Busting the Myth of Friday the 13th and the Knights Templar
The medieval religious order that fought in the Crusades is a favored subject of superstition.
The origins of superstitions can be hard to pin down. There are often several theories about how they started, and a bunch of people ready to debunk those theories. Friday the 13th is one such example.
If you read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, you might remember learning that members of the Knights Templar—a medieval society—were arrested on Friday the 13th. Brown’s book helped popularize the belief that these arrests are the reason people fear the date. But although some of the Knights Templar were arrested on Friday, October 13, 1307, that isn’t the origin of the superstition.
Right now, the hottest take on Friday the 13th is that it wasn’t associated with bad luck until 1907, when a novel
