FRIDAY THE 13TH ∙ Origins and Superstitions

Friday the 13th is treated as an unlucky day in parts of Europe and North America. Fridays and the number thirteen each had a bad name long before anyone put them together, and the pairing is younger than it feels: the earliest clear references are French, from 1834.

Origins of Friday the 13th and superstitions surrounding it

The folklorists at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center have looked into this more than once. Stephen Winick’s conclusion there: “the belief in Friday the 13th is not ancient or medieval, although it does have roots in earlier European beliefs about Friday and the number 13.”

The earliest clear references Winick found are two French texts from 1834:

• In the Revue de Paris, the Marquis de Salvo, writing about a Sicilian count who killed his daughter on a Friday the 13th: “It is always Fridays and the number 13 that bring bad luck!”
• In the play Les Finesses des Gribouilles, a character says he was “born on a Friday, December 13, 1813, from which come all my misfortunes.”

Winick is careful about both. The first could mean Fridays and thirteen as two separate bad omens; the second could be about that one date only. But by the middle of the 19th century the idea that any Friday the 13th was unlucky was common in France. In the 1858 play Bloqué! by Henri Chivot and Alfred Duru, a character exclaims: “I was born on a Friday the 13th!”

One small twist in the 1834 play: 13 December 1813 was a Monday, not a Friday. The character is explaining himself to a judge after being arrested and is not telling the full truth, so the impossible date may be part of the joke.

In English, an early example comes from music. The composer Gioachino Rossini died on 13 November 1868, a Friday. His biographer H. S. Edwards wrote in The Life of Rossini (London, 1869): “if it be true that, like so many other Italians, he regarded Friday as an unlucky day, and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that on Friday, the 13th of November, he died.”

The belief then crossed to America. The Library of Congress’s Stephen Winick traces it through a French play, Octave Gastineau’s Lélia, whose two English translations came out in 1878 and 1879, and through newspaper jokes of the 1880s that treated it as “both foolish and typically French”. Clubs formed to disprove beliefs like it: the Thirteen Club of New York first met on Friday, January 13, 1882. In the late 1880s and early 1890s, references begin to show up regularly in American newspapers.

By 1907 the date was familiar enough for Thomas W. Lawson to build a Wall Street novel around it. Friday, the Thirteenth calls it “the Wall Street hoodoo-day, Friday, the thirteenth of the month”. The novel is sometimes given as the origin of the superstition, but its characters already believe in it, so it shows the belief was around rather than starting it.

So as a named superstition, Friday the 13th is about two hundred years old.

Why Friday, and why thirteen

Friday. Christian tradition holds that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, and Winick suggests this may be where the idea of Friday as unlucky came from; it also made Friday a fasting day across the Christian world. In many parts of Europe, the Folklife Center notes, Fridays were traditionally a bad day to begin new projects, get married or start a journey, and fishermen often did not go out to sea on Fridays.

Thirteen. In the United States before 1900, the most common belief about thirteen was that if 13 people dine together, one of them will die. This is associated with the Last Supper, where Jesus “sat down with the twelve” (Matthew 26:20) and one of them, Judas, betrayed him. The Bible does not say who arrived or sat in what order, so there is no sense in which Judas was “the thirteenth”; the link is that 13 were at the table.

Thirteen was tied to death in other places too. In Tarot, the Death card has carried the number 13 since at least 1565, when Francesco Piscina mentions it.

The Loki story. You will often read that twelve Norse gods were at a dinner party when Loki arrived uninvited as the thirteenth guest and brought about the death of the god Baldr. The medieval sources do not tell it that way. In Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (in Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s translation), Baldr dies at the Thing, an assembly, where the gods are shooting at him for sport because nothing can hurt him; Loki puts a shaft of mistletoe in the hands of the blind god Hödr and guides his aim. Winick notes that neither the Poetic nor the Prose Edda sets Baldr’s death at a dinner party or gives the number of gods present when he was killed. Where the modern version came from is unclear; Winick suggests it was made by combining Baldr’s death with the Last Supper’s “13th guest”.

Two names you will see: triskaidekaphobia, “an irrational or disproportionate fear of the number 13”, and paraskevidekatriaphobia, fear of Friday the 13th.

The Knights Templar story

The Templar explanation starts from a real event. On the night of Friday, 13 October 1307, the Templars in France were arrested on the orders of King Philip IV. The order was not ended that day: Pope Clement V dissolved it by a bull of 22 March 1312, and Jacques de Molay, its last grand master, was burned in Paris in 1314. There is more on the orders themselves in our overview of the crusader knights.

What is missing is a link between those arrests and the superstition. According to Winick, “no one seems to have connected this historical event to the belief in Friday the 13th until the 20th century”, and the theory “was popularized by Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code”. Until evidence from the Middle Ages turns up, he writes, it “seems more like a modern guess.” The two French references from 1834 are about a Sicilian count and a man’s birthday; neither mentions the Templars.

Not unlucky everywhere

Which day counts as unlucky depends on where you are. In Spanish-speaking countries and Greece, the Folklife Center notes, Tuesday the 13th may be considered unlucky; in Italy it is Friday the 17th. And thirteen is not bad everywhere: in many parts of Europe it is a lucky number, and in the United States it has positive associations with the 13 original colonies, which is why the Great Seal has 13 stars, 13 stripes of white and red, and 13 arrows.

What to take from this

Friday the 13th is a good example of a habit worth having with any old custom: put the dates in order. Find the earliest dated appearance of the belief, then ask whether the explanation offered for it shows up before or after that. Here the belief first appears in 1834, while the Templar link and the Loki dinner party turn up much later.

It also shows how a real date can make a loose connection feel solid. The Templars really were arrested on a Friday the 13th. That fact is true; the link to the superstition is the part no one has found evidence for.

Sources

• Stephen Winick, “On the Possible Origins of Friday the Thirteenth: Metafolklore, Fear, and Fun”, Folklife Today, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 12 December 2024 (read in the Internet Archive’s copy).
• Stephanie Hall, “Who’s Afraid of Friday the Thirteenth?”, Folklife Today, Library of Congress, 12 January 2017, with Stephen Winick’s reply in the comments on the 1813 date (read in the Internet Archive’s copy).
• H. Sutherland Edwards, The Life of Rossini (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1869), Project Gutenberg #45705.
• English National Opera, “Gioachino Rossini” (born Pesaro 29 February 1792; died Passy 13 November 1868).
• Thomas W. Lawson, Friday, the Thirteenth (1907), Project Gutenberg #12345.
• Matthew 26:20–25, King James Version, Bible Gateway.
• Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, trans. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, Gylfaginning, the death of Baldr (sacred-texts.com).
• “Templars”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), Wikisource.
• “Knights Templars”, Catholic Encyclopedia (1912), New Advent.
• “Triskaidekaphobia”, Dictionary.com.
• Gaillard Hunt, The History of the Seal of the United States (1909), Project Gutenberg #73844 (the Act of Congress of 20 June 1782).

Checked September 2026. The French references, the Rossini biography, Lawson’s novel and the Templar dates were read in the sources above; the weekday of 13 December 1813 was checked against the calendar. If you can show any of this wrong, with a source, we want to see it.