Are you generally superstitious? Do you consider Friday the 13th an “unlucky” day? If so, you suffer from paraskavedekatriaphobia! Paraskavedekatriaphobia is the scientific term for the fear some folks have of the date Friday the 13th. But where did this fear come from? Why is the date jinxed? How did this phobia come about? There are many schools of thought on this matter. Many rumors run wild and cover the gamut from soup to nuts. One common belief is that the superstiti

Fear of the number 13 is the most prevalent superstition in the Western world. We even have a name for it: triskaidekaphobia. It is quite common for even the most ordinarily rational and otherwise exemplary person to possess this phobia. Winston Churchill, for example, refused to sit in row 13 in the theater or on an airplane. Napoleon was also plagued by a dread of 13. Christopher Columbus, too, seems to have been afflicted. In the 1950s, the Columbiana, a group of Italian C