Thirteen Is Unlucky

No thirteenth floor here. or fourth. Or fourteenth.
"The hotel I'm staying in has no 13th floor 'cause of superstition. But people on the 14th floor: You know what floor you're really on. What room are you in? 1401? No, you're not! If you jump out that window, you will die earlier."
—Mitch Hedberg

Similar to how Four Is Death and 108 is significant, the number thirteen is often considered an unlucky number in the western world.

There is some debate over the source of fear towards the number thirteen, though the writer Nathaniel Lachenmeyer has argued that the original 'unlucky thirteen' superstition was the 19th century belief that if thirteen people sat at a dinner table one would die before the end of the year. (Presumably he hadn't read the Greek myth using the trope.) Certainly it was established by the early 20th century when the word triskaidekaphobia was coined to describe an irrational fear of the number thirteen, a fear which has become so prevailent that many buildings in America will not have a 13th floor. If it is not particularly subtle it's the writers beating you over the head with symbolism.

Some will cite thirteen as being the number of Judas Iscariot; one of the Twelve Disciples of Jesus in The Bible; and the one who betrayed him. Technically he was replaced by Matthias; but...

Another myth was that Loki, the Norse god of trickery who (of course) betrayed all the others, was the 13th of the Aesir (battle gods). Friday the 13th was unlucky because Friday means "Freyja's Day," and Freyja (the goddess of love) was known to be hot-tempered and had a grudge against Loki.

Often writers will associate someone or something to the number thirteen to show that they are dark, evil, unnatural, or just unlucky. Maybe the Butt Monkey or the Cosmic Plaything was born on the 13th.

Friday the 13th is believed to be a particularly unlucky day, and has even spawned a movie franchise. Weirdly the idea that Friday the 13th is especially unlucky apparently appeared relatively late - in the 19th century both thirteen and Friday were seperately unlucky.

Note: This is not a repository for every time the number thirteen just happened to appear in history (we're looking at you, Apollo XIII and the thirteen stripes on the United States flag), this is for when writers use the number thirteen to denote something bad, or just really unusual.

Examples of Thirteen Is Unlucky include:

Anime and Manga

  • The 13th Squad from Bleach never ran out of bad luck. Their Captain is a very, very sick man, their original Vice-Captain was possessed by a Hollow forcing Rukia to kill him, and don't get me started with Rukia's misadventures.
  • The titular Golgo 13 has a Mysterious Past, but is not unlucky himself. He is bad luck for whoever his target is.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist has "The Mystery of Warehouse 13" - which turns out to be a misreading of Warehouse B. It is a very bad place.
  • Train from Black Cat has the number 13 etched on the side of his custom-made gun. Like Golgo 13, it's usually bad luck for the person fighting him (he can even use his gun to deflect bullets). He also has the number 13 tattooed on his collar. Not to mention that his catch phrase is "I'm here to bring some bad luck."
    • It's actually the Roman numeral for 13: XIII.
  • Hellsing has a secret Vatican organization known as Section XIII: Iscariot. They're a creepy bunch.
  • In Gundam Seed, the Big Bad's Gundam is called ZGMF-X13A Providence.
    • In Gundam Wing, Treize Khushrenada, the closest thing the show has to a Big Bad, is named for thirteen.
  • In Death Note, Light Yagami was probably trying to invoke this trope when he had Ryuk add a fake rule to the Death Note's directions. The "thirteen day rule" stated that anyone who wrote a name in the Death Note and did not keep writing names would die after thirteen days. This retroactively "proved" Light's and Misa's innocence after their confinement, and Light was noticeably angered when Mello disproved it. He considered it critical enough that he was willing to murder his own father to preserve the illusion.
  • This trope is invoked in Legend of the Galactic Heroes. The Alliance's 13th Fleet, under the control of Yang Wenli, is a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, originally only half the size of other fleets and composed of raw recruits and remnants of devastated forces. However, they're anything but unlucky due to Wenli's tactical genius.

Comic Books

  • The DC Comics character Doctor Thirteen is a paranormal investigator. His daughter Traci Thirteen is a sorceress. Neither one is a particularly bad sort, though Doctor Thirteen is a Flat Earth Atheist suffering from Arbitrary Skepticism. (Aversion)
  • Managsine hasn't had a page 13 for fifteen years or so. It has a page 12, 12bis, and it goes on to 14.
  • In DC Comics' old horror anthology series House of Mystery, the 13th page of every issue always broke from whatever story was being told to foretell some gruesome event in the reader's future/fake a misprinted page because "that's just what happens when you try to print something on page 13."
    • In homage to this, the current House of Mystery series made #13 an "Aniversary Issue" with three "13" related stories (reflecting its anthology roots), and an activity page by Siergo Aragones (returning to Cain and Abel some 23 years after Plop!). The latter was supposed to be page 13, as a direct homage, but they couldn't get it to work, so instead they numbered every page 13.
  • A Thomas the Tank Engine comic story had an engine named "Unlucky no.13" who had bad luck.
  • The comic book series and videogame XIII, which is about a man with amnesia, the number XIII tatooed on his back, and a knack for using weapons.
  • In ABC Warriors, during the Volgan War Arc, Volkhan recruits thirteen (well, twelve plus Mek-Quake) disciples.
  • Sweet Chastity has Vincent, 13th baron von Frankenstein. 'nuff said.
  • As everyone knows, Garfield hates Mondays. Slightly less known is the fact that he hates February. One strip had him take Jon's announcement that it was February and Monday in stride...only to scream when Jon points out that it was also the 13th.
  • Dark Horse's Spy Boy skipped the 13th issue, but eventually it appeared as a miniseries that is numbered as 13.1, 13.2 and 13.3. Very bad things happen to a cast member on it.
  • In Fables, all the witches from fables live on the thirteenth floor of the Bullfinch building in Fabletown. They're not entirely evil, more Chaotic Neutral.

Film - Animated

  • In The Rescuers movie, Bernard was afraid of the number thirteen, especially when it came to the number of steps on a ladder or stairs. The movie also ended on a Friday the 13th, if you look at the calendar shown.

Film - Live-Action

  • Buster Keaton used this trope a few times.
    • Convict 13, in which an innocent man is mistaken for an escaped felon.
    • In One Week, the newlyweds' housewarming party is held on Friday the 13th.
    • In Sherlock Jr, the exploding pool ball is numbered 13.
  • The movie 13 Ghosts is about a machine powered by ghosts to see into the future. The number of ghosts needed was probably not a coincidence.
  • Room Fourteen Oh Eight takes place on the thirteenth floor. And its room numbers add up to thirteen.
    • Every numbers in the movie add to 13. The room's key lock has "6214" etched into it, the first death was in the year 1912, the hotel is mentioned to be at 2254 Lexington Street in New York City, "this is 5" then "this is 8", Mike opens the room's Bible at random to Chapter 11 of book Samuel 2, and the movie was released in the US in June 22, 2007.
    • The normal DVD version's runtime is 104 minutes, 8 seconds. The director's cut is 112 minutes (1 + 12...)
  • As stated before, the movie franchise Friday the 13 th, which is about Jason Voorhees (who drowned on Friday the 13th) coming back on Friday the 13th to murder teenagers.
  • Apollo 13: Both the movie and the real mission went badly. However, the film actually deconstructs this trope twice before the mission takes place.
    • First, Marilyn's reaction upon hearing that Jim has been bumped up is to note that it's number 13. Jim tells her that it comes after twelve.
    • Second, while being interviewed by the media, Jim, Fred and Ken joke about having a black cat walk across a broken mirror under the lunar module ladder. Considering how things turned out...
    • Notably, while a lot of things went wrong, a lot of things also went right enough that they survived. For instance, the astronauts were damn lucky the explosion happened in the beginning of the mission when they had a full complement of supplies and equipment; they would have had no chance if it occurred at the moon or on the trip back.
    • It's interesting to note that NASA has not had a 13 mission since. Even the STS-# designations for the shuttle missions leaves off at STS-9 and goes to a different designation system before picking back up at STS-26.
      • Many airlines will not reuse flight numbers if there's been a serious incident on a flight, so that's not that strange. If the problems had happened on Apollo 14, they'd probably not have any 14 missions anymore.
  • Banlieue 13 is a very crapsack place filled with heavily armed gangs, drug dealers, and poor people that the president would rather nuke it then deal with it. Also doubles as a pun, since a stenciled B resembles a 13. The sequel ditched the B.

Literature

  • A Series of Unfortunate Events has thirteen books, which would fit with its macabre nature.
    • Each of which has thirteen chapters.
      • Mildly subverted in that the 13th book contains the 14th book, which is a chapter long. Lampshaded in that it's called Chapter Fourteen.
      • And the author's name has thirteen letters. (Both "Lemony Snicket" and his real name.)
        • As does the publisher. The series runneth over with this trope.
  • The Wheel of Time has thirteen Forsaken, the Dragons[1] of the series.
  • At the beginning of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the clock strikes thirteen, which is an early indication of just how wrong the world has gone. That or it's running on military time ... or both. The specific use of 13 and not "13-hundred" tells the reader we are in a military controlled setting, but something is wrong with the world.
  • In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book Mostly Harmless, the evil Guide-bird was being kept on floor thirteen. Maybe lampshaded because Ford notices that the elevator doesn't have a thirteenth button, and he thinks that's weird because only humans have a fear of 13, and that's how he figures out the bird-thing was being kept there.
  • Encyclopedia Brown has a friend nicknamed Trisk, (which is short for Triskaidekaphobia) who is terribly superstitious, particularly about his namesake.
  • Rincewind from the Discworld novels was born on, you guessed it, the thirteenth.
  • The Hobbit has a group of thirteen Dwarves - plus Bilbo, "the lucky number".
  • The Dark Tower series contains Maerlyn's Rainbow, a multi-colored set of thirteen crystal balls that allow their possessor to divine various actions depending on the specific ball. None of them are terribly nice—the pink one, for example, only allows its user to see people at their absolute worst and eats away at their life—but the most dangerous of the lot is the Black Thirteen itself, which is said to allow the local Satan figure to look out of it and causes the September 11th World Trade Center attacks.
  • The War Against the Chtorr. When the protagonist first encounters the Uncle Ira Group, they take him to the Missing Floor of a hotel (which is naturally on the 13th floor) and put him in Room 1313. He doesn't Have A Bad Feeling About This until he finds the door locked and his access to a terminal cut off. When the Uncle Ira Group does let him out, it's because they've decided to set him up to be killed.
  • District 13 in the The Hunger Games gets destroyed.
  • Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child. Though Eff's actual problem is that people expect a thirteenth child to turn out bad. (She's also the seventh daughter, as other characters point out.)
  • In the Harry Potter books, Professor Trelawney has a fear of thirteen, and in particular mentions the superstition that when thirteen dine together, the first to rise from the table will be the first to die. In Order of the Phoenix, she's right.
  • Inverted in Midnighters, where 13 is an extremely lucky number—for humans, anyways. Seeing 13 of anything (or even hearing a 13-letter word) is a Brown Note for slithers, and one of the few ways to keep them from killing you if they catch you.
    • Arguably played straight when Rex the Darklings try to turn Rex into one of them. Although they are mostly unsuccessful, he finds that he is now repulsed and weakened by the number 13, just like the Darklings, though not as strongly because he is still mostly human.
  • In The Dresden Files series, the pub used as a meeting ground is said to have thirteen column and thirteen tables as a way of dispersing magical energies. While not unlucky per say, it does rely on thirteen being a number intrinsically adversed to the workings of magic.
  • In Replica the thirteenth Amy clone (who was not supposed to exist and accidentally off from the twelfth) is the only Amy who does not have the clone perfection.
  • In A Song of Ice and Fire, the thirteenth commander of the Night's Watch, known only as "Night's King," enslaved the Watch with sorcery after marrying a "pale, unholy woman" and was the cause of atrocities for thirteen years before he was killed.
  • Thirteen, especially when you consider that the movie is basically supposed to prey on parents' worst fears.
  • In Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Monster Men, Professor Maxon is convinced that Number 13 will be his successful experiment.
  • In Monster Hunter Alpha, it's mentioned that monster hunting organizations, a very high risk profession, use a "Type 13" Federal Firearms License. This wouldn't be too unusual, but there are only 11, not 12, types of FFL in the real world and in universe monster hunting predates the scheme's creation. It seems someone in the government (which doesn't like civilian hunters) intentionally gave them the unlucky number.

Live Action TV

  • House has a character commonly known as Thirteen who has Huntington's Disease.
  • The Munsters live at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.
  • In the episode of Captain Scarlet where the titular gets fired, the reason as to why was because he lost all his money whilst gambling, his last act being to put them all on no. 13 (you can guess how that turned out).
    • An earlier episode featured Big Ben striking 13 (apparently due to the distance you are from it). At the end Scarlet says he considers it his "lucky number" .
  • In Lexx, Category 13 biohazards and Type 13 planets are among the most dangerous kinds of each.
  • 13 Black from Robot Wars had 2 huge spinning discs for massive destructive potential, and yet, it never lived up to its capabilities. Their motto was "unlucky for some..."
    • And in season four, 13th seed Gravedigger coincidentally went out in the first round.
  • Psych did an episode spoofing summer camp horror films, titled "Tuesday the 17th." It was aired on a Friday the 13th.
  • Battlestar Galactica - Twelve tribes of man who founded the Twelve Colonies... plus one that "got lost" and inspired the survivors to go on a wild goose chase In Space to find a planet called Earth. Twelve Lords (gods) of Kobol... plus one who became the Cylon God. Also there are 13 human-like Cylons - five "originals" and their eight creations (numbered 1-8) - however only twelve survived long enough to be considered important, since #1 killed the #7s and then programed the others to ignore the gap between 6 and 8.
  • Sarah Jane of The Sarah Jane Adventures lives at 13 Bannerman Road, but is not really that unlucky. Her life is just weird.
  • On The Price Is Right, there is a game called Half Off, where $10,000 is hidden in one of sixteen numbered boxes. To date, the cash has been hidden in fifteen of those boxes several times, but it has not once been placed in box #13.
  • Warehouse 13 has the titular warehouse, which does contain all sorts of magical artifacts.
  • A Good Burger sketch had the workers frightened of Saturday the 14th due to a haunting.
  • Agent 13 on Get Smart was a character who always got terrible assignments, that often went hilariously wrong.
  • Rome shows why 13 is unlucky... To people not Roman. Legio XII Gemina, the 13th Legion was Caeser's Legion that crossed the Rubicon.
  • Dexter has Lumen Pierce, also known as No. 13, the victim of a group of a murdering rapist/torturers. Who leads to the destruction of the entire gang after being rescued by Dexter when he kills one of the members right before she would have ended up as the thirteenth Barrel Girl.
  • Both Masters of Horror and Fear Itself had 13 episodes per season.
  • Kamen Rider Ryuki and Kamen Rider Dragon Knight involved thirteen Riders, and in Ryuki they're all trying to kill each other because There Can Be Only One. There are two good candidates for being the unlucky 13th one: Odin/Wrath, who is the most powerful and under direct control of the Big Bad; and Ryuga/Onyx, an unintended addition to the original twelve and Evil Twin of The Hero (though played with in Dragon Knight, as the Evil Twin takes over the title role instead and the Good Twin gets the Onyx gear in response).


Music

  • Some artists intentionally "skip" track 13 on albums (usually by making track 13 a few seconds of silence). Examples include:
    • Alan Jackson's Who I Am skips from 12 to 14 by way of a silent track 13. Alan lampshades this trope on the liner notes, which say "That's right folks, I am just a bit superstitious."
    • Similarly, the first disc of Garth Brooks' Double Live album uses a few seconds of applause as a "phantom" track 13, so that the track listing can skip from 12 to 14.
    • Fantômas' self-titled album and The Director's Cut both have short silences as track 13. So far Suspended Animation is their only album to have an actual song on track thirteen, although Delirium Cordia was just indexed as one long track anyway.
    • Or make the thirteenth an unlisted Hidden Track.
  • Steely Dan's "Black Friday" has a rather clever example of this:

When Black Friday comes
 I'll stand down by the door
And watch the grey men when they dive from the fourteenth floor...

  • Wax actually added three silent tracks to an album with ten songs on it, just so they could somewhat justify calling it 13 Unlucky Numbers.


Other

  • A children's riddle:

"What time is it when the clock strikes 13? Time to fix the clock."

  • In Tarot, XIII is Death in the Major Arcana. While it usually does not mean physical death, it usually implies the end of something (relationship or interest).
  • Curve 13 at the Whistler Sliding Center at the Vancouver Olympics is nicknamed "50-50", because the first time people went on it there was a 50% chance of crashing, although the American bobsled driver who named it now wants to call it "100-100" because he and his team completely owned it to win gold.
  • The South Australian Department of Transport puts reverse parallel parking as task 13 in the Driving Companion. Not good for superstitious learner drivers.
  • MS-13, a notorious Latino gang in California.
  • The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose contains multiple thirteens: thirteen steps, thirteen candles in a candelabra, and so forth. Since Sarah Winchester built (and built, and built ...) the house to confound the spirits of those killed by the Winchester Rifle, perhaps the multiple thirteens were meant as bad luck for ghosts.
  • The Danzig song "Thirteen".
  • George Carlin joked about how he'd been on airplanes that didn't have rows numbered thirteen. He said that knowing the airplanes' designers had been so superstitious they thought that might save someone's life didn't make him feel all that safer.
  • Most of the legends about The Jersey Devil claim it was Mother Leeds's thirteenth child.
  • The mythological backstory for the Trojan War starts with a banquet of the gods... they only have 12 golden place settings, but Eris, goddess of Chaos, shows up uninvited with the Golden Apple. The source story for Sleeping Beauty[2] starts with a similar dinner, replacing gods with fairies.
  • In Cricket, especially in Australia, a score of 87 (thirteen short of 100) is considered unlucky.
  • The Code of Hammurabi has no 13th rule for this reason, making this trope Older Than Feudalism, if not Older Than Dirt.
  • There's no car #13 in Formula One for this reason.
  • In 13 days after defeating Oda Nobunaga, Akechi Mitsuhide and his forces were completely wiped out by Toyotomi Hideyoshi.


Professional Wrestling

  • During his WWE tenure, Tazz wore the number 13 on his gear, symbolizing the bad luck that brought his opponent face-to-face with an unstoppable rage machine like him.


Tabletop Games

  • In Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the evil, rat-like race the Skaven worship the number thirteen.
  • Old World of Darkness has various thirteen things, like thirteen vampire clans and thirteen werewolf tribes, to fit in with its whole Crapsack World. In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Wyrm has Thirteen Urges which form the heads of the hydra, each of which is served by a Maeljin Incarna, who might as well be called the Thirteen Horseman of the Apocalypse. In Vampire: The Masquerade, the thirteen vampire clans were founded by the thirteen Antediluvians.
  • In Exalted, the Neverborn's chief servants are the thirteen Deathlords, who are somewhat reminiscent of Wheel of Time's Forsaken, except undead and indestructible.
  • A recurring pattern in Eberron is to have 13 of something, with one of them lost or destroyed. There are 13 outer planes, one of which was cut off from the cosmology (and with good reason). 13 moons, one of which dissapeared. There are currently 12 calendar months (named after the moons), but it implied that there used to be 13 months. 13 nations on Khorvaire, one of which was destroyed in a magical catastrophe...
  • In the Mad City of Don't Rest Your Head, every twelth hour brings a thirteenth hour, in which the characters can not leave the city and the Nightmares go hunting...
  • The Dark Eye's religion (the most popular) features twelve good gods and the thirteenth Nameless One. And oh boy, you better not go around mentioning that guy unless you want to get serious trouble.
  • In Chrononauts, its The End of the World as We Know It if thirteen paradoxes are ever active.
  • Magic the Gathering: The Innistrad expansion has a "Thirteen" motif, with the number 13 appearing on lots of cards to intentionally evoke this trope. In Shadow's Over Innistrad, the Thirteen motif is back, best exemplified by the card Triskaidekaphobia[3]

Toys

  • Gobots although all non-monster Gobots are good guys, that didn't stop Tonka from keeping 13 off the side of good. Hans Cuff (Patrol Car Robo) was marked MR-13 in Japan, but in America, he was reassigned to #12 as he was one of the Guardians... leaving #13 to a Renegade Gobot, Fly Trap (a recoloured Sanitation Robon MR-26)
    • the Revenge of Cronos reissues assigned another designated Renegade, Tank MRB-13.
  • Transformers The original Big Bad, Megatron, was originally Micro Change figure #13.
  • Such an unlucky number is featured on jerseys of top athletes in any toyline based on Creatures of the Night, Like 'Mad Balls and Monster High.


Theatre

  • Inverted in Once Upon a Mattress, where there are thirteen princess who wanted to marry Prince Dauntless. The first twelve princess failed the Queen's test; the twelfth is even said to have failed due to bad luck. Winnifred is the thirteenth princess, and she gets the Prince.
  • Despite its title Thirteen is an aversion. The characters aren't unlucky, they're just 13 year olds. And it sucks to be 13.

Videogames

  • Kingdom Hearts has Organization XIII, which consists of thirteen (official)members who like to walk around in Black Cloaks and do not nice things, which is ambiguously justifiable in that they lost their hearts and are trying to reclaim them.
    • The means of trying to reclaim their hearts, however, involves the distortion of the heart of all worlds. Pretty unlucky.
    • And don't forget what happened to Number XIII himself...
  • You have to look for it, but since the creator of Kingdom of Loathing avoids the number 13 and has gone out of his way to code the various numbering systems to skip it over. (Read more about Kol and 13 here)
  • Subverted in The Longest Journey where 13 pops up continuously until you learn that it's actually a lucky number in the setting. And an Arc Number, to boot.
  • Ace Combat 6 had the Strigon Squad, A Rival Ace Squad to the player in the game. It is noted in Toscha Mijasik's (aka Strigon 12) Assault recored that he retained the team's number 12 since the prelude because of his Triskaidekaphobia (aka a fear of 13). Ironically, the person he looked up to was killed and the city they occupied since day one was liberated on Mission 13!
  • BlazBlue: Nu-13 causes the End Of The World repeatedly when awakened underneath the 13th Hierarchical City, Kagutsuchi.
  • Thanks to being one of Hojo's intended recipients of Jenova cells, and therefore (presumably) a future Sephiroth-clone, Nanaki of Final Fantasy VII was given the tattoo "XIII" and even called Red XIII. He is also apparently the last (or next-to-last) of his race; had his father petrified while facing off with the Gi; was held prisoner by Shinra, experimented upon, and was slated for interracial breeding with Aeris; and loses his grandfather during the course of the story. On the other hand, at least he lives all the way through, is still around 500 years later, and is one of the party's better balances between magic-user and brawler, if properly equipped and leveled. And he certainly seems to bear his misfortunes with dignity and fortitude.
    • On the other hand he's a flea-ridden dog thing, so...
  • Subverted in Fallout, the population of Vault 13 turns out to be one of the luckier of the series of 120 or so long term nuclear fallout shelters in the continental U.S., given the outcome of most of the other vaults which range from grisly to Fate Worse Than Death. It's also the home of the main character of the first game, the ancestral home of the second's main and the number 13 has become iconic in the Fallout series.
  • Inverted in Minigore. The player collects Four Leaf Clovers to gain brief spells of invincibility, the first of which always appears when the player's score reaches 13.
  • Reila of Valkyria Chronicles III has had name erased from the records and replaced with the title "Number 13." This number was likely chosen because she is the Sole Survivor of several army squads and is viewed as The Jinx.
  • Played straight and inverted in Punch-Out!!. Mr. Sandman manages to beat twelve boxers from the WVBA and becomes World champion. Little Mac, the 13th opponent, beats him and renders his victory track imperfect. The inversion comes from Mac, likewise, having defeated 12 boxers and then Mr. Sandman to become the champion. This is further symbolized with the following elements: Little Mac has 13 hearts of stamina in both fights against Sandman (the rematch is in Title Defense mode, where the latter is once again the 13th opponent), Sandman's Contender introduction cutscene is 13 images long (the other boxers only have four-image-long cutscenes), he has to be hit 13 times (in case Star Punches aren't used) after the Berserker Rage is over to be definitely defeated, and even his stats (age, fight record, height) provide nods to number thirteen as well. Something interesting to note is that he, during his World title hold, has the highest rank in the World Circuit, while Aran Ryan (who embodies the Lucky Seven trope) is the lowest in the same circuit.
  • In both the Super and Real paths of Battle Moon Wars, mission 13 features the first major boss battle in the game, against Nrvnqsr Chaos, as well as being the hardest mission up to that point (assuming one isn't aiming for the Battle Masteries.)


Webcomics


Web Original


Western Animation

  • Donald Duck's car is the "313" - it's known for being extremely unreliable.
    • It's also the area code for Detroit.
    • Speaking of Donald Duck, he was also born on Friday the 13th, according to some sources.
    • One cartoon, Donald's Lucky Day, has a very superstitious Don delivering a package on Friday the 13th to 1313 13th Street. Naturally, the package is a bomb.
  • Eugene, the Chew Toy in Hey Arnold!, was born on a Friday the 13th.
  • Fairly Oddparents Anti-Fairies escape to cause bad luck on Friday the 13th.
  • Numbah 13 on Codename: Kids Next Door is ridiculously unlucky. And a dork.
  • The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror story "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" starts "on the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month" with a meeting to discuss the misprinted calendars bought by the town.
    • "Lousy Smarch weather..."
    • Let's see, that's 1 p.m., January 13, of the year 2014...
  • The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, is about Scooby Doo and Shaggy releasing the thirteen most terrifying ghosts ever from the Chest of Demons and trying to put them all back. The really unlucky thing though was that we never got a chance to see them finish.
  • In an episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko and Heffer board a plane with flight number 1313. All kinds of misfortune occur on their flight.
  • One episode of Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? took place on Friday the 13th. It starts off with Zack losing his lucky rabbit's foot and things go downhill from there.
  • Johnny "13" first appears in the thirteenth episode of Danny Phantom. He claims to have a "reputation for being unlucky." He can also summon a Living Shadow that is also unlucky.
    • Johnny's bad luck also seems to effect his Biker Chick girlfriend, Kitty.
    • Johnny and Kitty appear to be from the 50's.
  • The Top Cat episode "Rafeefleas" has T.C. collecting money for a pizza from the gang (as part of a scheme to get free pizzas for each of them), and Brain has thirteen cents.

T.C.: Thirteen is an unlucky number. Get rid of that hoodoo! (Brain drops the money in T.C.'s hat)

  • The thirteenth original Transformer is Megatronus Prime, who actually betrays his twelve brothers to serve Unicron, hence his new title, The Fallen.
  • Stunt Dawgs: While the heroes really suffered bad luck in that day, Lucky, who's usually unlucky, was extremely lucky that day.
  • A classic Popeye short had Bluto ripping a leaf from Olive Oyl's calendar so she'd think it was "Fri 13" instead of "Thur 12".
  • In Slimer and The Real Ghostbusters, the thirteenth floor of Hotel Sedgwick is reserved for dwelling ghosts and their guests.


Real Life

  • Brazilian soccer coach Mario Jorge Lobo Zagallo is known for believing thirteen is lucky.
  • Averted with the "Baker's Dozen", which is 13. The reason was that back in the 13th century, if you cheated someone out of their goods, you would be severely punished (often losing your hand). Thus, to instill confidence, baker's sold 13 for the price of 12. It also had the side effect of you could lose one item and still be safe and that 13 fits nicely in a box in a 3:2:3:2:3 configuration.
  1. ↑ No pun intended
  2. ↑ Hawthorne Rose, from the Brothers Grimm
  3. ↑ Thirteen appears multiple times in the art, 13 words in each mode of it's ability, the letter "t" shows up thirteen times, the artist's name has 13 characters (including the space), and most obviously, what the ability actually does.
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