JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

© 2010

Triskaidekaphilia: Horror Fiction’s First ‘Friday the 13th’

Unlucky Friday the 13^th has been cemented into modern folklore by a seemingly endless series of horror films carrying the phrase as a brand name. But for 70 years, the origin of Friday the 13^th—both the superstition and the phrase—was a mystery. It was only in 2004 that author Nathaniel Lachenmeyer finally tracked down “Friday the 13^th” to its ancestral home in a long-lost 1907 novel—a different kind of horror story about a Wall Street meltdown.

But I recently discovered “Friday the 13^th” in print a full 35 years earlier in a work by the seminal ghost story author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.¹ His 1872 story “Mr. Justice Harbottle” surely did not popularize “Friday the 13^th.” But it is likely the first use of “Friday the 13^th” in weird fiction, and may well be the first known use of the term in its modern superstitious meaning, period.²

I researched the origins of Friday the 13^th myself a decade ago, when I wrote a newspaper answer-man column.³ Friday the 13^th is a relatively recent joining of much older, separate superstitions about Friday and the number 13. While the number 13 maintains an independent, free-floating unluckiness in pop culture and folklore, “Friday the 13^th” has swallowed the generic unlucky-Friday superstition. (It is hard to imagine how an anti-Friday superstition could survive anyway in the era of the worker-worshipped weekend.)

The origins of the independent Friday and 13 superstitions are murky, though both clearly were shaped strongly by Christianity. Unlucky-Friday lore dates to the 1300s at the latest and likely originated in the traditional understanding that Jesus was crucified on a Friday. The superstition may have been both imitated and reinforced by a British and American custom of executing criminals on a Friday, a habit that extended into the early 20^th century.

Fear of the number 13 is a product of ancient numerological magic with a history that is completely lost. But it has been bolstered by the Biblical tale of the Last Supper, where Jesus and his 11 faithful disciples were joined by the traitorous Judas to make 13 diners. That plainly accounts for the more specific superstition that it is unlucky to seat 13 people at a table.

One would expect that a Friday that fell on a 13^th would be considered doubly unlucky. And perhaps it always was. But the first references in print to mention the coincidence as superstitiously significant date to the late 1800s. One certainly can find prior references to the 13^th day of the month falling on a Friday when necessity required such a detail, but without any allusion to superstition. (This rarity could be an artifact of the dominance of early publishing by scholars, gentry and government. One of the earliest references to Friday falling on a 13^th as doubly unlucky is in a journal of the then-new field of folklore.⁴)

As the turn of the 19^th century approached, newspapers increasingly pointed out juxtapositions of Friday and the 13^th.⁵ But it remained clear that they were referring to coincidences of two separate superstitions. The traditions merged into a singular Friday the 13^th sometime in the early 20^th century, but exactly when and why was long a mystery. When I conducted my five business days worth of research for my answer-man column, I got as far as slang experts of the time could lead me: a 1913 citation of “Friday the 13^th” that was the earliest known, but surely not the first.

In his book “Thirteen: The Story of the World’s Most Notorious Superstition,” Lachenmeyer dug deeper and unearthed a convincing solution to the mystery. Scrutinizing the archives of the New York Times, Lachenmeyer discovered a heavily promoted 1907 novel titled “Friday, the Thirteenth” about a disastrous scheme to manipulate the stock market set to occur on the ominous date. Despite the now-awkward punctuation and spelling in the title, the book itself uses the familiar “Friday the 13^th” phrase pervasively, including in its opening sentence, and melds the two superstitions into one disastrous referent. Lachenmeyer also demonstrated the influence of the book; the Times cited its author a full 16 years later, in an article published on a Friday the 13^th, as a source of Wall Street superstition.

As I sat in park yesterday reading Le Fanu’s 1872 short story collection “In a Glass Darkly,” I was as yet unaware that Lachenmeyer had solved the mystery of “Friday the 13^th,” but I knew its origins are firmly rooted somewhere in the early 1900s. So I did a double-take when, in Le Fanu’s “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” I saw the words “Friday the 13^th” used in a crucial morbid moment.

Le Fanu’s story concerns a corrupt judge who has a man unjustly hanged, then is hanged himself after being tormented and “convicted” by a ghostly court.⁶ The death sentence of the judge’s unfortunate victim is described in the form of a brief newspaper article that begins: “‘Executed accordingly, on Friday the 13^th instant, to wit….”⁷

I propose that in this line, Le Fanu independently invented the modern concept and term of a dreadful Friday the 13^th. There is no sign that he popularized the idea (though his stories indeed were popular); that was surely the work of the 1907 novel. Rather, he prefigured it in a time when the Friday and 13 superstitions were gradually dovetailing in pop culture.

Le Fanu’s phrasing exactly matches the modern, unitary “Friday the 13^th,” with no sign that he is referring to separate superstitions. Lachenmeyer notes that early citations of juxtapositions of Friday and the 13^th “always” used a self-conscious comma—“Friday, the 13^th”—that made clear the reference to separate superstitions. Lachenmeyer oversells the significance of the comma a bit, but it is indeed a useful hallmark, and it is notable, if not definitive, that Le Fanu’s usage is comma-free.⁸

It could be argued that Le Fanu merely chose an arbitrary date for his fictional hanging, and made it a Friday because, as aforementioned, that was a traditional execution day. But it is almost inconceivable that anyone in Western culture would use “13” without a nod to its enormous cultural baggage, and unlikely that an author well-versed in the weird would be unaware of the then current unlucky-Friday superstition.

Furthermore, “Mr. Justice Harbottle” is a story rich in symbolism, puns and allusions. The characters include a “Doctor Hedstone”; the magistrate of the ghostly court is a gigantic, double-sized doppelganger of Harbottle named “Chief-Justice Twofold”; a mysterious visitor who warns of a Jacobite conspiracy lodges at an inn called the Three Kings. This level of wordplay suggests that the use of “Friday the 13^th” is as significant and intentional as everything else in the tale.

And the Friday the 13^th execution is the pivotal moment of the story: Harbottle descends to the depth of depravity, and his victim transforms into the vengeful revenant who will lead him to his doom. Le Fanu’s usage of “Friday the 13^th” here is strikingly modern in meaning: the day is not unlucky per se, but rather is broadly sinister, a time of dark deeds.

The execution date is mentioned a second time in the story in the context of a letter, where is it given only as “the — ^th day of —.” The blanks are a rhetorical device in 19^th century fiction for evoking realism by pretending to politely censor details that would render identifiable people and places referred to in the tale. Le Fanu’s avoidance of the chance to repeat “Friday the 13^th” could be seen as damaging to my interpretation. While his motive for doing so is unclear, there is no reason to think that his blanked-out reference changed the date from the 13^th; note the “th” still in place. I find it more compelling that he gave the “13^th” in the first instance when he could have blanked it just as easily. Indeed, I believe that the 13^th is the key to an otherwise unexplained plot device.

The main point of the fictional letter is to inform Harbottle that the ghostly court will “try” him on the 10^th of the month and “execute” him on the 10^th of the following month. No explanation is given for why the 10^th was chosen. The timeline of the story is vague and even confusing, but textual evidence suggests that the judge’s victim was tried “two or three days” prior to his execution on the 13^th. That allows for the victim’s trial to have taken place on the 10^th of the month. As the structure of the story is built on the parallel fates of the judge and his victim, it appears logical to suppose that Le Fanu chose the 10^th for the judge’s trial as an echo of the victim’s trial. (Of course, the parallelism breaks down in that the judge will be executed on the 10^th, not the 13^th; Le Fanu may simply have found the precise one-month wait on death row to be more aesthetically satisfying than rigidly adhering to his structure.) If that is so, then it seems that Le Fanu used the 13^th as the significant hub of his timeline, backdating the trial from there.

Whatever Le Fanu’s intent in using “Friday the 13^th,” today’s reader cannot help but impose the term’s modern meaning on the line. When I read it, my first reaction was to snort and chuckle, judging it to a cliché piece of stage-dressing before I realized that it might be an original. For that matter, in combining two superstitions into one, Le Fanu may have intended that his readers laugh. With its frequent allusions to William Hogarth, “Mr. Justice Harbottle” is not merely a supernatural tale, but also a scathing satire of official corruption. Harbottle is a black-comedy caricature, so thorough a scoundrel that he serves punch out of his grandfather’s baptismal bowl. The culmination of his evil on an excessively ill-favored day fits right into that picture.

I feel quite lucky to be the reader with the right background to notice Le Fanu’s superstitious citation—and particularly that I happened to do so in a work week that will end with a Friday the 13^th.⁹

¹ “In a Glass Darkly,” Oxford World’s Classic edition (Oxford University Press, 2008).

² “Mr. Justice Harbottle” is a retitled and mildly revised version of Le Fanu’s story “The Haunted House in Westminster,” which appeared earlier the same year in the magazine “Belgravia.” The “Friday the 13^th” reference is exactly the same in “Haunted House,” which is therefore literally the first use of the phrase by Le Fanu, and perhaps by anyone. To lay out my arguments in this column, I will analyze “Harbottle” because it is the canonical and easily accessible version of the story; was published in the same calendar year; and is identical to “Haunted House” in all relevant passages. (Source: “Belgravia,” Jan. 1872, Vol. 16, p. 261-285, via Google Books.)

³ “Stupid Question” for Aug. 12 and Aug. 26, 1999, at http://archives.stupidquestion.net/sq81299fridaythe13th.html and http://archives.stupidquestion.net/sq82699toiletseats.html. I also addressed the apparently related phenomenon of “Tuesday the 13^th” in Mexico. Note that, like the present column, my original “Stupid Question” column also was published the week of a Friday the 13^th.

⁴ Anonymous review of the book “Biblioteca delle Tradizione Popolari Siciliane” by Guiseppe Pitré in “The Folklore Journal,” the Folklore Society (UK), 1889, Vol. VII, pp. 322-330, via Google Books. In a discussion of the book’s treatment of Friday being considered unlucky, the author notes: “Rossini, who made no secret of his scepticism, yet bowed to this superstition, and it so befell that he died on a Friday, the 13^th of the month.” The composer Gioachino Rossini indeed died on a Friday the 13^th, and he was briefly a favorite example of this doubly unlucky date. But the examples always made clear, as it is here, that Friday was considered the main piece of misfortune, with the 13^th merely supplemental.

⁵ “Thirteen: The Story of the World’s Most Notorious Superstition” by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), via Google Books.

⁶ As in most of Le Fanu’s stories, the tale is at least technically ambiguous as to whether the ghosts and demons are real; whether Harbottle is simply suffering guilt-induced hallucinations, madness and persecution by living people; or all of the above.

⁷ “Instant” in this sense means “of the present month.” There follows a list of executed criminals, including the judge’s victim, one Lewis Pyneweck. As a trivia note, the list includes a Flora Guy, which is the name of a character in Le Fanu’s first novel, “The Cock and Anchor” (Downey & Co., 1895; originally 1845, via Google Books).

⁸ The “Friday the 13^th” reference is exactly the same, without a comma, in the original “Haunted House” version of the story (see note 2 above). “Haunted House” in turn was a heavily rewritten version of Le Fanu’s story “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House in Aungier-Street,” which contains no references to Fridays or 13. (Source: “Dublin University Magazine,” Dec. 1853, Vol. 42, No. 252, pp. 721-731, via Google Books. As a side note, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of “In a Glass Darkly” twice incorrectly gives the title of this story as “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier-Street.”) No manuscript versions of any version of this story are known to survive, according to Le Fanu expert and bibliographer Gary William Crawford (publisher of the journal “Le Fanu Studies”), so it is unknown whether Le Fanu personally wrote “Friday the 13^th” without a comma or whether that was the work of his editors and publishers. (Source: E-mail interview, Aug. 10, 2010.) However, it is notable that no change was made in the revision of “Haunted House” into “Harbottle.” N.B.: While I am generally scrupulous in quoting Le Fanu, his use of dates, including “Friday the 13^th,” places the “th” in regular script rather than superscript. I use superscript to retain the clarity of modern convention.

As for using the comma as a litmus test for the meaning of “Friday the 13^th,” Lachenmeyer claims: “Friday the 13^th was marginally unluckier than the other 13^th days, but only because it combined two distinct unlucky superstitions: 13 and Friday. Evidence of this can be found in a grammatical peculiarity of the [late 19^th and early 20^th century] period: the fateful date always appeared in print as ‘Friday, the 13^th.’ The comma denotes the fact that Friday and the 13^th were perceived as different phenomena.”

That is a misleading observation, because it overlooks the fact that the vast majority of references to Friday the 13^th in print from that time are normal dates with no superstitious context at all, and that punctuating any such day/date formula with a comma was quite common. Obviously, the way that regular dates were written was the main influence on how “Friday the 13^th” was written. Having just reviewed approximately 320 books, journals and government publications from the 19^th century on Google Books, I found that non-superstitious records of Friday the 13^ths appeared both with and without commas, though mostly with, and typically in the form, “Friday, the 13^th of [the particular month].” The short lesson is that the comma is not nearly as definitive as Lachenmeyer claims. The full context of the usage is what matters.

Likewise, the lack of a comma in Le Fanu’s “Friday the 13^th” may be a matter of general convention. Le Fanu in the story is imitating a newspaper’s publication of a government report. His full phrase is “Friday the 13^th instant.” (See note 6 above.) My Google Books research found that plainly non-superstitious uses of the phrase “Friday the 13^th instant” elsewhere typically did not use a comma, either (though some did).

Was Le Fanu simply parroting a real-life day/date formula with no sense of the superstitious? It is possible. My pro-superstition argument rests not on commas, but on the context of a fiction author creating a key moment in a weird tale. Indeed, I would argue that Le Fanu’s effort to imitate an official report is indicative of the deliberate creativity he was applying to the passage in question. Likewise, it appears from my Google Books research and the “Oxford English Dictionary Online” database that this way of using “instant” was already somewhat old-fashioned by Le Fanu’s time (the main action of the story is set decades earlier), further indicating that he was applying creative effort rather than tossing out a day/date.

⁹ An irony in my personal experience is that I already read “Mr. Justice Harbottle” in an anthology approximately 20 years ago. Thus, I already once laid eyes on Le Fanu’s “Friday the 13^th” long before I had any awareness of its potential significance.

Posted Aug. 11, 2010.

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