Who Cursed Friday the 13th?

Buildings skip the thirteenth floor. Airlines skip the row. Hotels skip the door number.

Ask why and you will get four confident answers, and not one of them can be proved. Underneath all of them sits a chicken and an egg. Did something terrible happen on a Friday the 13th and curse the date? Or was the date already feared, so that people went hunting through history for something terrible to pin on it?

Here are the suspects.

The First Suspect: Friday

Friday is the day of the Crucifixion, which was enough on its own to make it heavy.

But the first plain statement of the everyday superstition comes only in 1787, in Francis Grose’s collection of English country beliefs. Friday, he writes, "labours under that opprobrium; and it is pretty generally held, that no new work or enterprize should be commenced on that day." No reason given. It is simply what people did.

The Second Suspect: Thirteen

Grose has thirteen too, on the next page: when thirteen people meet in a room, one will be dead within the year. Again, no reason offered.

The reason everyone supplies is the Last Supper — thirteen at the table, and the thirteenth to arrive left it to betray the host.

Then there is Loki: twelve gods dining in Valhalla, Loki arriving uninvited as the thirteenth, Balder dead before the evening is out. Two traditions, one warning — the extra guest ruins everything.

Wonderful story. It is not in the Norse sources. Balder is killed outdoors at an assembly, during a game: no feast, no table, nobody counting heads. Loki does crash a banquet elsewhere in the Eddas, but it is Ægir’s hall, about fifteen gods are there, and Balder is already dead when the poem opens. Somebody laid the two scenes on top of each other, added the number, and produced a Norse Last Supper — in the twentieth century.

Remember it. It happens again.

The Third Suspect: The Templars

Friday, 13 October 1307. That much checks out — it was a Friday.

And this suspect is not a small one. The Templars were the first international bank — hand over money in Paris, draw it in Acre — and the Pope’s standing army as well, answerable to no king. Philip IV of France owed them, and he had form: he had already stripped the Lombard bankers and expelled the Jews of France in 1306.

On 14 September 1307 sealed orders went to every bailiff and seneschal in the kingdom, to be opened on one morning a month later. At dawn on Friday the 13th they moved, everywhere at once.

Nobody resisted. The most formidable fighting order in Christendom opened its doors and walked out.

What followed was not an arrest. It was the erasure of an institution. Of the 138 men questioned in Paris, 105 admitted denying Christ — figures that look devastating until you look outside France, where torture was not used at first and almost nobody confessed. Then torture arrived there too, and so did the confessions. In May 1310, fifty-four brothers who had taken theirs back were burned outside Paris in one day.

And the order was never convicted. Abolishing it in 1312, Clement V’s own bull admitted the evidence "does not permit its canonical condemnation as heretical by definitive sentence." Not guilty. Just abolished — the Pope dissolving his own strong arm. The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, spent seven years confessing and retracting; in March 1314 he took it back one last time and was burned on an island in the Seine.

The rest did not go into hiding, whatever you have been told. Portugal and Aragon simply re-founded them under new names, and everywhere else they were pensioned off or absorbed into rival orders — after which they stop appearing in the documents, which is not the same as vanishing.

It is the best story anyone has, and it lands on precisely the right date.

The trouble is the silence. For six hundred years nobody connects the arrests to the date, and the claim surfaces only in the twentieth century, carried to everyone by The Da Vinci Code. That is a serious problem for the theory, but it is not an acquittal: whether the Templars started the fear or only fed it, they belong to it now — which is its own kind of true.

What the Record Actually Shows

Friday and the thirteenth are not feared together anywhere before the nineteenth century. The two earliest known mentions are French and both from 1834 — one a stage comedy in which a man blames his entire life on being born on Friday, 13 December 1813. That date was a Monday. The playwright was not remembering an anniversary; he was reaching for a joke his audience already found funny.

The earliest English trace is from 1869, in a life of Rossini, who had died the previous November: "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."

Read that "if it be true" again. The writer is not reporting a superstition everybody knows. He is proposing one, and blaming it on foreigners.

The Verdict

The egg came first. Two old fears drifted separately for centuries and collided in the 1800s, and once the phrase existed it needed a pedigree. The Templar arrests were a gift: a real atrocity, in the record, on exactly the right day of exactly the right week. Loki was a gift too, once somebody had rearranged him.

The story did not create the fear. The fear went looking for a story and found several.

You can see it in the fact that nobody agrees which day to dread. Italy fears seventeen and avoids Friday the 17th, because XVII rearranges into VIXI — "I have lived," which on a tombstone means I am dead. Spanish speakers avoid Tuesday the 13th: en martes, ni te cases ni te embarques — on a Tuesday, do not marry and do not set sail.

A curse laid down in Paris in 1307 would not have stopped politely at the Alps.

Fun Fact

The novel that fixed the phrase in English, published in 1907, was not a horror story. It was a finance thriller, written by a Boston copper speculator who had helped build one of the great Wall Street trusts and then spent years exposing it. His hero is a broker who works out that if enough people fear Friday the 13th, he can start a panic on that date and get rich on the crash. The book that taught the English-speaking world to dread the day is about a man who profits from people who already do.

Sources

Francis Grose, A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs and Popular Superstitions (London, 1787) — the earliest plain English statements about Friday and about thirteen.

Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2006) — the sealed orders, the Paris interrogations, and the confessions that appear only where torture does.

Julien Théry, "A Heresy of State: Philip the Fair, the Trial of the ‘Perfidious Templars,’ and the Pontificalization of the French Monarchy," Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 39, no. 2 (2013).

Clement V, Vox in excelso (1312), Council of Vienne — the suppression of the order without a condemnation.

Stephen Winick, "On the Possible Origins of Friday the Thirteenth," Folklife Today, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (2024) — the 1834 French references, and the Norse story’s absence from the Eddas.

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, 13: The Story of the World’s Most Popular Superstition (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004).

H. Sutherland Edwards, The Life of Rossini (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1869), p. 340.