13 reasons to be suspicious of Friday 13th

Friday 13th is widely known as a day of bad luck. Some believe that 12 is a complete number and to go one over is unlucky, while others even believe that if 13 people sit down to eat, one will die!

Is it silly to still be suspicious of the day? Or does it speak volumes that these suspicious events all happened on Friday 13th...

Film writer Alfred Hitchcock, known for horror films The Birds and Psycho, was born on Friday 13th, 1899.

In World War 2 during the 'blitz', a bomb was dropped on Buckingham Palace on Friday 13th September 1940. 3. Rapper 2Pac was shot and killed in LA on Friday 13th. The suspicious part is that some fans believe he’s still alive! 4. A plane was downed in the Andes and an avalanche hit on Friday 13th October, 1972. Those who survived resorted to desperate measures for survival – we'll not go into the gory details! – but they can be seen in the film Alive. 5. In August 1976, a man in New York tried to stay in bed to escape any potential bad luck on Friday 13th. He was killed when the floor of his block of flats collapsed and he fell six storeys. Ouch. 6. Hurricane Charley – one of the strongest to hit the US since 1992 – caused $8 billion worth of destruction in south Florida on Friday 13th August, 2004. 7. In November 1970, again on Friday 13th, a cyclone killed 500,000 people in Bangladesh. 8. On Friday 13th 1989, a deadly virus made some computers crash in Britain. Not only did it scare people, but it deleted lots of data which couldn’t be brought back. 9. On Friday 13th June 1952, a Swedish military plane carrying a crew of eight disappeared over the Baltic Sea, sparking conspiracy theories for decades. In 1992, the Soviet Union admitted it had shot down the plane. 10. A 13-year-old boy was struck by lightning at 13.13pm on Friday the 13th, 2010. The boy was on the seafront in Suffolk and walked away with a minor burn. 11. Friday 13th March 1964 – Catherine Kitty Genovese was stabbed in New York, and although it's believed 30 neighbours saw or heard it, no-one helped. It led to sociologists creating the term ‘the bystander effect’. 12. On Friday 13th August 2010, a runaway London Underground train travelled through five stations without a driver. The train in front was forced to skip stops and was diverted to another branch of the network. 13. But it's not over yet! On Friday 13th in 2029, an asteroid is forecast to pass our planet, closer than any satellite...

Hmmm... do we believe the forecast, or is it just a silly superstition?

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