Shemaine Bushnell Kyriakides
If your coffee spilled, your Wi-Fi lagged, or your boss scheduled a “quick call” at 4:59 p.m., don’t panic. It’s not fate. It’s just Friday the 13th, the only date on the calendar with its own built-in PR problem and a tongue-twisting fear name: paraskevidekatriaphobia.
Despite its spooky reputation, the date’s history isn’t filled with curses so much as a pattern of drama, coincidence, and occasional weirdness that keeps superstition alive.
Consider 1307, when King Philip IV ordered the mass arrest of the Knights Templar on...you guessed it...Friday the 13th. It didn’t just end a medieval power structure; it helped seed centuries of mythmaking about the date being cursed.
Jump to 1972, when a Uruguayan rugby team’s flight crashed in the Andes on a Friday the 13th, sparking one of the most harrowing survival stories of the century. The tragedy became a defining example for those who swear the day has a dark streak.
In 1992, a Turkish flight crashed shortly after takeoff on another Friday the 13th, adding aviation lore to the list of unsettling coincidences.
And in 2009, NASA reported a massive solar flare erupting on, naturally, Friday the 13th. It didn’t fry satellites or plunge Earth into chaos, but it gave space-weather watchers enough reason to side-eye the calendar.
The date also seems to attract the downright strange. In 2010, a 13-year-old boy in the U.K. was struck by lightning at exactly 13:13 on Friday the 13th. He survived with only minor injuries, but the incident practically begged to be filed under “unhelpful for the superstition argument.”
Even in pop culture, Friday the 13th has built its own momentum. From horror franchises to social media jokes, the date has become a character, one that shows up unpredictably and steals the spotlight whether it deserves to or not.
The takeaway: Friday the 13th isn’t cursed. It’s just historically busy, occasionally bizarre, and a convenient excuse to blame your bad hair day on the universe instead of humidity.
Enjoy the weekend. If anything goes wrong, you already have a perfectly good date to blame.
