Why Friday the 13th is linked to bad luck

Friday the 13th has been touted as a day of bad luck, a perception that has strangely been passed down different generations.

The superstition is particularly prominent in the Western World with Britons even avoiding certain activities on the said date, the Daily Express reports.

The date is also synonymous with the term triskaidekaphobia: fear of the number 13.

Apparently, the fear of Friday the 13th also has an official term: paraskevidekatriaphobia.

The phenomemon can occur at least thrice in one year and is believed to have originated from the Last Supper.

Christians believe that the last supper was the final meal that Jesus shared with his disciples.

According to the Independent, the number 13 is associated with one of the Jesus disciples: Judas Iscariot.

Judas is said to have betrayed Jesus to Pontius Pilate’s soldiers who later crucified him.

Many years later, on another Friday the 13th, King Philip IV of France arresting hundreds of Knights Templar.

“…many of the knights were later burnt at the stake in Paris,” the Independent says.

According to the Daily Express, other ‘bad luck’ incidents that have occurred on Friday the 13th in the past include the bombing of Buckingham Palace in 1940 and the death of rapper Tupac Shakur after being shot four times.

The Bangladesh cyclone in November in 1970 which killed 300,000 people as well as the Chilean Air force plane that ‘disappeared’ in the Andes with 16 survivors who had been forced to eat dead passengers to survive also occurred on Friday the 13th.

Other incidents are the crash involving the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the coast of Italy in January 2012 killing 30 people and the seven simultaneous Paris terror attacks that left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.