It is the date with the worst reputation in the calendar, and today it is here: Friday, November 13, 2026. For some people, 13 is a number avoided all year round. For others, the fear only strikes on the handful of days each year when a Friday and the 13th collide. An estimated 17 to 21 million people in the United States experience a fear of Friday the 13th — paraskevidekatriaphobia, to give it its full name — and about 10 percent of Americans say they feel uncomfortable or superstitious about the number 13. The superstition has sunk so deep into Western life that 80 percent of high-rise buildings do not have a 13th floor, according to National Geographic, hotels routinely skip Room 13, and some airports have no Gate 13.
But where does the fear actually come from — and is there anything to it at all? The answer is a tangle of religion, history, bad novels and one famous study that its own authors would not stand behind.
Where the fear comes from
Friday the 13th is really two superstitions stacked on top of each other. Friday had an unlucky reputation long before it met the number 13. In Christian tradition, Friday is the day of the crucifixion, and folklore piled on from there: Friday is said to be the day Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, the day the Temple of Solomon was toppled, the day Cain killed Abel, and the day Noah's ark set sail. Geoffrey Chaucer, writing in the 14th century, put it plainly in The Canterbury Tales: “And on a Friday fell all this mischance.”
The number 13 has its own long rap sheet. At the Last Supper, there were 13 people at the table — Jesus and his 12 apostles — and tradition holds that Judas, who later betrayed him, was the 13th guest to sit down. The oldest known negative reference to 13 is even older: in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi, a Babylonian code of law from around 1760 BC, the laws are numbered — and number 13 is omitted. Norse mythology has its own version of the story: at a banquet of 12 gods in Valhalla, the trickster Loki arrived uninvited as the 13th guest, and arranged for the god Balder to be killed, sending the earth into darkness.
The Templar story everyone repeats
The most famous origin story of all is the one about the Knights Templar. On Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the arrest of hundreds of members of the powerful religious military order, and many were imprisoned and later executed. It is a real date and a real event — and it is almost certainly not the origin of the superstition.
Here is the catch: there is no historical record of Friday and 13 being feared in combination before the 19th century. The Templar connection was popularized much later, through fiction — Maurice Druon's 1955 novel The Iron King, John J. Robinson's 1989 book Born in Blood, and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code in 2003. Researchers at the Library of Congress have traced the first clear references to the combined superstition to French works from 1834, and one of the earliest uses of the phrase in English comes from Thomas W. Lawson's 1907 novel Friday, the Thirteenth, about a stockbroker's attempt to bring down Wall Street on that date. The fear, in other words, is younger than the steam engine.
What the numbers actually say
So much for history. What about evidence — are more bad things actually happening on Friday the 13th? The most famous study on the question, published in the British Medical Journal in 1993, seemed to say yes: it concluded that the risk of hospital admission as a result of a traffic accident “may be increased by as much as 52 percent” on Friday the 13th. But the authors themselves warned that “the numbers of admissions from accidents are too small to allow meaningful analysis” — and that fewer vehicles were on the road on Friday the 13th than on the Friday before it.
“The numbers of admissions from accidents are too small to allow meaningful analysis.” — the authors of the 1993 British Medical Journal study on Friday the 13th
Subsequent research has gone the other way. A 2008 study by the Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics found that fewer accidents and reports of fire and theft occur when the 13th of the month falls on a Friday than on other Fridays — an average of 7,500 accidents, against 7,800 on a normal Friday. The researchers' theory: because people are nervous, they stay home or drive more carefully, and the day ends up safer than most.
Why it feels real anyway
If the data says the day is safe, why does it still feel cursed? The answer is confirmation bias: we remember the bad thing that happened on Friday the 13th and forget the hundred ordinary things that happened on every other day. On Friday, March 13, 2020, the United States declared a national emergency over COVID-19 — a coincidence, but one that will live in the superstition's scrapbook forever.
And the fear has famous company. Franklin D. Roosevelt reportedly refused to travel on the 13th of any month and avoided hosting dinner parties with 13 guests. Stephen King has said he will keep writing if a page number is 13 or a multiple of 13, and avoids stopping reading on a page whose numbers add up to 13. Christopher Nolan built his film Inception with 12 dream layers, saying 13 “just didn't feel right.”
Today is the third Friday the 13th of 2026 — February and March had the other two, back-to-back months, something that happens only once every 11 years. The next year with three Friday the 13ths is 2037. So if you are the nervous type, you can relax: after today, the calendar gives you more than a decade off. And if the Dutch insurers are right, today is not the most dangerous day of the year. It might be one of the safest.
