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28/11/2021

The internationally accepted Gregorian calendar may be split into 12 months, but things were almost very different. If the world followed the International Fixed calendar, we'd have 13 months. In this alternative system, each month includes the exact same number of days, which is 28 instead of 30 or 31 like we have now. The calendar was created by Moses Cotsworth, a North Eastern Railway advisor who was annoyed by the way months with different numbers of days affected his paychecks. (Aren't we all, Cotsworth. Aren't we all.)

28/11/2021

The Donnellys of Armagh, Ireland, consist of 13 living siblings born between 1924 and 1945, which helped them earn a Guinness World Record for the highest combined age of any living siblings on earth. In 2017, the 13 brothers and sisters—John (born in 1924), Mary (born in 1925), Eileen (born in 1927), Peter (born in 1929), Margaret (born in 1930), Rose (born in 1932), William (born in 1934), Terence (born in 1935), James (born in 1937), Brian (born in 1940), Kathleen (born in 1941), Hugh (born in 1943), and Gerald (born in 1945)—reached a combined age of 1,075 years and 68 days.

28/11/2021

Some condos, hotels, and office buildings may refuse to acknowledge their 13th floors to calm anyone who fears the unlucky number—and that's the same motivation behind a London hospital's decision to get rid of some of its beds. Because the beds are numbered, superstitious patients want to avoid bed number 13, because they "consider it an unlucky omen" and it causes them "unnecessary worry," according to The Daily Mail. To calm these fears, St. Thomas' Hospital in south London now has beds that go from 12 to 14.

28/11/2021

While some buildings avoid deeming their 13th floor as such, owners in Vancouver aren't allowed to do so. The Canadian city used to let builders jump to number 14 to avoid the unlucky number. However, things started to get out of hand when there were also requests to skip any floor that had the number 4 in it (i.e. 4, 14, 24, 34, etc.) because that's also considered unlucky in some cultures. "We're back to basic math at the city," the city's Chief Building Official Pat Ryan told the Vancouver Sun in 2015. "It was very hard to justify why we were doing this if something were to go wrong."

28/11/2021

Plenty of buildings have a 13th floor—but often, it'll go by a different name. Frankly, selling condos or getting hotel guests to stay on the 13th floor has proven difficult. In 2015, the New York City-based housing data and listings firm CityRealty released a list of condos in Manhattan that have a 13th floor. According to The Atlantic, "the company found that, out of 629 buildings with 13 or more floors, only 55 labeled the 13th floor as the 13th floor. That means only 9 percent of the condos that actually have 13th floors label them as such. The remaining 91 percent of buildings with 13th floors relabeled them."

28/11/2021

Sure, there's no proof that bad things are more likely to happen on Friday the 13th—but many disasters certainly have. For example, on a Friday the 13th in 1972, a plane crashed in the Andes, and the survivors reluctantly resorted to cannibalism. On the same day, a Russian plane crashed near Moscow, killing 174 people. On a Friday the 13th in 2006, nearly 400,000 people lost power in Buffalo, New York, when a blizzard buried the city in two feet of snow—in October! Suffice it to say, sometimes bad things do happen on the 13th.

28/11/2021

If you, like FDR, are the kind of person who fears they'll suffer an unusually unfortunate fate on Friday the 13th, you can breathe a little easier. "No data exists, and will never exist, to confirm that the number 13 is an unlucky number," Igor Radun of the Human Factors and Safety Behavior Group at the University of Helsinki told Live Science. "There is no reason to believe that any number would be lucky or unlucky."

28/11/2021

King isn't the only famous name associated with triskaidekaphobia. President Franklin D. Roosevelt also suffered from this fear, which is why he was extremely cautious with the number, according to his biographer, journalist John Gunther. "[Like] most people with good luck, FDR was moderately—not excessively—superstitious. He hated Friday the 13th, he would never start an important trip on a Friday if he could help it, and he disliked sitting down with 13 at dinner," Gunther once wrote.

28/11/2021

Some people aren't just leery of the number 13—they're downright terrified of it. Those who fear this number suffer from what's known as triskaidekaphobia.

28/11/2021

It just so happens that quite a few serial killers have 13-letter names, including Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy, and Albert DeSalvo. Even Jack the Ripper has 13 letters, as does Adolfus Hi**er, which was Adolf Hi**er's baptismal name.

09/11/2021

09/11/2021

09/11/2021