Friday the 13th Is Younger Than You Think

Feed the Reader

10 hours ago

4 min read

Glance at a calendar, spot a Friday the 13th coming up, and you may feel the tiniest flicker of unease. It's a date with a reputation. Some buildings skip the 13th floor, people joke about staying in bed, and sooner or later someone will tell you it all goes back to the Middle Ages.

It feels ancient. As a combined superstition, it isn't.

Two old ingredients

The belief is built from two older ideas, and those really do have long histories.

The first is that Friday is an unlucky day. In Christian tradition, Friday is the day of the crucifixion, and for centuries it was a day of fasting. A day spent going without your favourite food can easily pick up a gloomy reputation. Tellingly, Friday isn't generally regarded as unlucky in cultures where Christianity isn't the main religion.

The second is that 13 is an unlucky number. Its origins are murkier. One common explanation points to the Last Supper, at which 13 people sat down together. Another suggests 13 suffers by comparison with 12, a tidy number that divides neatly and turns up everywhere, from months to hours to inches. Nobody can say for certain. What is clear is that 13 was linked with death well before modern times. In tarot cards, for example, the Death card was numbered 13 by the sixteenth century.

So both ingredients are old. The recipe that combines them is not.

When the two meet

A folklorist at the Library of Congress in the United States has hunted for the earliest clear references to a specifically unlucky Friday the 13th. The oldest he's found come from France, in 1834.

That year, a character in a French play blamed all his misfortunes on having been born on Friday 13 December, and a writer in a Paris literary magazine complained that it was "always Fridays and the number 13" that brought bad luck. On their own, both lines are a little ambiguous, since one might mean Fridays and 13 as separate omens and the other just one unlucky date. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, French plays could use "born on a Friday the 13th" as shorthand for a lifetime of bad luck, and audiences got the joke.

From France, the idea travelled. When one French play was translated for English-speaking audiences in the late 1870s, a later version added the words "how unlucky" after the date, as though the publishers worried readers wouldn't understand why a character was upset. In the 1880s, American newspapers ran it as a "French joke", treating the superstition as a slightly silly foreign quirk.

By the late 1880s and 1890s, though, Friday the 13th was turning up regularly in American papers, usually with a wink. Sportswriters joked about which baseball team the date would doom, and one newspaper noted how few couples applied for marriage licences on it. In New York, a society called the Thirteen Club, set up to make fun of superstitions like this one, had already held its first meeting on a Friday the 13th, in January 1882.

The Templar story

Now for the most famous origin tale of all.

On Friday 13 October 1307, members of the Knights Templar, a powerful medieval religious and military order, were arrested in France, the start of the order's destruction. That date is real.

What's missing is any medieval link between that event and bad luck on Friday the 13th. Folklorists and historians have found nobody connecting the two before the twentieth century, and few people in the Middle Ages would even have known the exact date of the decree outlawing the Templars. The idea was popularised much more recently, notably by Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, and it now appears on countless websites as if it were settled history.

In other words, the superstition existed first. The backstory was bolted on afterwards.

Modern media made it stick

In the twentieth century, Friday the 13th became a firm fixture of popular culture.

In 1907, the American writer Thomas W. Lawson published a novel called Friday, the Thirteenth, about stock traders using the superstition to manipulate the market. It's sometimes credited with starting the belief, but it couldn't have: its characters already believe in it and describe it as a tradition. What the novel did was spread it further.

Newspapers kept the date in the headlines for decades. And from the 1980s, a long-running series of horror films made Friday the 13th one of the most recognisable dates in the world.

Why we like our superstitions old

Folklorists have a word for the stories people tell about their own beliefs: metafolklore. Friday the 13th has gathered plenty. Besides the Templars, you'll find claims about an ancient law code that skipped the number 13, or Norse gods at a fateful dinner with 13 guests. Neither holds up when checked against the original sources.

There's something very human in that. A belief feels weightier, and perhaps more respectable, if it comes with a deep and dramatic past. A superstition that grew up in nineteenth-century theatres and newspapers doesn't sound nearly as impressive as one inherited from medieval knights.

Younger, not newborn

It's worth being careful in the other direction too. Not finding a written record doesn't prove that nobody ever felt uneasy about a Friday falling on the 13th before 1834. Folk beliefs can circulate for a while before anyone writes them down. What the evidence shows is when the combined belief emerged into the record and how it spread, not a precise birthday.

So the fair summary is "younger than you think", not "invented on a particular day".

Back to the calendar

Look again at that Friday the 13th on the calendar. The flicker of unease is real enough, and the two ingredients behind it are genuinely old. But the combination took shape in the nineteenth century, and the knights and ancient omens were mostly added later, to give it a pedigree.

The dread may be real. The antiquity is the illusion.