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And how many of you are locking yourselves in your houses because you're triskaidekaphobic?

My grandmother was.

Origins
The superstition has been linked to the fact there were 13 people at the last supper of Jesus. It has also been linked to that fact that a lunisolar calendar must have 13 months in some years, while the solar Gregorian calendar and lunar Islamic calendar always have 12 months in a year.

Triskaidekaphobia may have also affected the Vikings - it is believed that Loki in the Norse pantheon was the 13th god. This was later Christianized into saying that Satan was the 13th angel.

The Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1686 BC) omits 13 in its numbered list. This seems to indicate a superstition existed long before the Christian era.

The number 13 also retains biblical meanings. At the Last Supper, there were 13 people present. Additionally, the Christians disliked the pagans, who regarded the number 13 as a "sacred" number.

In general, 13 may be considered a "bad" number simply because it is one more than 12, which is a popularly used number in many cultures (due to it being highly composite).

Examples

An elevator without a 13th-floor button.Some buildings number their floors so as to skip the thirteenth floor entirely, jumping from floor 12 to floor 14 in order to avoid distressing triskaidekaphobics, or using 12a and 12b instead. This is sometimes applied to house or room numbers as well. The same is also true of rows in aeroplanes.

The composer Arnold Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia. He was born and died on the 13th of the month.

The Nazi fighter plane developed from the He-112 was designated He-100 in order to avoid the designation He-113, which was considered unlucky. Adolf Hitler was triskaidekaphobic. In the United States, there has never been a F-13 fighter aircraft due to many pilots being superstitious.

American singer-songwriter John Mayer had 14 tracks on his album Room for Squares, although the 13th is 0.2 seconds of silence and is not listed on the album cover.

Some refer to the near-fatal Apollo 13 mission to the moon as proof of 13 being unlucky. Apollo 13 was launched at 14:13 EST on April 11, 1970 from complex 39 (three times thirteen). Some have previously attributed it to launch on 13:13 EST, which was incorrect. [1] Apparently, Apollo 13 was also going to go through LOI Lunar Orbit Injection on April 13th.

The Spanish motor racer Ángel Nieto is famous for saying that he achieved 12 + 1 World Motorcycling Championships. A bio-pic about him is thus titled 12 + 1.