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Like most people, I grew up with the Friday the 13th superstition, and with the movie of the same name, so it was hard to believe that something that was so familiar and so embedded in our culture – and that seemed so ancient – did not exist until the 20th century.

Previously, the most prevalent 13-based superstition had been that relating to ‘13 at a table’ (which would appear to predate any other beliefs about the number 13 being unlucky and first appeared as a fully-fledged superstition in the 17th century).

Although Friday the 13th only emerged as an independent superstition in the early 20th century, Friday itself had long been considered an unlucky day. Like the fear of 13, fear of Friday was inspired by the New Testament. Although there has been a lot of debate about the precise date of Jesus’s death, all of the early accounts of the Crucifixion are in agreement that it took place on a Friday (the day of crucifixion in ancient Rome). This connection between unlucky 13 and unlucky Friday was well known in the 19th century. In 1852, Notes and Queries observed: “There is as little doubt that Friday is considered unlucky because it is the day of the Crucifixion, as that the belief of its being unlucky for 13 to set down to a meal together owes its origin to the remembrance of the Last Supper.” In the mid- and late-19th century, belief in unlucky Friday was almost as pervasive as belief in unlucky 13. Given their shared source, it is likely that they fuelled each other’s popularity.

Beginning in 1887, under the leadership of Chief Ruler David McAdam, Chief Justice of the City Court, the Thirteen Club (see panel) – which had already targeted the belief in the unlucky 13-at-a-table – trained its sights on another prominent superstition: unlucky Friday. The club was convinced that the tradition of holding executions on Fridays was the key to the superstition’s continued popularity. Considering that the sixth day of the week was popularly known as “hangman’s day,” they had a point. Using their legal connections, the club actively courted judges and encouraged them to begin executing criminals on other days of the week. Whenever a judge took up their suggestion, the club issued a public congratulation. Judges who sentenced men to hang on other days of the week were honoured guests at Thirteen Club dinners.

The Thirteen Club also assaulted unlucky Friday on another front, enthusiastically supporting the Half Holiday movement, a national campaign to make Saturday a half-holiday instead of a full workday. One of the main arguments in favour of this was that it would improve morale and morals among the working class by allowing them more time to prepare for Sunday’s religious observances. In May 1887, a limited half-holiday law was enacted in New York State, but it applied only to banks and public offices. The Thirteen Club continued to campaign for a more comprehensive law that would give “workingmen” similar rights. Issues of social welfare aside, the club wanted a half-holiday law as a first step toward making Saturday a full holiday. It was betting that if Friday were made the last day of the working week, it would stop being associated with bad luck. The ubiquitous expression “Thank God It’s Friday” and the acronymic restaurant chain prove that the Club’s instincts were right.

In a speech at a Thirteen Club dinner in 1890, Judge McAdam summed up the club’s role to date in reversing Friday’s reputation: “Now anybody can have as much pleasure on that day as on any other, while those who were formerly hanged only on Friday may now have the pleasure of being hanged on every day of the week.” An article in the New York Times two years later confirmed that: “Owing principally to the efforts of the Thirteen Club, the execution day has been changed or varied in all States of the Union and thus has, to a great extent, brightened the day”.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the 13th day of every month was viewed as unlucky. Friday the 13th was marginally unluckier than the other 13th days, but only because it combined two distinct unlucky superstitions: 13 and Friday. Evidence of this can be found in a grammatical peculiarity of the period: the fateful date always appeared in print as “Friday, the 13th.” The comma denotes the fact that Friday and the 13th were perceived as separate phenomena. Perhaps the best evidence that Friday the 13th did not exist as an independent superstition in this period is the fact that the Thirteen Club never mentioned it.

According to A Dictionary of Superstitions and other sources, the first reference to Friday the 13th as an independent superstition appeared in 1913, when a letter in Notes and Queries mentioned “the evil luck of Friday the 13th.” Public opinion and almost every news story on Friday the 13th notwithstanding, contemporary folklorists are in agreement that Friday the 13th is a 20th-century superstition. But no one has been able to pinpoint exactly when or why it emerged. In the first years of the century, newspaper articles on Thirteen Club dinners that took place on Friday the 13th continued to treat the two superstitions – unlucky Friday and the 13th day of the month – as distinct and separate beliefs. Often this was articulated with the convention of the comma – “Friday, the 13th”. But at times the separation was made even more explicit. An article in the New York Times published on Friday, 13 April 1906, warning of the effects of superstition on Wall Street, observed: “To-day is Good Friday, also the 13th of the month.”

An article the following day extolling the bravery of the Thirteen Club followed the same awkward practice: “The Great Unterrified, officially known as The Thirteen Club, met last night – the 13th, a Friday, and Good Friday at that.”

By 1908, however, Friday the 13th was sufficiently established to be acknowledged grammatically by the same paper that had not recognised its existence two years earlier: a New York Times article on 14 March 1908, began: “WASHINGTON, March 13 – Friday the 13th holds no terror for Senator Owen.” (Owen had introduced 13 public building bills into the Senate that day for the state of Oklahoma.) The omission of the comma was not a typographical oversight; sometime between 1906 and 1908, Friday, the 13th became Friday the 13th.

The mystery of the missing comma in the New York Times narrowed my search for the point in time when unlucky Friday the 13th first emerged. It also pushed back the first known reference to the superstition from 1913 to 1908. I wondered what could have happened between 1906 and 1908 to put Friday the 13th on the path to becoming the world’s most popular superstition. I found my answer in the Thirteen Club’s annual report for 1907. At the bottom of an advertisement for a Thirteen Club dinner on Friday 13 April, there was the following acknowledgment: “The thanks of the Club are due to Mr Thomas W Lawson who so kindly permitted us to use his day for our dinner.”

I thought I detected jealousy in the Thirteen Club’s sarcasm – as if Mr Thomas W Lawson were stealing its thunder. It turned out that this was exactly what had happened.

A successful, eccentric Boston financier and stock speculator who earned the nickname of “Copper King,” Lawson was the author of several diatribes against stock speculation, the most successful of which was a book called Frenzied Finance, which appeared in 1905. Two years later, Lawson published his only novel, Friday, the Thirteenth. Although completely forgotten today, it was this novel that redefined the coincidence of unlucky Friday and the 13th as a single superstition, and launched Friday the 13th in the popular imagination. Lawson kept the superstition front and centre from the opening sentence – “Friday the 13th; I thought as much.” – to its dramatic conclusion – “I staggered to his side. As I touched his now fast-icing brow my eyes fell upon the great black headlines spread across the top of the paper that Beulah Sands had been reading when the all kind God had cut her bonds: ‘Friday the thirteenth’.”

Part torrid love story, part polemic on the crookedness of the “stock-gambling game,” with a plot that hinged on a speculator’s attempt to manipulate the market on that day, Friday, the Thirteenth was as successful as it was awful. It sold 27,500 copies in its first week in print, and after a month it had sold 60,000. Sales were helped by the provocative title and the author’s celebrity, and Lawson’s shameless self-promotion. Prior to publication, he took out a series of advertisements in New York newspapers touting his “Big Novel.” On the day of publication he paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times, which included the following prediction: “A novel which will surely reach its hundreds of thousands of readers, men and women, quickly… A book which is going to make history; the author is convinced that it shows a perfectly simple yet inevitable way by which any broker with nerve enough can pull down the pillars of the Wall Street structure.” The key to Friday, the Thirteenth’s sales, however, was the following bit of brilliant, if unscrupulous, marketing, which was also featured in the ad: “He has offered ,000 to anyone who can show a flaw in his theory.”

Less than two months later, Lawson and Friday, the Thirteenth made headlines when a stockbroker was arrested after attempting to derail the Philadelphia Stock Market by applying the novel’s flawless theory.

When Friday the 13th made its next appearance on the calendar that September, Lawson created his own headline: he ran a large ad in the financial section of the New York Times that began: “Friday the 13th – it’s here today”. Lawson admonished readers to buy stock in companies in which he had a vested interest. His argument was that Wall Street’s triskaidekaphobia would drive stock prices down, making it the perfect day to buy. His advertisements for his novel and this ad, all of which ran in 1907, are the earliest-known articulation in print of the Friday the 13th superstition as a superstition in its own right.

The Friday, the Thirteenth phenomenon did not end there, however. The relationship between the motion picture and publishing industries in the early part of the 20th century was not so different from the relationship between the two businesses today: a movie version of a book was both an indication of a book’s success and an engine that drove further sales. In 1916, 64 years before the horror blockbuster Friday the 13th was released, Friday the Thirteenth, a feature-length silent version of Lawson’s novel made it to the big screen. Today, the film is lost and no prints are known to exist.

It was thanks to Thomas W Lawson that Friday, the 13th became Friday the 13th; the tradition of unlucky Friday the 13th has not required any punctuation or qualifications ever since.

Although forgotten today, Lawson’s place in the history of unlucky 13 was acknowledged in his own lifetime. Two years before his death in 1925, at a time when his greatest successes – financial and literary – were in the distant past, Lawson received his due in a New York Times article that ran on Friday, 13 April: “A very substantial number of people may be found south of Fulton Street who would no more buy or sell a share of stock today than they would walk under a ladder or kick a black cat out of their path. The shades of Thomas W Lawson continue to stalk through the canyons of Wall Street.”

The connection between Friday the 13th and Wall Street has remained strong ever since. As recently as 1985, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was struggling to break 1,300, there was talk on the Street that triskaidekaphobia was adding extra resistance to the psychological barrier the market normally encounters when it approaches the milestone of a round number – which is itself a number superstition. The longer it took to reach 1,300, and the more times it tried and failed, the louder the talk became. In 1987, some traders saw a connection between the record 508-point decline on October 19 – Black Monday – and the three Friday the 13ths that year – despite the fact that the Dow rose on two of those three days.

Friday, 13 October 1989, was definitely a bad day for the market: the Dow dropped 109 points, the largest one-day decline besides Black Monday. To make matters worse, the market had suffered a similar decline on the Friday before Black Monday, so a lot of traders spent that weekend in 1989 terrified that another Black Monday was in the offing. In the end, the Dow rose 20-plus points on Monday. If it hadn’t, who knows how much the reputation of Friday the 13th would have been enhanced? To this day, October is seen as a bad month for the stock market – which, naturally, tends to make it a bad month for the stock market.

By the 1930s, Friday the 13th was the most popular superstition in the US. A 1933 study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found that 95 per cent of fourth year students and 91 per cent of first years at seven Midwestern colleges believed that “Friday the 13th always brings bad luck”. The Friday the 13th superstition became so popular that it even infringed upon that hallowed ground of reason and rationality – the Law. On Thursday, 12 October 1939, the town board of French Lick, Indiana, decreed that, beginning at midnight and continuing for 24 hours, all the black cats in town had to wear bells, so residents could avoid them on the fateful day. The board assigned the town marshal with the task of belling the cats.

The timing of the decree, five weeks after the start of World War II, lends support to the popular theory that superstitions become more pronounced during times of uncertainty. The decree had enough public support that it stayed on the books through 1940. The board abandoned the practice in 1941, but a particularly unlucky Friday the 13th in June of that year led them to reinstate it for 1942. There is no information on when the tradition ended – whether, for example, it survived the war – but it did continue at least until 13 November, 1942; the New York Times picked up the story on 11 November of that year, calling the decree “a war measure to alleviate mental strain upon the populace.”

The late 19th century marked a turning point for superstitions; for the first time, organised religion lost its exclusive claim as arbiter of superstitious beliefs. Prior to the 20th century, most dictionaries followed the Church’s lead and defined superstition as a vice contrary to religion by excess. In the new century, however, more and more dictionaries replaced this religious definition with a secular one: superstition became an irrational belief stemming from fear or ignorance. Where once superstition offended God, it now offended Reason. Later in the century, even the Catholic Church accepted a more secularised definition of superstition; in 1967, the first revised edition of the Catholic Encyclopædia defined superstition as any “irrational or abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God, proceeding from ignorance, unreasoning fear of the unknown or the mysterious, or from morbid scrupulosity.” This shift set the stage for a new assault on unlucky 13 and Friday the 13th.

After World War II, politics replaced religion as the major adversary of superstition in the United States. In the wake of the Nazis’ unprecedented exploitation of social prejudice, the public was actively discouraged from viewing superstitions as merely sinful or frivolous beliefs. Conventional superstitions like fear of 13, walking under ladders, black cats, and spilled salt were thought to originate from the same malevolent, irrational wellspring as the racial and ethnic prejudices that had been the justification for the Holocaust. Increasingly, the US government (and media) attacked superstitions as unpatriotic and unscientific, an open threat to democratic freedom and progress. There was a concerted national effort to educate the public about their dangers; the First American Exhibition on Superstition, Prejudice and Fear, which (not coincidentally) ran for 13 days at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, beginning on Friday, 13 August 1948. The exhibition borrowed freely from the Thirteen Club’s bag of tricks: to enter, visitors had to pass underneath one of three giant ladders; a raft of open umbrellas was suspended from the ceiling; there were displays of spilled salt and broken mirrors, and silhouettes of black cats were taped to the walls.

As the date of its opening and the length of its run suggest, unlucky 13 was one of the exhibition’s primary targets. If the title of the exhibition suggested that there would be further American Exhibitions on Superstition, Prejudice and Fear, there is no record of them. However, others continued the campaign. The 1952 book, Understanding Public Opinion: A Guide for Newspapermen and Newspaper Readers, not only captured the sentiments of the era, but also influenced a generation of journalists: “[The superstitious person] not only has false hopes and fears, but he is a sucker for demagogic appeal. He is inclined toward racial prejudice, disregarding all anthropological evidence to the contrary, and in a time of insecurity he will fall for any kind of new Messiah that comes along… A person who believes in black cats and umbrellas and all of these other everyday superstitions is less likely to think logically and clearly in any other field. He is continuing in an unscientific frame of mind at a time when the clearest type of scientific thinking is essential.” Not even the Church, which viewed superstition as a minor sin – “a vain observance in daily life” – put as much emphasis on the need for its elimination.

In the post-war years, there were two types of newspaper coverage of unlucky 13: sober articles which supported the contention that superstition was a serious social disease, and the next generation of the gently mocking commentary that had been pioneered in the days of the Thirteen Club. With the Club and its monthly dinners a thing of the past, journalists came to rely on the periodic reappearance of Friday the 13th to generate coverage of the superstition.

Understanding Public Opinion had no sympathy for this journalistic tradition: “The Friday the 13th feature is, of course, almost a ‘must’ in every newspaper office… Reporters often strain themselves to get a ‘13’ story”.

The following year, in 1953, the New York Times published the prototype for many of today’s Friday the 13th stories – “Friday, the B-r-r-r!” Calling it “the most widespread of all superstitions”, the article warned the public that 1953 was going to have three Friday the 13ths (each year has between one and three), making it “a terrible one for triskaidekaphobes”. The article is one of the few to quantify the impact of Friday the 13th on our culture: “Any Friday the 13th, it is estimated, costs the nation 0,000,000 in business loss”. Presumably, this meant that in 1953 Friday the 13th was going to drain the economy of 0 million – although there was no information on how this estimate was determined.

“Friday, the B-r-r-r!” proved to be an influential story. The 0 million figure has been quoted in articles ever since, often without regard to the passage of time or the possibility that Friday the 13th’s impact may not have remained constant over the years.

For the next 25 years, Friday the 13th was nearly as regular an event in newspapers as it was on the calendar. Both types of coverage – critical and irreverent – helped to ensure that public awareness of the Friday the 13th superstition remained nearly universal, while at the same time undercutting actual belief in the superstition.

Meanwhile, there were fewer and fewer references in the media to the once great superstition of unlucky 13 at a table. People no longer remembered that this was the original 13 superstition, or that it was inspired by the Last Supper, which deprived it of much of its potency. Dethroned and disconnected from its roots, in the span of one generation “13 at a table” went from being the most powerful of 13 superstitions to the most vulnerable. Of all the 13 superstitions, it was the easiest to disprove; there was nothing vague about the assertion that if 13 people sat at a table one would die within a year. While the public, spurred on by the calendar and the Friday the 13th newspaper feature, focused on the unlucky date, “13 at a table” slowly faded away.

13  SUPERSTITIONS ABOUT FRIDAY THE 13TH

1  If a child is born on Friday the 13th, he will be unlucky all his life.
2  A child born on Friday the 13th will have a short life.
3  A child born on Friday the 13th will always be unlucky, but a part of this misfortune may be avoided by concealing the child’s birthday.
4  A child born on Friday the 13th will not have any good luck until after the death of the last person who knows the true date of the child’s birth.
5  A child born on Friday the 13th must carry a rabbit’s foot from a rabbit killed at midnight by a cross-eyed farmer. Otherwise, the child will bring bad luck to the family. If the child loses the rabbit’s foot, he will die.
6  If a woman has a birthday on Friday the 13th, she will marry and have a child within the year.
7  It is unlucky to be married on the 13th.
8  If a funeral procession passes a person on Friday the 13th, he will be condemned to death.
9  Don’t go out at night on Friday the 13th, or you will have convulsions that night.
10  Don’t sit 13 people at a table on Friday the 13th; one will become seriously ill.
11  Don’t cut your hair on Friday the 13th, or someone in your family will die.
12  Don’t wear black on Friday the 13th, or you will soon wear it again in mourning.
13  It is good luck to be born on Friday the 13th.

LONDON'S THIRTEEN CLUB
by Paul Chambers

On Saturday 13 January 1894, London played host to a most extraordinary event. No fewer than 169 gentlemen of eminent rank and learning assembled at the Holborn Restaurant. Each diner was wearing a green tie and, on arrival, was presented with a buttonhole that consisted of a Japanese skeleton stuck to a miniature coffin lid. In time, an undertaker arrived and, without word, led the guests through to room number 13.

The dining room itself was no less unusual. Inside were 13 tables each of which was laid for 13 people. All the knives were crossed while about the table were scattered various objects such as skulls, mirrors, peacock feathers and upturned horseshoes. Salt had been scattered everywhere and the whole scene was lit by black candles placed inside model skulls and coffins. The diners sat down to their meal, which consisted of 13 courses and was served by cross-eyed waiters. The dishes included langue de serpent and poulets au chat noir. While eating there was much deliberate spilling of the salt.

Their appetites sated, the assembled crowd sat back to listen to an address given by Harry Furniss who, aside from being a genuine funeral director, was also chairman of the London Thirteen Club, the entire membership of which was now assembled before him. Furniss proposed a toast: “To the memory of many senseless superstitions killed by the London Thirteen Club”. He then went on to give a speech in which he outlined his theory concerning the Houses of Parliament and superstition. Afterwards a letter from Oscar Wilde was read out. The esteemed author apologised for refusing an invitation to dine with them but, he explained: “I love superstitions. They are the colour element of thought and imagination. They are the opponents of common sense. The aim of your society seems dreadful.”

After the speech, a final toast was proposed after which the diners were encouraged to give each other knives (but not to pay for them) and to smash the many mirrors that were in the room. Wine was drunk, songs were sung and in the early hours the sozzled rabble poured onto the pavement and dissolved into the chill London air. A good, if slightly unusual, time was had by all.

The above meeting, which is bizarre even by today’s standards, was the 13th annual meeting of the London Thirteen Club. While the society itself has long since vanished into the annals of history, it was at one time very active – although its activities were often frowned upon.

The Club seems to have been formed, possibly as an offshoot of the New York Thirteen Club, by a group of London journalists in October 1889. It had just one objective: to educate people against their tenets and slavery to superstitious notions. The extent of its activities is obscure, but the most visible action was the annual dinners where, as we have seen, the members would participate in a gigantic practical experiment against superstition.

The chairman once proudly proclaimed that despite their activities only one member of the Thirteen Club had ever died and that he had failed to pay his subscription. “Given the low mortality rate of its membership,” one critic pointed out, “it is actually rather lucky to belong to the Club.”

Others were harsher in their condemnation. The Club was variously described as “an assembly of idiots” and “a prearranged sham”. This did not stop eminent people joining and among its ranks were peers, MPs and even Professor Thomas Huxley, aka ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. For a while there was even a branch in Glasgow, founded in 1891.

However, the London Thirteen Club may have been too smug for its own good and by the turn of the 20th century it seems to have disappeared from public view. The last reference I can find to it is in April 1896 when the Prince of Wales was seen to turn down emphatically the offer of its presidency. Given the wavering fortune of the Royal Family during the coming century, he was perhaps a little hasty in his dismissal.

Sources: The Times (London), 30 Dec 1893; 15+17+22 Jan 1894; 14 Mar 1895; 1 Apr 1896.

This article is an edited extract from Nathaniel Lachenmeyer's book, 13, which is available to buy from Amazon