Fear of the Number 13

What the word triskaidekaphobia is asked to do

The term does two jobs, and the second is far better attested than the first. It names a personal fear. It also names a convention about a number, held across much of Europe and North America by institutions rather than by nervous systems. A hotel chain that omits a floor is not frightened. It is managing guests who might be.

Nothing in Wikipedia's account describes the personal version. There are no cues, no avoidance costs, no physical response, no age at which the fear is said to begin, and no threshold separating it from ordinary superstition. The article does list six people said to have had it, Arnold Schoenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sholom Aleichem, Stephen King, Nick Yarris and Ángel Nieto, and attaches nothing to any of the six: no date, no account, no source. That bare list is the entire case-level record.

Two neighbours are worth separating out. Dread of Friday the thirteenth is the narrower thing, since it needs a weekday and a date to coincide, and it collected names of its own rather than borrowing this one. Tetraphobia is the same behaviour applied to four, and it is common across East and Southeast Asia, where thirteen mostly is not. Italy reserves its unease for seventeen. Parts of Afghanistan avoid thirty-nine. The behaviour travels; the number does not.

Where triskaidekaphobia and its Friday variants came from

Wikipedia gives the Ancient Greek parts as treiskaídeka, thirteen, and phóbos, fear. Coriat's use in 1910 is the earliest appearance the article records, and no coiner is named, which for a word this conspicuous is a gap worth stating plainly.

The Friday variant acquired two competing names and neither is dated. Paraskevidekatriaphobia is built on paraskeví, Friday, and dekatreís, thirteen. Friggatriskaidekaphobia swaps the Greek weekday for Frigg, the Norse goddess behind the English name of the day, producing a hybrid that no classicist would have assembled deliberately.

What has actually been counted about triskaidekaphobia

One survey exists and it is about hotel rooms. Gallup found in 2007 that thirteen per cent of American adults would be bothered by a room on the thirteenth floor, and that nine per cent would be bothered enough to ask for a different one. That measures a stated preference among people who were asked a question about a hotel, and it is the closest thing to a figure this subject has.

The other counts are commercial. Dilip Rangnekar of Otis Elevators estimated in 2002, from a review of the company's own records, that eighty-five per cent of buildings with at least thirteen storeys and Otis lifts had no floor called the thirteenth. It is an internal estimate by a manufacturer, never published as research, and it is repeated everywhere as though it were a census.

Property research divides. Antipov and Pokryshevskaya, and separately Burakov, reported in Russian studies that flats on the thirteenth floor were slower to sell than flats immediately below or above, and that a discount of ten per cent or more erased the difference. Against that, Wikipedia says several prominent American developers have claimed to see no such effect on their own offices and flats, and names none of them.

What nobody has produced is a prevalence figure for the fear itself. Any percentage attached to triskaidekaphobia is a number with no survey behind it.

Why triskaidekaphobia's origin stories all arrive late

Wikipedia is unusually direct on this point: several authors claim the belief is ancient, no evidence for that has been documented, and the earliest European attestation of thirteen as an unlucky number falls after the Middle Ages. Everything traceable is later still.

Tarot supplies the firmest early dates. The Death trump carries the number thirteen in several variants of the deck, and Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote in 1781 of the Tarot of Marseilles that the number had always been regarded as unfortunate. Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf quoted him three years afterwards and repeated that card thirteen meant death and misfortune.

The dinner-table belief, that one of thirteen people seated together will be dead inside the year, is documented from at least 1774. In that year Johann August Ephraim Götze wrote that superstition likes nothing better than religious material for its proofs, and offered the Gospel account of the Passover meal as his guess at the source. English writers from the 1890s hardened the guess into a specific claim, that Judas had been the thirteenth to sit down. The Gospels record no seating order, only that thirteen men were present.

The Norse version is the youngest and the most repeated. Twelve gods dining in Valhalla, Loki arriving uninvited as the thirteenth guest and arranging for Höðr to shoot Balder with mistletoe, comes from Magic and Superstition, published by Douglas Hill in 1968; the folklore historian Donald Dossey passed it on in Holiday Folklore, Phobias and Fun, crediting Hill. Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, where the killing of Balder actually sits, counts no twelve gods and stages no dinner party, and the number thirteen does not appear in it at all.

Philip IV of France ordered the arrest of the Knights Templar on Friday, 13 October 1307. Thirteen was suspect by then; Friday was not, and the two had yet to be joined. The link between that arrest and the modern dread of the date was made early in the twenty-first century and carried into general circulation by The Da Vinci Code.

How buildings and ships are renumbered to avoid triskaidekaphobia

Floor numbering is a decision that gets written down and then outlives everyone who made it, which is why the built environment holds more evidence about this fear than any library does.

There are four ways to lose a thirteenth floor and all four are in service:

• skip it, so the button marked 14 opens on the thirteenth storey and every label above it is wrong by one
• renumber it 12A or 12B, which leaves the floors above unaffected
• give it a letter instead: Monroe Park Towers in Richmond, Virginia, marks it M, the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, and reaches it only by the freight lift or the stairs
• give it a use in place of a number, which is how the Radisson in Winnipeg acquired a pool floor, the Sheraton on the Falls at Niagara Falls a floor consisting of nothing but a restaurant, and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago a mezzanine

Cruise liners run their decks from twelve to fourteen. Several London streets have no house number 13, among them Fleet Street, Park Lane, Oxford Street and the Haymarket, and no evidence is offered for why.

Where the habit began is not known, and a wholly unsuperstitious explanation sits beside it. New York architectural critics during the first skyscraper boom warned developers against building above the thirteenth floor, roughly 130 feet, on the grounds that the extra height would bring street congestion, ominous shadows and falling property values. By 1939 the sociologist Otto Neurath had adopted the absent thirteenth floor as his standard example of a convention with nothing behind it, setting it beside the use of money in an economy.

Vancouver's planners went the other way and banned the practice, on the grounds that a building whose labels are wrong by one sends emergency crews to the wrong floor.

Ships and spacecraft did the same arithmetic. The submarine K13 sank on trials on 29 January 1917 after diving with a hatch and some vents open; forty-eight men were brought out and thirty-two died. She was raised, repaired and renamed K22, and the British L-class boats that followed had no L13. Apollo 13 lifted off on 11 April 1970 at 13:13 Central time and lost an oxygen tank on 13 April, which was not a Friday.

The Space Shuttle case is better, because there the superstition loses. What would have been STS-13 was renamed STS-41-C under a new numbering scheme, and NASA said in a 2016 article that the change was driven by the planned launch rate rather than by nerves. STS-41-C turned out to be the eleventh mission to fly; the thirteenth by launch date was STS-41-G. Wikipedia reports that the crew concerned were unbothered, flew a mission patch with a black cat on it, and landed on a Friday the thirteenth. The programme's disaster came on the hundred and thirteenth launch, STS-107, while the mission actually numbered STS-113 flew and returned without incident.

The most expensive instance is Irish. Registration plates there open with the year, so cars sold in 2013 would have read 13, and the Society of the Irish Motor Industry warned in 2012 that the digits would deter buyers in a market that was already weak. The government agreed a split: vehicles registered in the first six months of 2013 read 131, those in the second six months 132.

The empty floor then became a genre. A secret thirteenth floor turns up in a Superman story in Action Comics #448 in June 1975, in the film The Thirteenth Floor, in the computer game Floor 13, and in the name of the band The 13th Floor Elevators, and most of those treatments run on the same conspiracy reading: that the floor is there, and something is happening on it.

Which places treat the number as lucky

The number carries none of this on its own. France thought thirteen lucky before the First World War and put it on postcards and charms. Italy still does, apart from at the dinner table. Colgate University was founded by thirteen men with thirteen dollars and thirteen prayers, and keeps Friday the thirteenth as its luckiest day of the year.

Sport is full of it. Eusébio wore thirteen for Portugal at the 1966 World Cup, scored nine goals including four in a 5-3 quarter-final against North Korea, and took the Golden Boot as the tournament's leading scorer. Wilt Chamberlain's thirteen has been retired by five clubs. Miami retired Dan Marino's number on 23 November 2003 and Toronto retired Mats Sundin's on 15 October 2016. Several Venezuelan players, Dave Concepción and Omar Vizquel among them, chose the number because it is lucky at home.

In Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong and Macau thirteen is welcome, because it sounds like the words for being sure to live. The number skipped there is fourteen, which sounds like being sure to die.