thirteen guests, and due to that, a clash happened.

Loki caused trouble, as he was famous for doing, and convinced one of the guests to shoot the God Baldr, who was one of Frigga and Odin’s sons. He was known for being the god of light, joy, purity, and the summer sun. Baldr was killed by another guest with a mistletoe-dipped arrow, and after that quote “The whole Earth got dark. The whole Earth mourned. It was a bad, unlucky day.” end quote. This is also why today it’s considered bad luck to sit down at a table of twelve, making the number thirteen.

In a strikingly similar story, Christain theology recounts in the New Testament that the Last Supper featured thirteen members, including Jesus and his Twelve Disciples. It’s still debated today whether the thirteenth member was considered to be Jesus himself, or his disciple Judas, who infamously betrayed him, leading to his death a short while after the famous gathering. Some scholars also believe that the Last Supper occurred on the thirteenth of Nisan, which is a month on the Jewish Calendar, while others believe that it was the crucifixion of Christ that occurred on the thirteenth instead of the Last Supper.

It’s also infamously known that The Knights Templar, the Catholic military order that was headquartered in Jeruselum around 1100 A.D, was rounded up and executed on Friday, October 13th, 1307. At the time the Knights acted as money keepers for European Kings, including the French King Philip the fourth. After a war, Philip couldn’t repay the Knights and schemed with powerful members of the church to accuse the Knights of Satanism and other crimes. When the entire group was killed, there was no longer anyone to recall his debt and he was then free of his obligation of repayment. 

Hangman's Knot

Beyond religion, thirteen seems to show up in some of the darkest moments of history. It’s even said that traditionally there were thirteen steps up to the gallows. This, according to sources, makes sense as it would allow for officials to hang people charged with crimes from a tall enough height that their feet wouldn’t touch the ground when pushed. Along with that belief, there’s also a story that states that executioners would tie the knot used to hang people with thirteen knots.

While there’s not a lot of evidence to back up the claim that this was actually put into practice, American songwriter Woodie Guthrie, who also famously wrote the song This Land is Your Land also wrote about the thirteen knots in a hangman’s noose. He wrote, quote “Did you ever see a hangman tie a hang knot? I've seen it many a time and he winds, he winds, After thirteen times he's got a hang knot.”

It also adds fuel to the idea when you realize that traditionally, a coven of witches usually has thirteen members. In some stories, it is all thirteen that make up a coven, and in others, the coven is made up of twelve witches and is brought up to the number thirteen when the Devil joins the group. 

Death & Thirteen

It’s also known by some that the thirteenth card of a Tarot Deck is the character of Death. This character is usually depicted as a knight in armor riding a pale white horse. He is often thought of as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse that appears in the final book of the New Testament in the Christian faith. Though, the card’s meaning can often be misconstrued. The Death card can mean a lot of things, and not all are necessarily bad. As tarot card readers avoid predicting actual deaths, the thirteenth card stands more as a representation of rebirth or change. If you draw the card in a session, you should look at it as more of a signal to let go of old issues or beliefs, or rather, a past version of yourself that needs to be put to rest.

It’s also a well-known wives tale that having thirteen letters in your name means that you are cursed. While a pretty silly superstition, it doesn’t help to quelch your fears when you realize that a number of murderers have thirteen letters in their names. This includes Charles Manson, Jefferey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy, and Albert De Salvo. Though thinking about it, I am starting to wonder if that includes just last names, as my surname, Woolstenhulme, consists of thirteen letters.

Cursed Numbers

The U.S isn’t the only country to fear a number. In Italy, seventeen is a number to be feared. This is because Roman numerals can be rearranged to translate to “I have lived.” That phrase is the past tense of the phrase, signifying the idea that if you have already lived you are in fact already dead. The fear of the number is so strong that a lot of planes even avoid having a seventeenth row and a few hotels don’t feature a seventeenth room.

Infamously, the number 616 or 666 is often cited as related to the Devil. This is because it was mentioned in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament as quote “The Mark of the Beast.” 

In Afghanistan, the number thirty-nine is the one considered bad luck and is worn as a badge of shame as it is the product of three thirteens. 

Alternatively, in Asian superstition in regions such as Hong Kong and Macau, the number thirteen is considered lucky, as it sounds similar to a Cantonese phrase that means “Sure to live.” The number fourteen, rather, is unlucky as it sounds like a phrase that translates to “sure to die”.

Friday the Thirteenth

Beyond just the number, the Western world has grasped onto the idea that the occasional Friday the Thirteenth on our calendars are cause to stay inside all day. While Westerners have run with the superstition, making comments whenever something unfortunate happens on those days, the fear of particular days of the week has pretty deep roots in European history. 

First of all, it’s known that Romans preferred to execute people on Fridays.

Secondly, it’s known that in certain Spanish-speaking countries, and also in Greece, it’s Tuesday the thirteenth that is considered bad luck. This is in part due to the fact that the Greeks assigned a God to every day of the week, and the one assigned to Tuesday was the God of War, Ares. Along with that is the fact that Tuesday is the third day of the week, which is another number that holds a lot of superstitious weight. The belief that Tuesday and the thirteenth were cursed, was later strengthened when Constantinople fell to the Fourth Crusade on a Tuesday the thirteenth in 1204 and later again to the Ottomans on a Tuesday the twenty-ninth in 1453. 

The fear of the number thirteen even went so far as to spook Christopher Columbus from putting down the correct date of his landing in the Americas. While he had hit dry land on the thirteenth of October, he made a decision to change the date to the twelfth so as to not scare away people from coming to the new land. 

In more recent years infamous events that have occurred on Friday the thirteenth include the Bombing of Buckingham Palace, in September of 1940, the disappearance of a Chilean Airforce plane in the Andes in October of 1972, and the killing of Tupac Shakur in September of 1996. It’s not a great day for natural disasters to occur either. The Australian bushfires of 1939, which killed 36 people in one day, and the Cyclone that hit Bangladesh in 1970, killing 300,000 people are among the list of natural events to occur on a Friday the Thirteenth. That also includes a freak snowstorm that hit Buffalo New York in October 2006 and which put twenty-two feet of snow on the ground. The unexpected storm caused havoc, with around one million people losing power for up to a week. 

Tycho Brahe Days

In Scandinavian Folklore days that are considered to be unlucky are referred to as Tycho Brahe Days. This is usually in reference to witchcraft, and what were considered the best or worst days to perform magic on. Tycho was a man who lived in the late 1500s and was famous for being an astronomer, astrologer, and alchemist. If you check out my Instagram page @StrangeOriginsPodcast you can see a picture of Tycho and, what I would refer to as his magnificent mustache.

These quote-unquote unlucky days were listed in widely used almanacs, though it’s still debated today whether Tycho had anything to do with the naming of these days. Some say that he was very scientific and empirical, while others state that he was extremely superstitious. Nonetheless, the mention of Tycho Brahe's days showed up in Scandanavian folklore.

Superstitionus

In the last century, it’s become the idea that Friday the Thirteenth was cursed was popularized by a man by the name of Thomas W. Lawson. Lawson had run away at twelve to become a clerk at a Boston bank and soon after that took an interest in stocks. He afterward became a multimillionaire by investing in the copper boom of the 1890s. Around 1907 he wrote a book titled Friday the Thirteenth. The book followed a broker who took advantage of the fear of the date in order to create a Wall Street panic. This was around the time that a boat named after Lawson, which was the only seven masted schooner in existence, and which he had heavily invested, wrecked off the Isles Scilly on a Friday the Thirteenth. 

Unsurprisingly, the superstition also spilled over into the sports world. It’s believed that the football quarterback Dan Marino, despite being one of the best in his position, never managed to win a super bowl. A lot of fans speculate that this is due to the fact that his jersey number was thirteen. The same thing happened with Basketball player Steve Nash. Despite having a career that landed him a spot in the Basketball Hall of Fame, he never won himself a championship. Some believe it’s because of his jersey number. 

Athletes aren’t the only ones that suffer from Triskaidekaphobia, though. Horror author, Stephen King famously said that quote “The number 13 never fails to trace that old icy finger up and down my spine. When I'm writing, I'll never stop work if the page number is 13 or a multiple of 13; I'll just keep on typing till I get to a safe number. I always take the last two steps on my back stairs as one, making 13 into 12. There were after all 13 steps on the English gallows up until 1900 or so. When I'm reading, I won't stop on page 94, 193, or 382, since the sums of these numbers add up to 13.” 

Similarly, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt refused to travel on the thirteenth days of months, or have dinner with thirteen guests in attendance. 

Composer Arnold Schoenberg also had a crippling fear of the number. This was due to the fact that he was born on the Thirteenth of September, 1874, and therefore believed his life to be ill-fated. He went so far as to refuse to rent any room with the number thirteen attached to it and avoided the number in his musical compositions. He was also very afraid of any date in his life that fell on the thirteenth or was divisible by thirteen. In 1950 a fellow composer Oskar Adler sent him a note that mentioned that Schoenberg should watch out, as he would be 76 that year, which when you separate the numbers and add them up, come to thirteen. After this, Schoenberg became severely depressed and anxious and proceeded to stay in bed all day. On July 13th, 1951 he died at 11:45, unable to, in the words of his wife, face the last thirteen minutes of a Friday the thirteenth.

The Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem, whose stories inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof also suffered from a fear of the number. It was understandable seeing as his thirteenth year had been a difficult one. His family had been forced to move back to where he had been born after a bad business deal made by his father, who before then was a fairly successful and wealthy merchant. After they moved back to poverty, his mother contracted Cholera during an epidemic and passed away. When he became a writer he labeled the 13th page of his manuscripts as 12a. It was even rumored that his headstone memorialized the date of his death as May 12a, 1916, though it was proven later on that the dates were noted as they happened in the Jewish calendar, making the days different. 

Even Alfred Hitchcock, who was not surprisingly born on the thirteenth of August, had a run-in with a bit of bad luck with the number. His first directing attempt was with a film titled Number 13. It was simply just a film about poor Londoners finding affordable housing and starred a married couple, but for one reason or another, the film fell through after only a short time.  Hitchcock didn’t like to talk about it and hated when people mentioned it for the duration of his career. The footage became lost after that and, today is highly sought after by film historians.

The Thirteen Club

The Thirteenth, or even Friday for that matter, isn’t all bad, though. One wonderful example of how people have turned a superstition into something charitable is a group called the Thirteen Club. Started at the College of William and Mary in 1890, it’s today known for being highly philanthropic. 

Founded by Captain William Fowler, the club reveled in the number thirteen, dispelling the myth that thirteen dinner guests meant bad luck and only dined together officially when thirteen guests were in attendance. Fowler had had good luck with the number in his youth, attending the thirteenth public school of Manhatten, where he had graduated at the age of thirteen. He had also built thirteen structures when employed as a builder in New York. When the Civil War rolled around he went on the 13th of April to enroll to fight and ended up participating in 13 battles. He later resigned on the 13th of September of the same year. After that he both bought and sold a successful bar on the thirteenth.

And after that, in order to keep the good luck rolling, he decided to always be a member of thirteen clubs. Besides one where he and his friend drank boiling whiskey, his most popular club was the Thirteen Club. At these dinners, which were held on the thirteenth, they enjoyed thirteen courses which were always lit by thirteen candles. Four U.S. Presidents were even a part of the club at one point or another, including Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and Theodore Roosevelt. The members of the first gathering, in fact, were so stable in their lives and careers that in a report following their first January meeting, it was stated in the history books that quote:

"Out of the entire roll of membership … whether they have participated or not at the banquet table, NOT A SINGLE MEMBER IS DEAD, or has even had a serious illness. On the contrary, so far as can be learned, the members during the past twelve months have been exceptionally healthy and fortunate."

Another famous collegiate association with the number thirteen comes from Colgate University. The Colgate Thirteen began their all-male acapella group, the second of it’s kind to exist in the U.S., in 1942. The group was named after the 13 men who offered $13 and thirteen prayers each, to found the University in 1819. They were so popular that they even performed the national anthem at the 13th Super Bowl.

Finally, in Finland Friday the 13th is not necessarily a superstitious day but is still used as a way to warn people of the dangers of everyday life. Seeing as there is always a Friday the Thirteenth on the modern Gregorian calendar, that day is used to celebrate National Accident Day, which began in 1995 to raise awareness about automotive safety. At the time Finland was experiencing a large volume of reported accidents that resulted in a high number of deaths. Today those numbers are down, thanks to the superstitious nature of Friday the 13th. 

So is it just a bunch of coincidences, or is there something just a little bit too off about the number thirteen? Granted, a lot of the events I’ve mentioned sound like events that are talked about on the news on a daily basis. Bad things happen every single day, whether they are accidents caused by humans or natural disaster. If something unfortunate isn’t happening in your life, then it’s happening in someone else's. In my opinion, there’s really no way to stop truly unavoidable events. Superstition, in the eyes of most, is just a band-aid that helps us to believe that we have control over the things that change our lives. In all reality, superstition, including the belief that you should avoid the number thirteen, is most likely just simple illusory correlation. When our brains hear that A connects to B we are much, much more likely to look for evidence to back that idea up, even if that evidence doesn’t quite make sense. 

Maybe, in the long run, though, it’s better that we cling to the belief that certain aspects of life will bring danger. It helps to keep us on our toes, to avoid the real dangers in our lives. While an estimated $800 million dollars is lost every time a Friday lands on a thirteenth in the U.S., it’s also reported that fewer accidents happen on these days. It’s not because of some invisible unlucky force though, but rather because more people just opt to stay home for the day, avoiding the pitfalls of the outside world. 

At the same time though, it’s hard for me to say that there isn’t any truth behind the myth. There have been just one too many coincidences while researching this topic for me to say with full confidence that the number doesn't have a mysterious effect on the world. While coincidences do occur frequently, the stories behind the number 13 seem like more than just simple chance. So really, that only leaves us with two options; either it's our viewpoints that change the number, or it’s our viewpoints that allow the number to change us.

Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry, so be sure to keep an eye out for the next Friday the 13th, which is scheduled to happen in November of 2020. 

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