The Number 13 - Ep. 1

Why do so many buildings skip the 13th floor? Why do airlines avoid row 13? And why does a single number carry so much cultural dread? 

In the first episode of Cursed...ish, Daniel and Angela dig into the long, strange history of the world’s most infamous number: 13. 

From Friday the 13th superstitions to the tongue-twisting fear known as triskaidekaphobia, we explore why the number 13 has been treated as unlucky across centuries of folklore, religion, and popular culture. Along the way, we look at everything from the Last Supper and Norse mythology to the arrest of the Knights Templar on October 13, 1307, plus eerie patterns people have noticed in shipwrecks, plane crashes, and even the near-disaster of Apollo 13. 

But is there anything truly sinister about the number itself? 

Or are we just very good at spotting patterns and telling ourselves stories when coincidence stops feeling random? 

Daniel breaks down the mathematics of prime numbers, the curious idea of “happy numbers,” and even a bizarre proposal for a 13-month calendar that would give us a Friday the 13th every single month. Meanwhile Angela brings the cultural perspective, from Taylor Swift’s lucky 13 to the psychological pull of superstition. 

Along the way, we ask the real question at the heart of every cursedish story: 

When bad things happen on a particular date… 
are we witnessing a curse, or just pattern recognition at work? 

Welcome to Cursed...ish. 

Questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share? Send us a hex at uhoh@cursedish.com.

The hosts of Cursed...ish are not responsible for any misfortunes that may befall you while listening to this podcast. By listening to Cursed...ish, you assume all risk of bad luck, ill omens, and unexplained catastrophes.

*Terms and conditions may be upheld by unknown forces.

Transcript

Daniel 0:00

It went from sea to air, and then it went even into space disasters with Apollo 13.

Angela 0:05

Whatever whatever entity is running the 13 curse was just like getting bold. They were getting bored, they were getting a little bit, you know, ready for a promotion.

Daniel 0:24

At some point, everyone has had this thought. I don't believe in curses, but I feel cursed. A project that keeps going wrong, a string of strange coincidences, a disaster that, in retrospect, seemed almost inevitable. That's when we start explaining things away as cursed. So the question isn't just, are curses real? It's why that explanation survives and why it spreads.

Angela 0:48

Welcome, accursed ones, to Cursedish, a podcast about misfortune, mystery, and the stories we tell when bad luck stops feeling random. We're not here to tell you curses are real, but we're also not here to tell you that they aren't.

Daniel 1:00

What we're interested in is the uncomfortable middle ground, where belief, coincidence, history, and human storytelling collide.

Angela 1:08

Sometimes a curse is a supernatural explanation. Sometimes it's a metaphor. And sometimes it's what people tell themselves after the universe keeps kicking them in the teeth.

Daniel 1:17

I'm Daniel Stevens, a former behind-the-scenes cog in the mainstream media machine, now a self-appointed professor of Wikipedia, who's come to live with the fact that the more you learn about something, the more you uncover just how little we'll ever truly know.

Angela 1:29

And I'm Angela Mattes, corporate drone by day and best-selling fanfiction author by night, and someone who enjoys the art of storytelling who's just nosy enough to ask the right questions.

Daniel 1:40

Each week on Kirstish, we investigate a story in which misfortune is framed as more than coincidence, as something malevolent.

Angela 1:47

We'll dive into the damned from King Tut to the Avata cadavera, and even your favorite four-letter word, seeking out tales of the grim and the macabre to explore the fine line between a stroke of bad luck and something far more sinister.

Daniel 2:01

We're curious, we're not that serious, and we're deeply skeptical, even of our own conclusions.

Angela 2:07

And we're not here to mock belief.

Daniel 2:08

But we're also not here to protect it from questions. So, Angela, before we get into today's story, we should probably do the thing that every cursed podcast has to do at least once.

Angela 2:18

What? Establish how unhinged we are?

Daniel 2:21

Exactly. So a quick temperature check. Uh, do you believe in curses?

Angela 2:26

Do I believe in curses? Um, I mean, I've definitely felt cursed a time or two. Definitely had one of those times where you just have a string of events where you feel like you're under a rain cloud, and the only way to make yourself feel like there's any end in sight is to just assume you've been cursed by the universe and it'll work itself out. Um, but I kind of equate curses to ghosts. Like everyone has some sort of a story where they've had a supernatural experience, and maybe people have seen ghosts, some people haven't, but it all still feels like there's something there. We're all talking about it. We all kind of know that that feeling of like the tingles on the back of our neck or when something's not quite right. We all kind of know when we feel like we're just fucked, and there's nothing for it but to say that we're cursed. Yeah. What about you, Daniel? Do you believe in curses?

Daniel 3:18

Um, so for me, I guess my one of my like core personality traits is that I am an extreme skeptic. So I am very skeptical of the idea of curses. Um, but inversely, and I feel like a lot of people who are skeptical do not have this inverse aspect that I have, which is I am at the same time an extremely open-minded person because of that skepticism. It's almost like skepticism tells me don't believe things, but open-mindedness is like the inverse of that to me. It naturally follows of like, well, but it could be real. Like, I'm skeptical that it's not real.

Angela 3:53

So is that an oxymoron?

Daniel 3:56

Maybe. And I, you know, that's maybe my internal struggle. That is just the reason my hamster wheel is going is because I can't get over this fact that it's like I can't tell myself something's real, but also I can't tell myself that we don't know it can't be possible. So that's that's and that's what I'm really excited about about doing this is getting to look into that that weird area in between. And I think in the end, too, like the most important thing is even if this curse doesn't if a curse curses aren't real, or if they are real, if there's a literal physical force behind it, you know, like what we do with those curses is real. What how it affects our world is real. And I mean that's that's what I'm excited to look into. So I I you know I believe in that at the bare minimum.

Angela 4:37

Yes.

Daniel 4:38

Yeah. So I and and you know, we find ourselves kind of in a in a in a in a curious moment right now. You know, we're actually this at the time of this episode releasing, we are in between two cursed dates. We are in a in a rare moment that happens over once every 11-ish years, in that we are between two Friday the 13ths, one month after the other. We just had a Friday the 13th last month, and we're gonna have another Friday the 13th uh in a few days. So that is a very sticky. Yeah.

Angela 5:09

What if that happened every 13 years? Then we'd really be screwed.

Daniel 5:12

You know what? And I think that might be the universe saying that would be too much. And so that they spared us there. But so I get so you know, let's get in, let's get into our into this, into this curse. So I want you to imagine for me, Angela, that you are checking into a hotel, and they tell you your they tell you that your room is on the 14th floor. So you take your key card, you go over to the elevators, you wait, you know, the elevator arrives, the doors open, you get in, you run your finger past the buttons, it says 10, 11, 12, 14, you push the button, the door's closed. Exactly. Okay, so you you're wise to this, you've noticed what I've said, but you've have you seen this in real life?

Angela 5:53

Yes, I stay in hotels almost every week, and just recently noticed a missing little number on the dial. It went from 10 to 11 to 12 to 14, and 13 was missing.

Daniel 6:06

Exactly. So we've all seen this before, like a missing number 13 on an elevator. That's and that's not a mistake. That is a an intentional omission done by the builders, the architect, and it all boils down to the motivation behind that is fear. It's a very specific fear, a fear so specific that uh, you know, psychologists do diagnose it and they've given it a name. It is a word that ironically makes me fear letters more than numbers. The word is called Triskidecophobia. I practice.

Angela 6:36

Ooh, say that 13 teams 13 times fast.

Daniel 6:39

I you know, triskideophobia. I think I might be able to do it after all my practices.

Angela 6:43

Triskidecophobia, triskodecophobia. Yeah, okay, that's not as that's not as hard as it seemed.

Daniel 6:48

But it when written out, it is very, very daunting. So this fear of the number 13 is a legitimate thing. It has real effects in our world. Like we've said, we see that architects will often skip the 13th floor. You'll see airlines will renumber f uh rows, they'll skip the 13th row, hotels and apartments will skip rooms with the number 13 in it. They'll do 12A, 12B.

Angela 7:11

Yeah, actually that's really interesting because I just moved apartments and in my previous apartment I lived on the 13th floor. And now in my current apartment I just moved to, we don't have a 13th floor. So it kind of opens up the realm of questions of A, why this place, why did they say no 13th floor, but the other place was clearly totally fine with it. Um, but B, am I going to see any change in my day-to-day life now that I'm off the 13th floor? Potentially, potentially I've been accursed for the last two years just for living on the 13th floor. And now my life needs to, I better start seeing money flow in and like rainbows and daisies, everything. I I had better like fall into some serious good.

Daniel 7:58

Let's hope for good things for you. Yeah. I mean, maybe we're tempting fate by starting a podcast about accursed things, but we'll see what happens, right?

Angela 8:05

Oh, yeah, good timing. Um yeah. I expect this podcast to go viral now. Thank you.

Daniel 8:11

Some nice balance. You know, you you've gotten one curse, got rid of living on the 13th floor, brought in a curse podcast into your life.

Angela 8:18

So Oh, I was looking at it as a positive, like, ooh, maybe a little bit of good luck for us as we get started. And you're like, no, you've you've unfucked yourself to fuck yourself again. That's fine. It's fine. I'm used to it.

Daniel 8:31

Yeah. Well, I mean, uh yes, and but this whole third the thing of the fear of 13. I mean, we're we we do see it in in the world. I mean, the government of Ireland even changed something, they changed their license plate numbering so that there wouldn't be 13s in license plates. And it's like a government is doing this, so there's clearly something Ireland, aren't they all about luck and shamrocks or whatever?

Angela 8:54

You'd think they would look at 13 in the inverse and think it was lucky because I mean it does go both ways. Taylor Swift.

Daniel 9:01

Yeah, I get yeah, and Taylor Swift, I mean, she's obviously that's a very intentional inversion of the bad luck, I would say. She's clearly doing that intentionally to great success, right? I mean, you're the you're the bigger Swifty of the two of us, so right? She's she uses it as just like her generic 13 is her lucky number, right?

Angela 9:18

Yeah, and like she would always write 13 on her hand before her concerts, even when she first started out and she was you know playing tiny little gigs at like state fairs, and then now she's uh recently had like the highest grossing stadium tour of all time, like probably times many over. So I would say the number 13 has worked out for her. Although she's also had a lot of bad luck, like in love and things like that. So I guess it is sort of a mixed.

Daniel 9:49

I guess we'll we'll call her a Triskadecophile as a lover of the number 13. But there are, you know, there are a number uh tris Triskadecaphobes are numerous in our society. There are there are wedding planners and like doctor's offices that say they reportedly get fewer people scheduling events on those days. Um, and these, like I said, there's these entire industries just quietly playing along, like not wanting to disturb people who don't like the number 13. There's been famous Triskidecophobes, uh, according to Smithsonian magazine, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not schedule events on the 13th. He wouldn't invite 13 people to meetings, etc., that kind of stuff. Uh both Herbert Hoover and Napoleon as well were reported Triskidecophobes.

Angela 10:32

Well, clearly didn't work out very well for Napoleon. He maybe should have Exactly should have been trying a few other things besides Triskidecaphobia.

Daniel 10:41

A modern example is Stephen King to this day. Apparently, he will not end a story on a page that ends in 13 or has a 13 in it or is a multiple of 13. So he will write longer stories to not end on a 13. So I mean that I mean, but he seems to he probably knows what he's talking about, right?

Angela 10:58

Yeah, I guess.

Daniel 10:59

So so I mean it's like there's obviously something here. What is it? Like 13 is just a number. Uh I mean, right? Like so let's start there. Like, let's look at something that to many people is quite terrifying. Let's look at the map. What about 13? So 13 is a prime number. I mean, that's the first thing that seems quite obvious about it. And just to be clear for everyone, that a prime number is a number that can only be divided by one and itself evenly. So I guess it makes sense. There's this idea that 13 just doesn't play nicely, it doesn't divide itself, it doesn't want to share cleanly.

Angela 11:32

Yeah, but like seven is a prime number, and seven's considered lucky. So I don't see how that pans out.

Daniel 11:37

If we were doing an alter in our bizarro universe podcast Blessedish, seven is the first episode of that podcast. So yes, clearly a prime number doesn't inherently make us feel wrong, right? There's also this concept in number theory, which is a whole other thing that I had to resist talking way more about. Number theory is this whole idea of studying numbers. Apparently, it used to kind of be like a joke of a science, but now with cryptocurrency and other stuff, it's become much more important. In number theory, there's this idea of something called a happy number. And in essentially, what it is is you take the digits of your number, you square them, add those back together, and keep doing that over and over. If the number reaches one and resolves at one, where one squared is just one, so it'll always be one again, then it's a happy number. The other, some other numbers they just they end up hitting.

Angela 12:24

I don't understand what that means at all. I cannot be doing that math, but it's fine. I'll take you through it in just a second. No, no, I don't need that.

Daniel 12:34

The unhappy, the unhappy the unhappy numbers, they never reach one. They hit like cycles where they will just spiral forever, you know. Very unhappy, spiraling like the rest of us. So 13. Exactly. So 13, you take one squared plus three squared, it's one plus nine, that's ten. You do it again, you have one squared plus zero squared, that's one plus zero. You get to one, you're at a happy point. It resolves very cleanly on just one or two steps. So thirteen is doing what it should do. It seems like a nice, you know, it it's a number that does play well with others in some ways.

Angela 13:07

So like it's just misunderstood.

Daniel 13:09

I guess, yeah, it's just misunderstood. It just wants to, you know, it's it's just a misunderstood bad. Like all of us.

Angela 13:16

It had its like emo bangs in high school and exactly, exactly.

Daniel 13:20

So it really does seem like it's there's no arithmetic that's that scary here. There's nothing mathematically here. So then it's probably a cultural thing, right? I mean, so many people in different cultures seem to think 13 is wrong, but there are other cultures that have different numbers they don't like. For example, the number four in lots of Asian cultures, they consider it unlucky. Many people say it's because the word four sounds like the word death in many of those languages. 17 similarly is taboo in Italy. This is said to be because uh 17 in Roman numerals, x vi would be rearranged into V I X I, which is pronounced Wixie, which is Latin for I have lived, also known as I am now dead.

Angela 14:02

So Okay, okay, that is a reach right there, a little bit. Like they literally were like, okay, X V I I. If you re-like that, yeah, this is one of the things, and I'm not trying to like debunk or just be like whatever. But so far, we have discussed four, 17, 13, and I guarantee, I mean, think about six, six, six, six, six, six, six. The next next on my list was six six six. Yes. Add these all together, add these all together, and suddenly every number has some sort of negative or positive kind of like it becomes a crapshoot, right? I would think pretty much everything could be one or the other.

Daniel 14:43

It doesn't seem to be every number though, and that brings us to something. Maybe there is something about 13 that we find in nature or something that just like rubs us the wrong way. And there's one idea I've saw that I think kind of makes a little sense, and this is the idea of the sun and the moon. So the calendar we use is based on seasons. We do 12 months, you know, so our seasons stay the same and they divide into three months, and that that divides nice and easily. But a lunar-based calendar goes on a different cycle, and every couple years there's this 13th moon in a year, this 13th cycle, and it just doesn't play well with our desire to have 12 dividable, you know, things that can divide into our four seasons. So, this idea that there's this 13th lunar cycle every once in a while that just is out of step with our desire to have a nice dividable time system.

Angela 15:35

And so and I can fully accept the idea that it's the moon that's ruining everything, because I will say Mercury in retrograde, I haven't experienced quite as tangibly the like chaos that occurs when Mercury is retrograde. But a full moon, oh my god, that is real.

Daniel 15:54

Like if you have ever worked in retail, a full moon is a whole other thing. Yeah.

Angela 15:58

If you have ever worked in retail, oh my god, you know the full moon is so real. So I'm yes, tell me more about this lunar calendar. I'm I'm in, I'm sold.

Daniel 16:07

So this idea that there's no great way to make it divide evenly and cleanly, and it's just exemplified by this 13. But actually, this looking into these calendar things, the lunar versus solar calendar stuff, brought me up to this something that I've always thought was super interesting, is one of like my favorite little historical asides, this concept of calendar reform. And there's this great guy in it who sort of said, like, I'm gonna take the chaos of 13 and I'm gonna embrace it. And he is this guy named Moses B. Cotsworth, a wonderful name. He was an accountant, yeah. He was an accountant and a statistician, and he lived around the turn of the century, the 1900s or 1800s and 1900s. Now that we're so old that we have to clarify which turn of the century. No, right?

Angela 16:51

Um, I don't need that curse on top of the other curses that we're already talking about, curses of numbers.

Daniel 16:58

But he was a guy, he didn't like that statistics wouldn't always match up. Like something that was true of one month that was 31 days isn't necessarily going to translate well to a month of 30 or 28 days or 29 days. And also, as an accountant, if you have a monthly contract, one week of a that contract costs X dollars in one month, but technically a different amount in a different month because you have different number of weeks per month and all that. So he came up, he did some research. He went to prehistoric sites around the UK, including Stonehenge. He even went to the pyramids at Giza because he thought these ancient cultures knew more about the movements of the heavens and the moon, the earth, and the moon. So he did some research.

Angela 17:38

That is really interesting. Yeah, I've actually know that we don't know. Oh, I've been to Stonehenge, and while I was there, I was sandbagging and I could hear someone's tour guide telling them all about Stonehenge, and I picked up an interesting factoid, or just I don't know if I would say this is a fact, more of an aside that the tour guide said that has literally broken my brain since then. Because Stonehenge, for anyone who doesn't know, is a site just outside of London where a like circular formation of these huge, massive stones was created in ancient times, and the stone came from for some reason hundreds of miles away, and it's like massive multi-ton stones. And we do to this day, we do not understand why they would have undertaken the struggle to get these stones brought all the way across from miles away, and then why they put them in the formation. What the tour guide said that has stuck in my brain is he said, We don't know why they brought these stones from so far away, but maybe they knew some kind of magic that has died out over the ages.

Daniel 18:44

Yeah, yeah, that's how I've always thought of that kind of stuff is they just they were in touch with something we don't quite understand.

Angela 18:50

Yeah, like what did they know that we don't know?

Daniel 18:52

Yeah. Well, what did Moses B. Cotsworth know that we don't know? Because he went to Stonehenge, he went to the pyramids, and then he came up with a new calendar, and it was the 13-month calendar, the equal month calendar, he called it. It was 13 months of 28 days, so four seven-day weeks, which came to 364 days, and then there was one extra day called like a holiday sort of free day. He called it year day after December 28th, but before January 1st. And then there was an extra month between June and July called Seoul to make a 13th day.

Angela 19:23

Ooh, that sounds like very um futuristic.

Daniel 19:26

Yeah, and actually, George Eastman instituted this calendar internally at the Eastman Kodak Company for decades from the 1920s until the 1980s. They used it because it was much better for accounting and for planning purposes, and you would always know what date. Yeah, yeah.

Angela 19:40

But then you like showed up to Kodak on your first day in an orientation, they were like, and by the way, like nothing is what you think it is. It's soul 24, and you're like, I would have been like, Am I in a cult?

Daniel 19:52

Yeah, I mean, the cult vibes are definitely there. But I mean, like it seems great. And very, very crucially, every day in this calendar, if January 1st is a Sunday, it is always a Sunday. If January 23rd was a Tuesday, it's always a Tuesday because it's just constant.

Angela 20:11

Keep it simple, stupid.

Daniel 20:12

Exactly. And if we did this, I mean, you'll notice we're in this, like I said earlier, we're in between two Friday the 13ths. That's because February is 28 days, and February had a Friday the 13th. So the next month has a Friday the 13th. So if we use this equal calendar, this equal month calendar, and we started it on a Sunday, which would make sense, we would have a Friday the 13th of every month. So we'd have 13 Friday the 13th every year. So I honestly think we should give it a shot. It would be fun. Let's see.

Angela 20:40

Well, I have noticed no skulldugary these last few days while we're in between the Friday the 13th. And last month on Friday the 13th, again, nothing of any import happened. So I I could probably take one of these once a month.

Daniel 20:54

Well, there's still there's a few days left for Friday. The next Friday the 13th is just around the corner, Angela.

Angela 21:00

So all right, we'll see what happens.

Daniel 21:02

So we'll get to Friday. We'll we'll get to how Friday got dragged into this. But first, let's go back to 13. So 13 does see there's you know, there's this idea that it's just like a little out of sync with things. So there's some weirdness there. But really, you can start to see some things specifically in Western culture that are just why we start to have negative connotations with the number 13. Tarot is one of those. And I know yes. So as I like tarot. Uh yes, and many do. But you can tell me then what is the 13th tarot card?

Angela 21:35

Oh, obviously it's death.

Daniel 21:37

Exactly. And I know before you even have to tell me, I know that death does not mean death, it means many things. Tarot, it's very complicated.

Angela 21:45

Although when you pull that card, oh my god, it does feel a little bit like oh shit.

Daniel 21:50

It is still saying the word death. Another point would be in some mythology. There's a Norse myth where 12 gods were dining joyfully when a 13th uninvited guest left. Loki showed up. He caused chaos, fighting, death, destruction. So it's just this idea: 12 happy uniform, 13 arrives, and chaos and death follows. This is also echoed in Christianity at the Last Supper, where 13 guests died. Yes, one of whom is a traitor.

Angela 22:18

I didn't realize Judas was the 13th guest. I guess that makes sense.

Daniel 22:21

Yeah. So that 13th guest, the traitor, is what caused the disruption. There's another.

Angela 22:27

No, not to throw a wrinkle of curiosity in here that we don't need to go down this rabbit hole too much, but do you think that whoever wrote about the Last Supper in the Bible would have known about the Norse myth? Or were they two completely separate stories told that had the same similar structure? That I mean I mean, I don't know if we could ever actually truly know, but it's a curiosity.

Daniel 22:51

The interplay of different of different mythologies. Well, actually, we're gonna touch on this in a little bit when we talk about the data.

Angela 22:57

So I just like line you up for the I'm just teeing you up, sorry.

Daniel 23:01

But yes, obviously like the the replacing and interplay and like retelling of stories through mythology and different I mean it's a touchy subject, but yeah, I I there's that definitely that argument, and I I think there's a lot of a lot of a lot of scholarly ink spilled on that topic on where did these all of these myths come from? Where did how do how do we build upon each other? You know, how did religions build upon each other? So yeah, there's I I could see that happening. And so, yes, this little pot this pattern starts to emerge. And some people even say it was seen so far back as Hammurabi's code. There's claims that Hammurabi skipped the 13th code when they were codifying his laws. So for just to review Hammurabi's code isn't one of the earliest forms of written laws that we have records of. Supposedly they skipped the 13th law. That turns out to just when I looked into it, yeah.

Angela 23:53

Wasn't he chiseling that thing into stone? Like I would have skipped and missed a lot of things.

Daniel 23:57

What it turns out to just be is when someone translates, some French guy translated it in the early 1900s, he added his distaste for 13th. The original laws were never even numbered. So that's just a commonly cited. Just a total self-insert, no big deal. Yeah. But so we have these ideas like 13, there's some some historical, some some cultural unease around the number, maybe some natural unease around the number. But then there start to be some historical events that happen and people start to s notice.

Angela 24:27

Ooh. Okay, yes, I think we are coming a bit full circle around to my skepticism. All right.

Daniel 24:33

Probably the the most well-known and earliest example was the arrest of the Knights Templar. This happened on October 13th, 1307. Okay. Yeah. This was when the Knights Templar, you know, very long history, but the king of France at the time, Philip IV, he essentially made up a bunch of charges, said they did blasphemy, homosexuality, all types of crimes they were just accused of. An order was given to arrest them all on October 13, 1307. Uh, they were all charged, tortured, forced to give confessions in many instances, and many executions were happening. Allegedly, Jacques de Molay, the leader of the Knights Templar at the time, he there's reports that he did this or a different knight, but someone is alleged to, upon their death of being burned at the stake after a forced confession, after a you know, essentially a false trial, he cursed the name of Philip IV and the Pope at the time, saying that they would both die in the next year. And they did die in the next year. So there is a legend of a curse upon us. So there's there's cursed here. And all right.

Angela 25:43

Did you just make something up? What was that?

Daniel 25:45

Apparently, I did Cursed Hystery.

Angela 25:47

Is that our portmanteau? Okay. Hey, all right, put it on a t-shirt, put it on a baseball cap. I'll take it.

Daniel 25:54

There's but so there's there's a layer of a curse.

Angela 25:56

How badass is that? Like, especially again, when we kind of look at the possibility that a curse is just a way of describing something that kind of feels shitty. Like, for him to have been like, Curse you and curse you and then a year leader, they were both dead, like, get him. Like, get him.

Daniel 26:12

Yeah, I mean, this is you can't argue with results.

Angela 26:17

Yeah, you can't argue with results 100%.

Daniel 26:21

Um, and then so yeah, so the Knights Templar is, you know, a really contentious, horrific moment in history. Then also Constantinople, you know, Istanbul, Constantinople, two historic changes of power when it fell happened, one on April 13th, 1204, and another in a year 1453, whose digits add up to 13.

Angela 26:43

Okay, that is reaching. Although Taylor Sif fans would not say so, because you know when they if they saw that year with the numbers added up to 13, they would eat that up. They would somehow turn that year into a date that was then the same day that it was like National Cat Day. And on National Cat Day 13 years ago, she released Reputation, so we're finally getting Reputation Taylor's version.

Daniel 27:05

Let's all pray.

Angela 27:09

From your lips to Taylor's ears. I have a lot of emotions stored up about the whole Reputation Taylor's version. Don't get me started.

Daniel 27:19

Okay. So, yes, I mean Taylor is saving us from 13. Uh, you know, the historical context of 13 being bad was being built. We've got these bad uh these bad historical events, but then there start to be like maritime disasters that really are just like, okay, this ship launched on the 13th or ship that was named the 13th in it. Um, some really famous and horrific examples. There were so many, they were countless, countless, countless, countless. I can't tell you how many boat disasters I found reading about this that had connections to 13. But some of the worst ones were the NAVA, an English ship bringing convicts to Australia that wrecked on May 13th, 1835, between Tasmania and mainland Australia, leading to 226 deaths of mainly women, convicts, and many of their children they were bringing. Yeah, really horrible. Um, another boat, uh, Trace de Marso, going from Cuba to the USA. There's allegations that this was on July 13th, 1994. Allegations that the Cuban government sank it intentionally, leading to 35 deaths. That's still a contentious. Um, you know, there's still denials and blame being cast back and forth on that. An interesting one I found was the British submarine designated HMS K-13. During some training exercises when it was being commissioned, it sank in 1917 when someone miscommunicated between the bridge, the control room, and and you know, and the boat itself. They left a hatch open and they went underwater. And so then it's Oh my god. Yeah.

Angela 28:52

And that was like anytime I hear about a submarine accident, I immediately just like seize up to the submarine get claustrophobia, and I'm just like, oh my god.

Daniel 29:02

So they they fixed the ship, brought it aboard, then they renamed it the K-22. It was then later involved in another series of accidents with other vessels, friendly vessels, that were all they were all going around in like radio silence trying to avoid German U-boat detection, and they ended up c having a bunch of collisions with each other due to these maneuvers, and 103 people were dead among all of all of the vessels. Oh my god. So yeah, so it seems like they couldn't even escape that name. Eventually, when they went on to the next line of submarines, the British Navy, um, they on the L class, they skipped L13 and went right from L12 to L14.

Angela 29:40

And is that boat still in the water today?

Daniel 29:45

Maybe. Um, also the Costa Concordia, that very famous cruise ship um back in 2012. That was happened on uh January 13th.

Angela 29:54

Um also something about the pictures from that wreckage are just so eerie. Like I can't even quite put a finger finger on it. I think it's just like the wildness of seeing a cruise ship on its side like that.

Daniel 30:09

That was that was a wild.

Angela 30:11

That gives me the heebie jeebies. Yeah, okay. Wow.

Daniel 30:14

On top of people noticing these maritime disasters, once air travel starts, there start to be air disasters that you know that are being cursed by 13. One of the most famous plane crashes, I would say, in in all of aviation history, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, that is the rugby team that crashed in the Andes and famously had to resort to cannibalism to survive as they waited for rescue. That left on Friday, October 13th, 1972. That same day, Aeroflot Flight 217 in Moscow crashed. They were coming in for a landing and they had made contact with air traffic control, and they were given a clear for a landing, and then they never communicated again. The plane just continued descending until it crashed. They never took the air traffic or their landing gear out, and officially the cause was undetermined, but it's just called or it was determined to be psychophysiological incapacitation of the crew for reasons unknown.

Angela 31:10

Those ghost plane situations also freak me out.

Daniel 31:14

So that was both on the Friday the 13th. One year to the day later, the same airline, Aeroflot 967, crashed after an instrument failure and killed all 122 on board. So it's horrifying, horrifying plane crashes that with 13 as well.

Angela 31:28

And then it honestly kind of I'm like literally thinking, like, do I have any flights on I didn't fly on that? No, okay. I'm good. I'm good.

Daniel 31:37

Start checking on your calendar when you book. But I and it really all kind of culminated with it went from sea to air disasters, and then it went even into space disasters with Apollo 13. So obviously that was broadcast around the entire world.

Angela 31:53

Whatever entity is running the 13 curse was just like getting bold. They were they were getting bored, they were getting a little bit, you know, ready for promotion.

Daniel 32:03

I mean, it's not even just that it's called Apollo 13, Angela. It launched on April 11th, but it launched at 1.13 Central Time, which in military time is 1313.

Angela 32:16

So nobody had any any foresight to say perhaps not.

Daniel 32:21

NASA looked at their charts and they said this is the best launch time based on where the moon is going to be and everything. They they were doing the physics of it.

Angela 32:28

But also, well, that's good because everything went so well with Apollo 13.

Daniel 32:32

Well, so it was on the 11th at 1313 they launched. Two days later, on March or on April, excuse me, 13th, is when the an oxygen tank exploded, leading to the cataclysm that eventually led to what we all saw. Thankfully, they were all able to make it home safe. They did not land, of course, as planned. Um, we all saw the movie they made it home fire.

Angela 32:52

Yep, Tom Hanks is safe.

Daniel 32:53

Yeah, exactly. But like these were just some super famous examples, and there's just this number 13 staring everyone in the face. And it was exemplified by media, of course. Some of those first maritime disasters was when mass media, news media, print media really started to become a global phenomenon. Instead of just these local, uh, local stories or local patterns and superstitions, they kind of become a global phenomenon when newspapers can print all these things, and they don't say like 13 is cursed, but you know, they say this is weird. It launched on the 13th and then it sank. Yeah. So it's just makes for a good headline, but yeah, and these these patterns just kind of take on a global scale and a global pace. Eventually, mass media, you know, literature and film eventually takes on 13. There's a 1907 novel by Thomas William Lawson called Friday the 13th, and it's about a guy who wants to manipulate the stock market. So he uses the fear of Friday the 13th to enact his plan, to, in addition to his plan, use people's inherent fear of that day to spark a market crash, and then he profits from it.

Angela 34:02

Ooh, that sounds interesting.

Daniel 34:04

Yeah, I know. I kind of want to read it. Um, you know, there's there's other things like 13 up until today. There's 13 reasons why. 13 is clearly used as just like a key or like a to key people in to there's something right scary here, something off here. You know, Hitchcock's his first directorial debut was going to be a movie called The Number 13. Eventually, uh it this they they had to stop shooting, it was never completed. It sounds like uh financing fell through. Sounds like maybe it was a cursed movie, to be honest.

Angela 34:33

A cursed set. Maybe we'll have to do a whole episode about this event.

Daniel 34:38

Yeah. Um, but there's, you know, other move other scary movies use 13. There's 13 ghosts, a movie from our childhood times that I love.

Angela 34:46

Um my god. I don't think I have thought about the movie 13 Ghosts until you literally just said it. And all I can remember from that movie is watching it in middle school at a sleepover, and I mean that was around the time that the ring came out, and I still am traumatized from the ring, so I was probably very fragile at this point in time. And I just remember being so upset that my friends picked that movie and then being like, Well, what the fuck is this? When like I just remember there was like a glass door and it's like cut in half, yeah. And then like you see, like the bisection, and I was like, like it was just veered into my brain. Yeah, but like I don't know. It was I just remember being gross.

Daniel 35:28

Okay, but the scariest movie from our childhood with 13 obviously was 13 going on through. Oh, yeah, horrifying. Yeah, but truly, obviously, this whole 13 in cinema culminated with the Friday the 13th franchise. I mean, it is first of all, there are 12. I looked into this, there are 12 movies. How are they not making a 13th? The last one was in 2009. I don't know how they're not making a 13th Friday the 13th movie, like maybe the producers, what do you think?

Angela 35:54

Maybe they've been trying and it just keeps the grill. Maybe this is a curse.

Daniel 36:00

Yeah.

Angela 36:00

We have to we have to investigate Daniel.

Daniel 36:03

But that's an entire horror franchise that just says, hey, Friday the 13th, you know this is a scary day. So it's fully just in your face at that point. And that brings us to what did Friday why is Friday? Why Friday the 13th? Like what 13, I guess we're starting to see where it comes from, but why Friday? If you talk to me about Rebecca Black, I'm well, she apparently did not do her research because when she's celebrating Fridays, Friday was a traditionally unlucky day. I was shocked to find this out. Christianity is kind of here again, back at it again with Good Friday, the day Jesus died. Friday, unlucky. I mean, it's good Friday, but still Jesus died. Also, popular Christian retellings of Eve and the apple, or Eve and the forbidden fruit, that supposedly occurred on a Friday, as well as Cain slaying his brother Abel, as well as the Greek. Okay, I am sorry.

Angela 36:53

Adam and Eve, they didn't they didn't even have clothes, they did not have days of the week. For fuck's sake.

Daniel 37:00

But supposedly those were all events on Fridays. That Knight's Templar thing, that was a Friday the 13th. Friday was also Hangman's Day in like medieval England, in Old England. So that was an inherently dour day, the day that they're gonna execute people. So even back as far as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, there's this idea of like this playfulness of Friday as an unlucky day. In the Nuns Priest tale, he has this repeated quote where he says, I'm gonna update from the old English to more modern English. So this is an isn't an exact quote, but he says, and on Friday fell all this mischance. Oh Venus, that art goddess of pleasance. So he's saying, like, Venus, you're supposed to be this goddess of good things. Why are bad things happening on Friday? Friday was Venus's day. All of our days of the week used to be named after Roman gods. Friday was Dias Veneris. The Germanic peoples took the Germanic version of Venus, who was Freya or Frigg, and made it Frig's Day, Fry's Day. So that's why we have Fry Day. So they're named after the same god. So when you were kind of asking about like, did Christians look at this like Norse myth? Everyone was sort of doing that. They were taking gods, they were like, oh, that god's like ours. Let's just use that. So like Friday is Frig's Day from Venus's day, and the idea that Friday was unlucky when Venus and Fry Freya, many different names, were supposed to be goddesses of good things. So there's this like Chaucer was saying, What's going on here? There is this disconnect between you should be for good things, but bad things are happening. And so this Friday as an unlucky day has a thing. Side note, speaking of all this day naming, if we were speaking Spanish or Greek right now, we'd be talking about Tuesday the 13th as an unlucky day. And that goes back to because they used to name Tuesday was Dias Martis, which was Mars, who's the Roman god of war. So just being associated with war was bad enough. That Tuesday was bad. Also in Greek, that fall of Constantinople, one of those was on a Tuesday, the 13th. So that just sort of went in to make Tuesday their unlucky day.

Angela 39:06

Okay, but again, we're kind of getting back into that place where it's like, you know, 4, 13, 7, 6, 66, now it's Tuesday, Friday, like there are curses. I know, but like, are there curses at play, or is it just sort of like there's been a lot of time and there's been a lot of stuff going on, and some of it just so happened to coincidentally be on some of these days at some of these times? So, like, if we were to look at a timeline of all of the maritime tragedies and disasters throughout history, is it a better news headline for it to be on Friday the 13th? Or and there have been a bunch of other things that have occurred that I mean the Titanic was on very close to being on a 13th, but it was not. Like things like that, it's like, well, are we just sensationalizing? I mean, I'm who am I to say? I'm I'm trying to do anything not to bring any more curses down upon me since apparently I got myself out of the clear and back right back into it. So I'm not gonna say it's not. I don't want to tick anybody off out there.

Daniel 40:08

Okay, but perfectly, I mean, okay, regardless if it's real or not, we are seeing the effects of it in our real world, right?

Angela 40:14

Well, it's definitely been going to shit lately with all this Friday the 13th.

Daniel 40:19

There was someone, there is a Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2015, they did, according to the Vancouver Sun, they banned skipping floors or mislabeling things because they were seeing this happen so much, and they thought this is a safety issue. What if someone, you know, firefighter might be looking for the 14th floor from outside by counting the windows?

Angela 40:41

Oh my god, yeah. And honestly, even when you get in an elevator and you're looking, like if there's a moment of life and death, every second counts. And if you're looking and you are like, why are these numbers not lining up the way I expected them to? I get it. I understand that.

Daniel 40:56

Exactly. And so they they they stopped letting people skip 13. There was also a lot of skipping of fours as well happening. Oh, yeah. And so they just they don't let you do that anymore. There was apparently one building there was a labeled into the 60s, but it only had 50 floors. So there was like floor 63 at a certain point, and it was like, this is actually floor 50.

Angela 41:13

Was it just literally like number soup when you got into their elevator? Just like putting floors wherever the heck they want.

Daniel 41:19

So eventually Vancouver, and like to me, what seems like an aggressively Canadian move, they were just like, none of this bull, like you just need to have regular numbers comply. Um they said, cut the shit. Exactly. And there's also people who remember I was, you know, we were talking about famous Trisky Decaphobes. There were people who absolutely flaunted this. There was a there was a thing called the 13 Club, and there was a guy, his name was Captain William Fowler in 1881. He was obsessed with the number 13. Apparently, his whole life he loved it. He apparently attended PS13 growing up. He fought team, he fought in 13 Civil War conflicts. Public school 13. They just the way they name schools and like cities often will make PS a number.

Angela 42:05

Um, my millennium brain was like, is that like a PS3 or something? But is that is that where we're at? Like, I don't know what you're talking about.

Daniel 42:13

But yeah, so he went to public school 13 growing up, he fought in 13 Civil War conflicts, which is like Okay, you know, at a certain point, like when he got to number 12, you know he was just like fix him for trouble.

Angela 42:24

Like he was the guy who was like, So what if we uh what if we marched, what if we marched into N territory?

Daniel 42:31

Yeah.

Angela 42:32

Like he must have been such a terror trying to get from 12 to 13. Like he probably like he probably created that 13th one himself.

Daniel 42:39

Well, so what he did go on to create for sure was the 13 club. He and 12 others met on Friday for the inaugural meeting, met on Friday, January 13th, 1881, at 8 13 p.m. in room 13 of the building they were meeting in, and they dined on 13 courses over the course of that uh meeting. They also listen to this. This isn't they really they hung so many lampshades on it. They reportedly walked under a ladder to get into the room, and they also decorated with piles of spilled salt and open umbrellas scattered throughout the room. And a year later, all 13 members were reported to be alive and well in good health.

Angela 43:19

I would only care if they were all found to be dead, but then again, this sounds insufferable, so I would then even further debunk and say, Did he perhaps have it coming?

Daniel 43:29

Well, the the club went on to you know, fame they they said, hey, we've survived 13. It did grow, it the club went on. It ended up including famous people such as Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt, so FDR's cousin, who was like, Oh, you hated 13, I'm gonna love it. Seems like an intentional little thumbing of his nose. Yeah. Chester A. Arthur as well, Benjamin Harrison, so a bunch of presidents, and William McKinley, who was assassinated. So there's just a I'm just gonna let end it there. I mean, there is an exception to every rule. Yeah, but I mean, obviously, this 13 club thing, they obviously like did it and they're all alive. So, what do you think? How what are your thoughts? Like, this is kind of where we've come to 13. There's this cultural idea behind it, there's this cultural idea behind Friday, there's pattern recognition, there's maybe some real, real statistical analysis there, but it seems like people's responses to it more than what's causing it. What do you think?

Angela 44:27

I mean, I've said it enough times that I am skeptical because I feel like you're just taking a dart and shooting it at the wall and hitting things because history is long and many things happen within it. So I'm gonna say I think this is one of those times where we have just created an aura around something and then maybe even manifested some of the accursedness about the number 13 or Friday the 13th, but I I mean I'm definitely on the skeptical train here. I'm all for pattern recognition and us just liking a good scapegoat. I mean, I know if anything shitty goes on on Friday the 13th, I know what I'm blaming it on.

Daniel 45:09

It is a conventional excuse. Yeah, I I think it's I think it's definitely it's it's maybe there's that kernel of truth of like 13, it's a little unwieldy, it's awkward, and then we started to notice the pattern because of that, so that's what the true beginning of the curse is. Um, but yeah, it it you know, other cultures have other numbers they don't like, other days they don't like. It really seems like that. But the the most, you know, the number one thing that I found from looking at this that makes me think like, oh, this is a true curse day, is that we let it affect our lives, we let it change what we do, we let it not, we let it make us avoid certain dates. We don't, you know, people don't schedule weddings uh uh on 13th, Friday the 13th, they don't schedule surgeries and such. Maybe a house selling with a 13 and an address, just a few people who are like, oh, I don't want to live in a 13. That's fewer buyers. That's yeah, exactly. Yeah, I love the idea of your new your we kind of got like a little science experiment going on to see what's going on. I know.

Angela 46:12

We're gonna A B test my life and see if I'm cursed or not right now.

Daniel 46:17

Yeah, but but in general, yeah, I think the 13, it's it's one of these over. It's like one of the biggest curses in our culture. It makes sense that it's really just a pattern recognition thing. But I'm I'm excited to keep looking at, you know, some maybe like real cursed items. Maybe like, do you've got something we're gonna talk about next week? You'll tell me about that.

Angela 46:34

So next week we are diving into the diabolical, destructive world of cursed diamonds. And we'll be starting with a cursed diamond. Not the one you all would think, because that I was gonna say there's some classics. There are some classics, but we're gonna be saving those. We are going to start with a diamond that I had never heard of before that has a pretty nasty occur a pretty nasty curse attached to it, and I've met her.

Daniel 47:03

Hmm.

Angela 47:04

Unbeknownst to me. I've met her.

Daniel 47:06

Okay. Well, I'm excited to hear about it.

Angela 47:08

People have lots to talk about. Yeah.

Daniel 47:10

I'm excited to hear about something that, you know, you know, might be truly cursed and bring you know, a little more specifically cursed.

Angela 47:18

Hard diamond curse.

Daniel 47:20

Because I think I think what we kind of do kind of realize with 13 is, you know, there's something there, but it is not super cursed, more cursed-ish.

Angela 47:28

I agree. Maybe cursed, maybe not. See you next week.

Daniel 47:43

Cursed-ish is an ish media production. It explores stories of alleged curses, historical mysteries, and supernatural claims. While we do investigate the history and the evidence behind these stories, ultimately you should decide for yourself what to believe. If you have questions, comments, or your own accursed tales to share, send us a hex at uh oh at curstish.com. That's uh oh u h o h all one word at cursed all one word.com