“They’re afraid something tragic or ominous would happen,’’ said Donald Dossey, a North Carolina behavioral scientist and author who said he named the fear, paraskavedekatriaphobia, proof that he does not suffer from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words.
Some feel they’re just being cautious the way Ford, Napoleon, and President Franklin Roosevelt were said to have been.
Elizabeth Lampert, a consultant in Alamo, Calif., said she doesn’t avoid everything on the 13th, but would “absolutely, absolutely’’ delay something like surgery.
“There are only a few Friday the 13ths, so why test fate?’’ Lampert said.
The phobia around the 13th is a cousin to triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number 13. Even today, Otis Elevator Co. knows better than to include a button with a 13 on it in elevators all over the world, said Dilip Rangnekar, a spokesman. The supposedly unlucky number, triskaidekaphobes say, is the reason behind the explosion of Apollo 13, which took off at exactly 1:13 p.m. (1313 military time).
It’s also the number that prompted Roosevelt to alter his travel plans on any day of the week that landed on the 13th.
“FDR would not depart on a [train] trip on the 13th,’’ said Thomas Fernsler, a University of Delaware mathematician who has studied the number enough to earn the moniker “Dr. 13.’’ He recounted a story that originated with FDR’s personal secretary, Grace Tully, who said the former president would order the train to leave the station before midnight on the 12th or after midnight on the morning of the 14th.
Roosevelt died in 1945 on April 12. Thursday, April 12.
“He avoided traveling to the beyond on the 13th,’’ joked Bob Clark, head archivist at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
The origins of all this fear of the number 13 and Friday the 13th are open for debate.
Some say it has to do with a particular Friday the 13th in the 1300s, when some particularly unlucky knights were burned at the stake. Fernsler suspects it may have something to do with Jesus Christ, who was crucified on a Friday after a Last Supper attended by 13 people, one of whom was Judas Iscariot.
Dossey has his money on Norse mythology, when Loki - referred to in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a “cunning trickster’’ - crashed a party of 12 gods at Valhalla. “That’s really when the number 13 became unlucky,’’ he explained.
