Friday The 13th

Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scare It All the Time. I'm Chris Collari. And I'm Ed Ficola. And I have been waiting all year to do this episode. If you are listening, the day that this comes out, it is Friday, November 13th, which is actually the third Friday the 13th of the year, but scheduling didn't allow for us to do this earlier. So here we are. If you've survived every Friday the 13th to date, congratulations, you're still with us and you're here to listen to this episode. Friday the 13th is a famously bad day. It's the prime cut of unluckiness, the filet mignon of failure, not to mention the namesake of one of the most successful horror franchises in history. What I wanted to know is how and why this particular day gets such a shitty reputation. Who decided that Friday was a problem? Why did 13 get lumped in with it? And does putting them together actually make a Megazord of misfortune? Today, we are going back through the history of the superstition, meeting some people who went to extraordinary lengths to defy it, and looking at what really happened on a few very bad Fridays of 13ths. So keep your lucky charms handy and hide your hockey masks. We're going to see just how bad things can get around here before the sun comes up on Saturday the 14th. What are we? Scared. When are we? Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Just a quick bit of housekeeping. Without Ed today, he is still recovering from the month of too many treats. But don't worry, I will wrap a ruler across his knuckles and get his ass back to work as soon as humanly possible. I just wanted to stop in real quick. and say that I'm so glad that you guys have enjoyed the bonus content that we put out in October. I know I said this on the last episode, but the response continues to roll in. And so if you like the supersized amount of scared all the time that you got in October, please, please, please, every subscription counts. head over to the Patreon, support the show at patreon.com slash scaredallthetime. Check out what we've got over there. I don't think you will be disappointed at all. I also wanted to stop in on our five-star review corner. You know you love it. If you listen to the show, you know that if you leave a five-star review, we will sometimes read your five-star review on the show, and someday we will get to every five-star review that has ever been left. So today I just wanted to highlight two very quickly. One is one of my favorite reviews you've ever received. But I'll start with the first, a good one. Five stars from Todd of The Pole. And his five star review is, these two don't miss. Chris and Ed just feel like some guys. Chill guys. And Todd of The Pole, that is correct. We are just chill guys who happen to enjoy speaking into a microphone directly into your ears. The second five-star review we actually received through our contact form entry on our website, which is not where I recommend you leave five-star reviews. You should leave them on Apple or Spotify, but this one is very good. It is from Shannon. It is five stars, tons of exclamation points. I hated the show at first, but kept listening because of Scott and Forrest. Those are our friends at Astonishing Legends. I fucking get it now. You guys are the best. funniest hours I've spent in my adult life, LMFAO. So Shannon, you are welcome. And also thank you for sticking with whatever bullshit you hated about the show for so long. I'm glad you came around on us. I think this is how anybody who listens to the show and doesn't immediately fall in love with it will eventually feel if they are subjected to it long enough, Clockwork Orange style. So You didn't hear it from me, but strap your friends to a chair and force feed them the show until they love it. All right, guys, I think that is basically it for housekeeping. We love you. Thanks so much for listening to the show. Follow us, rate, review, you know, all the good stuff. And enjoy this episode on Friday the 13th. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. It is Friday the 13th, and we are here to explore just how afraid of the day we should be. But before we dive in, something you should definitely not fear, our new sponsor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joritos has been kind enough to send us a couple of different drinks, and it's a heat wave still here when we're recording this, so it's been really nice to have it. we've been doing the Minaragua, which I love. It tastes really good with tequila so far. And plain. If you're sober, you can drink lots of Minaragua. Yeah, I'm just happy to notice in the last episode I did try it with tequila and it worked out. But before that, we were just getting cool, refreshing Minaragua in our bods during these heat waves. But I'm also going to try the Cidral Mendet, which I assume is pronounced incorrect. I have no idea. It's from 1902 they've been making this. And it's like an apple soda and it's crisp to the touch right now. So I'm pretty pumped about it. Going to use our Minaragua fucking bottle opener here. Pop that bottle, boy. See how it sounds. And then hand that over to me. There you go. What a sound. I get chills just hearing it. Yeah, yeah. It rules. It's very fun to touch. They're good to drink. So happy to have them during this heat wave. So if anybody's interested, and you're at the store, you see some dope-ass Mexican sodas, buy these ones. I think we might be the first sponsored podcast of Minaragua and Sildur Almondet. to describe the product as fun to touch yeah yeah maybe cheers cheers. Oh that's my first taste of the apple and it's fantastic it's really good. All right i want to get right into it because who knows how long we have before something goes terribly wrong for us or the listeners great ed how superstitious are you about friday the 13th i'm not did you ever have someone in your life that was. Yes who i don't just people Just people. People bring it up. A family member, a friend, a friend's family member. No, they've never installed elevators in a tall building in New York. No one's avoided it in that sense. But people are like... In the same way that people are like, oh, Mercury's in retrograde type of thing. I think it's just one more excuse you can throw in the pile. It's not going great for you or you're dreading something that Friday. They go, oh, it's Friday the 13th. Are there any superstitions that you know of around... plumbing and the number 13 i. Don't i'm excited to learn some though i don't have any i'm asking you yeah don't don't don't bend your pipes in the shape of a 13 well. As you just mentioned some you know there's elevators in if you were installing elevators in tall buildings you would probably know that many tall buildings to this day don't have a 13th floor. We talked about just down the street here there's an antique store sometimes it feels like a friend so i won't say the name But there's an antique store that I've been to for whatever reason. And they actually, something I thought was cool inside is they have like a bowl, like a punch bowl of just number 13 elevator buttons. Oh. Because they're not used. That is really cool. Yeah. Although I wonder if they're not used, why were they made? Because there's 13 floors exists. Right. And I think Otis probably sells it to countries and places where it's not an issue. That's true. And they're like, why? Like also 13 is not an even number. Yeah. Usually it's like rows of elevator buttons or even numbers. So something, you know, now we just put like a door open button in that spot or something. I don't know. But yeah, I don't know why. But it's a fun thing when I walked in going, oh, that's interesting. That is cool. We should we should get some of those. But yeah, I actually am excited this episode. I don't know anything about the lore of Friday the 13th other than the name of the movie. Like, I don't know why there's no button in there. So interesting. Well. I was not particularly worried about Friday the 13th growing up either of all the things that I was deeply afraid of. It almost seems like an exciting day for you of being like, oh, we could watch Friday the 13th on Friday the 13th. Well, once I became a horror fan, yeah, there was some of that. But, you know, there was no there were certainly things that I was weirdly superstitious about as a kid. Most of them were things I just made up in my own mind. Like, I remember I saw a clip of The Exorcist on TV when I was very young, too young. And it's the scene where Reagan's in bed and she can't sleep and she's tossing and turning and then she opens her eyes and she sees the face of Pazuzu looming out of the dark at her. And for years. In my head, I decided I'm not going to toss and turn while I sleep. I'm going to pick one side to sleep on, and I am not going to roll over and open my eyes because I will see Pazuzu. I was tossing and turning all night. I didn't see Pazuzu. No, I mean, to be clear, Reagan's tossing and turning is not why she saw Pazuzu. She was possessed by the devil. But in my head, I was like, well, that must have somehow caused it. So I was superstitious. Shook a Pazuzu loose. Yeah, I was superstitious about weird stuff like that, but Friday the 13th was not on the list of those things. In fact, I remember my dad, who was an Italian immigrant, telling me- Yeah. I don't think 13's unlucky there. It's not. It's like 17 or something. 13 was a lucky number, and he thought that Friday the 12th or Saturday the 12th would actually be more unlucky. It's because 12 is the unlucky number? I guess. I don't know exactly. I'm going with 17. I tried to do a little research around this, and there seems like there are lots of different cultures with lots of different numbers and days that are similar. Man. Um, you'll see it a little bit as we get into some of this, why I was actually a little bit surprised to hear that from him, but put a pin in that. Um, I do love the idea that Friday the 13th is kind of like an ambient curse. Like most superstitions, you have to do something, right? You have to walk under a ladder. You have to break a mirror. Friday the 13th, you just wake up. Got you. Yeah, that's interesting. A bad day. It's something that we all have to worry about at least once a year or sometimes, as we do this year, up to three times a year. And it's one of those things. Where- Giving away a lot of free tattoos. If you are afraid of it, and there are people who are very afraid of it, you can't avoid it, which is crazy. There's things we've talked about before on the show that are certain fears that you just do everything you can to not engage with. You won't drive over a bridge. You won't get in an elevator. You won't- And Friday the 13th' s every year. It's not like it's a leap year only situation. Every year. Every year. The first thing that leapt out to me in researching. This episode- To keep leaping on the mind. Is calendar math. I had never put much thought into calendar math. We talk about calendars every once in a while. But not in the- Like how they've changed and- Yes, but not in the way that some of these people do. There are some people who are really fascinated by The various combinations that dates can repeat in and the different kinds of patterns that you can find in a calendar. Yeah, well, you know, dates do repeat. Famously. I buy old calendars all the time because it would be like, oh, the 1986 rigid, you know, girls of rigid calendar. Girls of rigid? Who's getting rigid? Rigid tools, man. It was like, yeah, that was the one. So it would always be like kind of bikini calendars, if you will, but like the– or just like– Yeah, but. A bikini calendar called the Rigid Girls Calendar. No, it's not called that, but Rigid is the brand. Gotcha. And, you know, you'd go to the supply house or whatever. And the rigid ones are always the ones that were gone first. It was a vibe. Of their namesake. So I have a Tugall one upstairs right now, which is the name of the brand. Yeah. The tool brands are Rigid and Tugall. Yeah, this is why they were born to make these calendars, man. And so Tugall is like a winch company, essentially. Holy Freudian slip, Batman. Ed's calendar is for the company Lug. All. Not Tug. All. And that one's great because it's actually not salacious at all, but that did seem like they tried to pose the models in a way that kind of resembled the tools. It's so weird. But anyway, I got it because it last year, the calendars match. Like I could use that calendar for like, that is the days that it matches up again. Yes. Okay. Well, I'm going to start a tool company. I'll start beating off bug spray or something. No, that's a bunch of calendar. Well, the New York Times talked to a man named Marty Ross, who's an Australia-based mathematician and an author of, among other titles... A Dingo Ate My Math book. We've discussed this poor woman. We need to get her out of the lexicon of jokes. If you have not listened to our falsely accused episode, you should go listen to that and you can learn the actually tragic history of Dingo Ate My Baby. You'll stop making jokes about it. This guy's book is far from the most insensitive Dingo Ate My Baby joke, but Lord Almighty. Anyway, Marty Ross, despite the questionable titles of his books... crunched the numbers on Friday the 13th. He tells the Times that, quote, the Gregorian calendar runs in 400-year cycles, meaning that the Gregorian calendar repeats itself every 400 years. So the specific pattern of months and days in, for instance, our 2026 calendar aligned with the ones from 1626. I don't understand. You can get a thing from 20 years ago that matches up. Well, I'm sure there are cycles within those cycles, but we're talking about the 400-year cycle because that's how he broke it down here. Okay, okay. So within that 400-year cycle, there are only 14 possible calendar configurations. That's because... This is a Rubik's Cube? This is what I mean. Some people put a lot of thought into this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's because January 1st can fall on one of seven possible days. Obviously. That's what's called a common year. So you can either get January 1st on one of those days in a common year, or your calendar year can be a leap year. Those two, the common year and the leap year, have two sets of seven possible days. That creates 14 possible calendar configurations. And so do you think the leap year was introduced to make the 400 make sense? No. I forgot. We said it one time, and I'm not going to get into it. I forget why the leap year was introduced. Yeah. It was to try to make certain calendars align, and I don't remember exactly whose calendars, but the leap year doesn't really matter here too much. What matters is the 14 possible calendar configurations. There are 59 years in the 400-year cycle with three Fridays the 13th. We're in one right now. We're in one right now. Of those 59 years, 44 are common years and 15 are leap years. A common year that begins on a Thursday, as 2026 did, will have three Fridays the 13th in February, March, and November. And a leap year that begins on a Sunday will also have three Fridays the 13th in January, April, and July. So that's a lot of ways or a lot of math, a lot of patterns just to see what how many different ways you could have Friday the 13th fall, which for people who aren't particularly afraid of Friday the 13th, like you and I, seems like a lot of work for no reason. But if it's something you really want to keep an eye on, you can literally set your clock to it. And I guess also the downside of knowing when Friday the 13th are coming is that if you do believe that they are terrible days, no amount of preparation can save you. No. It's coming. You just know at the beginning of the year, am I dealing with two or three? Or one. How many days am I calling out of work? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Before we get into the legend and the lore of the day itself, we do have to talk about the movies. Yeah, you talk about those movies every other episode. Why not bring it up in this one? I don't talk about Friday the 13th that much. I think it comes up. It's a lot of like, that's the first time kids thought they were going to die or something. Well, no, you're talking about my theory about Halloween. Oh, I am. which one's friday the 13th that's jason. Friday the 13th is jason yes mike myers is michael myers. And then freddy krueger is nightmare on elm. Street correct okay i think for a lot of people friday the 13th before they were thought of it as a scary day even thought of camp crystal lake and jason. Where was that shot connecticut new jersey i believe that's tri-state area. Yeah tri-state area um They think of Jason and all of the mountains of dead teenagers that he's killed before they think of it being a day that they might slip and fall into a sewer. I think it's penetrated the culture. I think the hockey mask really worked out for them. It did. And we'll get to that more about the hockey mask in a minute. But Ed, how many of the Friday the 13th movies have you seen? I think the first Friday the 13th movie I ever saw was I think the third one. whichever one has like the eyeball on a string or is maybe it was from an arrow or something, but. Like, yes, it's on the, it's on the tip of an arrow. I believe. Yeah. That shot ruled. I remember being a child being like this, that it was funny. It was like the first piece of like, what are the earliest pieces of filmmaking where I was like, Oh, I got to see how they did that. That's cool. But I think that was the first one I saw. And then no other ones for like a decade. And then I saw like, And then I remember watching the first one and going like, ah, this is like, it's not really Jason's story at all. Right. So I've seen at this point, probably like three or four of them, but they don't, they don't stick in my mind the way, I guess it might've been three does because it was the first time I'd seen those images at all. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like beating people on a fucking, it was like slam people against trees and a sleeping bag. Yeah. Not the same one too. I, think that is three yes. Man i think three might having to see oh and i also okay so three rules and i recommend anyone to watch it because obviously it saved me all this time but i also remember watching uh renting when it was new to video jason x oh yes so that would have been like i think the oh and jason takes manhattan. Jason Takes Manhattan is a bottom-of-the-barrel entry. These are the ones I've seen, though. Yes. Do you remember anything about Jason Takes Manhattan? Yeah, I remember there was an underground sewer scene. Yeah. Like, there's sewer work. Sewer. Sewer, you're saying? Sewer. Sounds like you're saying sore. I can't help that. So, yeah, I remember there was sewer work. I remember... I don't remember a ton about it. There's not much to remember, and here's why. Well, the teaser... For Friday. The 15th party. Like him in like Times Square or something? Yeah. The teaser is fucking brilliant. It's just one shot of the middle of Times Square and the camera rotates around, you know, the shoes, the pants, and then it looks up and you see Jason and it's Jason takes Manhattan. But it is infamous. I don't know if it was one of the first horror movies to shoot in Vancouver but it. Was like Canada for New York. It was Canada for New York and there are some really funny stories out there of the people making the movie you know it was built from the idea of well Jason Muppets Take Manhattan I don't. Well, I guess maybe it was. I don't know. That's probably earlier. That probably is earlier. But I mean, the idea of Jason in New York City was like, oh, we got to do that. So they, you know, they wrote the script. And as they were moving towards production, they just kept being told, well, actually, there's nowhere that we can shoot, you know, this for New York or that for New York in Vancouver. And so it ultimately the movie is mostly kids on a boat trip from Crystal Lake. Yeah. To New York. Yeah. And most of the movie takes place on the boat. And then there's like 15 minutes at the end where they're in New York. And by the way, even then it's in a sewer. Like you're not even on the streets of New York. I think they did like a day or two or something of shooting. There is a scene with, you know, like boombox punks that go past Jason or whatever. But yeah, that is a really bad one. So I saw that and it's based. Jason X is in space. Yes. And David Cronenberg is actually an actor in that movie. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. He plays the, one of the signs. I watched that in a condo in Milford, Connecticut. I remember. And it was on, on like a, what's that? A wicker based furniture, Rattan furniture or whatever. It was like a very eighties decor condo on the water that other than like me and my friend, who were in this situation where we can go like see the water. Yeah. Decided instead to go to blockbuster and then stay in and watch Jason. Like our parents took us to like blockbuster or whatever. Yeah. And so that's how I utilize that time and space. But yeah, that was fuck. I remember it being a really fun time. I don't remember a frame of that movie. I remember the cover was like a silver hockey mask with a snake or something going through it. Maybe that Jason goes to hell. But that's Jason goes to hell, has the snake going through it. Jason X has the silver mask. Yeah. So I'm conflating the two. So I guess I realize now that I've seen more Jason movies than I thought. Yeah. In the beginning, I couldn't remember that he is Friday the 13th. Yeah. But to pull the curtain back a little bit, just before we started the episode, you were like, I think I've seen the first one maybe once. And now it seems like you've seen a lot of them. Oh, also when I was saying that to you, like I was thinking, I was thinking of Halloween the same way I made that mistake right at the opening of this. I was thinking of Halloween. Okay. So, well, this is great. This is good. You've seen a lot of Jason movies. You've seen a lot of Friday the 13th movies. I guess the eyeball would probably be your favorite kill in the franchise. In the same movie, that or the sleeping bag against the tree. Yeah. Or, I mean, you would love it, even though it's not worth rewatching the whole movie for, but in Jason Takes Manhattan, he literally punches a kid's head off. Sure. That's a fun moment. You can still. See that in New York. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen all of them, I believe, but only one or two of them more than once because most of them are pretty bad. My favorite is Friday the 13th Part 6. That movie I probably talked about on the podcast before. To me, that is the pinnacle of 1980s slasher movies. If someone tries to picture a Friday the 13th movie, even if they've never seen one, What they're picturing is probably a lot more like Part 6 than most of the rest of the entry. Is Part 6 the one that opens with the FBI raid? The thing where the girl's running through the woods and you think she's a final girl? That's Jason Goes to Hell. Okay, that's a fun opening. Part 6 is the first movie in the franchise that, for my money, feels like a movie. It has the scope of a movie. The first five feel really dingy and dirty and cheap. Very locked off cameras. Not even locked off cameras, but just not particularly well lit. They hired a literal ex-pornographer, made part five. That's probably why it's great. It's really sleazy. But part six treats Jason almost like a universal monster. He's lit well. It's the summer. There's fog. Did they change it? Was it one of those things where they got like, oh, we got Michael Bay to do it, his first movie type of thing? No, the director of Friday the 13th Part 6 is this guy, Tom McLaughlin, who had made one or maybe two very low budget horror movies before he got the opportunity to do Friday the 13th Part 6. And it very much was his intention. The two things I love about the movie are the two things that he went into his pitch with. And one was, I want Jason to feel like an iconic movie monster. And two was, look, the series is getting a little long in the tooth. I think this movie should be a little bit funnier than the previous entries. And it is. It is a proto-scream. It's not interested in deconstructing the tropes of the genre, but there are jokes throughout the movie that are. That aren't just like one-liners. That aren't one-liners, that are smart little winks and nods. And Jason still stays scary the whole time. But the reason that I think it's so close to what people think of is it's summer nights, it's fast cars, it's hot girls and buff dudes. And it's got all of those... 80s slasher elements. All the elements of a rigid calendar yeah exactly um and it's just you know there's alice cooper songs on the soundtrack and It's just a great, fun time at the movies. Oh, wait, that's the one where you covered it for 12 Deadly Days or something, or for The Sleepover. For my first short film, yes, I had a band cover Alice Cooper's song, Man Behind the Mask, which I think is a great horror movie song. That's a good cover, too. It's a very fun pop song, and yes, the cover by The Appreciation Post, who I think are back in the saddle again. For those of you who like sort of Weezer-adjacent pop rock, The Appreciation Post released some of the best stuff in that genre. They should have been huge. I'm Annie from Boston, Massachusetts. And I'm Johanna from Vienna, Austria. We're the hosts of Fresh Hell, your international podcast that covers murder, mystery, and the macabre throughout history. Are you interested in the 3,569 ways your household could have killed you in the Victorian era? Do you know how malaria and syphilis played a role in the John List family murders? And have you ever wondered what Prince Albert's sex chair had to do with the murder of Stanford White? Okay, nothing. It had nothing to do with it. We're still telling you about it, though. It's a pretty great sex chair. If you're looking for another show that talks about Ted Bundy, this is probably not the podcast for you. But if you're looking for two women that cover lesser-known cases from all over the world with a lot of background information. So much background information that you will rock your local pub quiz from now on. Then find Fresh Hell Podcast on your favorite podcast app. We also have German cannibals. See you soon. Tschüss. Anyway, all that to say, I do love Friday the 13th movies. I love Friday the 13th Part 6 the most. And one of the things that I think is very interesting about the franchise is that it began as a very intentional ripoff of Halloween. Which I think is interesting because oftentimes the ripoffs of movies fail at the bottom. You know, like you get your hit and like in the case of like Obsession, you now have 15 more like YouTube based horror movies that are getting made. And the chances of any of those becoming successful franchises are pretty small. Well, we also saw this a lot like as a video store clerk for years, like you'd have the like Coke Pepsi challenge of similarly titled, similar cover movies. So there'd be like Lord of the Rigs that also something called like... King of the Circles. King of the Circles. Yeah, and you'd be like hoping someone rents that by accident. Well, those were churned out by different companies like Asylum Films, like is the most famous company that did those where they would just, they sought to make use of that shelf space by just churning out cheap copies. In the case of Friday the 13th, well, first of all, I checked the... worldwide gross, the worldwide gross adjusted for inflation of the full franchises, 1.2 billion for Friday the 13th and 1.6 billion for Halloween. So they are almost equally popular these days as franchises. And honestly, it would be even closer if it weren't for the fact that the most recent Halloween trilogy that brought back Laurie Strode was such a huge, massive, extremely well, or maybe not extremely well received, but made a ton of money. I didn't catch it. Friday the 13th hasn't released any new movies since 2009. Is that because of like legal reasons? Who owns the rights? Yes. We'll get to some of that in a second. Terminator. I also think that a lot of that is also very interesting because it's tied. Those legal problems are tied to the specific evolution of the franchise and But the way that this all started was the guy who directed the original Friday the 13th is this guy, Sean Cunningham, who'd actually been in the business for a while. He produced Last House on the Left for Wes Craven. And when Halloween came out, he saw how commercially successful a cheap slasher film could be, and he was like i gotta get in on that so he hired a novelist named victor miller to write a screenplay which miller titled a long night at camp blood. He's working with walt disney over here like the. What the hell was it like the bloodmere castle bloodmere castle or blood yeah bloodmere house um cunningham thought that was a shitty title and you know a lot of times producer notes aren't helpful but in this case i think john cunningham had the better title. It would be even better producer note if it was submitted on friday the 13th like you a lot of times people don't know the front of a screenplay has the draft date yeah if he's looking at the shit title then just looks down and sees that it's like the 13th just like Oh shit, just change it. It's actually pretty wild if that was the case. Cunningham was thinking further ahead than that. He actually, before the script was even finished, he took out an ad in Variety announcing the making of Friday the 13th. That's one way to win your argument. Oh, you saw the article? Yeah, it's called that now. Sorry I didn't call you and told you in advance. It's this big, bold logo that's smashing through a pane of glass. But he had no script. He had no idea really what the movie was even going to be. He also now says that he was fishing to see if anyone else owned the title and would attempt to sue, which was a little bit of foreshadowing for the future of the franchise. Turns out, and I didn't write all the notes about this down, but there was some other random movie that had come out a few years earlier called Friday the 13th colon something, but it never really caused any issues. Supposedly, maybe he paid those people off to not cause a stink or whatever, but Anyway, the first movie was made for a very low budget. It was a huge hit, but the sequels built up the mythology of the series without much of a plan. So this isn't really a spoiler, but you were saying the hockey mask did well for them. Yeah. It wasn't until part three that the hockey mask even came into the picture. What? Yeah. The first movie. That's the one that I saw first. Yes. So for you. That's why I've always been there. Yes. But that's part of where the troubles began because in the first movie, it's... I don't want to spoil anything if you haven't somehow seen Friday the 13th, but. Just a person. Let's just say the killer isn't Jason. Then in part two... There's no hockey mask. Jason's mostly wearing a sack over his head. Yeah, they knew you'd probably want to cover that face. They knew that early on. Yeah, he had an ugly mug. And it wasn't until part three that he actually picked up the hockey mask and put it on and became the Jason that we think of. Which, thank God, by the way, we had something that I, looking at a hockey mask from that time period, don't really know how it provides protection. It seems like You're still just getting hit really hard in the face. There's padding that you ever see in them. It is funny when you think of masked slashers. In Scream, the mask is very much used to hide the identity of the killer. But in most other masked slasher movies that predated Scream, hiding their identity didn't really have anything to do with it. That's one of the reasons that Scream was so fucking brilliant was because it was like, All these killers wear masks. Also, they're the killer. Yeah. No one's ever used the idea of anonymizing the killer in any, you know, narratively meaningful way. Well, I'm just, I only bring it up because if you were to make, if all this disappeared and you made Friday the 13th today and Friday the 13th three, you still took a hockey mask off a goalie. mask off a kid. It would just be this giant, insane, really probably helps protect your face mask that they wear now, like helmets. Yes. It would be ridiculous. It wouldn't work at all. But there was this weird slapshot time in history where they had a uniquely insane piece of sports equipment that I imagine no goalie today would trade to go back to. Yes, correct. That worked out really, really well. Yeah. Well, it worked really well Until it didn't. Because over the years, various studios and creative entities have owned all these different pieces of the franchise. So the title, Jason's mask, adult Jason being the killer, all the stuff that has come together to be what people want to see in a Friday the 13th movie doesn't actually fit together in the same package of ownership. It's why- Which is why they tell the original writer, I'm sure, you're not getting anything. Well, they did. We'll get to more of that in just a second. But all of these rights issues are why the ninth movie is called Jason Goes to Hell, colon, The Final Friday. Because Paramount, who owned the rights at the time, sold the rights to Jason to New Line, but they wouldn't sell the title Friday the 13th. That's some proto-private equity shit. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. So they could legally make a movie called Jason Goes to Hell, The Final Friday, but they couldn't call it Friday the 13th. and it has gotten even more complicated over the past decade because Victor Miller, that original novelist who wrote the first screenplay, it's a long, complicated story, but he basically sued to reclaim the copyright to the original screenplay, which means he owns the copyright to Jason's backstory of being a kid who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake. He owns the rights to the idea that Well, I guess we have to spoil it here. Jason's mother is the killer in the first movie and he owns the right to the camp setting, but he doesn't own the title or Jason's design, which are all now held by different entities. All of that is why we haven't had a Friday the 13th movie since 2009, because the point of slasher movies is that You can make them relatively cheaply and they can make money. But not if you have to pay 300 licenses. It's not cheap anymore. I have heard it estimated, and I've heard this from a source who I think would kind of know, but it still seems nuts to me. And this was actually, I heard this probably 10 or 15 years ago, so it's probably even more money now. I've heard it estimated that to pay off all the various rights holders to make a proper Jason in his hockey mask movie that is called Friday the 13th, You're looking at tens of millions of dollars before there's even a script just to get everyone on the same page. That's bullshit. Yeah. That's just dead to you. Then Halloween's going to continue to surpass them in a box office because they'll be able to keep making those. Right. Well, but by the time this episode comes out, I believe the Crystal Lake show on Peacock will have come out. And Crystal Lake, the show on Peacock, is a collaboration between A24 and And I believe the Victor Miller camp and New Line. So it's a show about Linda Carlini is playing Jason's mom. And there is a young Jason in the show. But they, unless and until they're ever able to work out a deal, there will never be adult Jason in the hockey mask. And it will never be called Friday the 13th. Got you. But if this show is a gigantic hit, who knows? If it's a gigantic hit, maybe. So anyway. All those legal nightmares aside, what is it about the day of Friday the 13th that even allowed it to carry enough weight as a title to launch this franchise? Yeah. Depending on who you ask, it starts with a very different murder, the murder of Jesus Christ. Well, they say you like to fire people on Fridays. Would that make less of a scene? Well, Ed, you were raised Catholic. You know about Good Friday. I don't remember it being on the 13th. Well, it's not on the 13th. We're going to just start with the Friday part of the equation, the Friday half of the equation. Because there's really only one piece to the Friday half of the equation, and that is that Friday was the day that Christ was crucified, known to Catholics as Good Friday. Although, to be clear, not because the event was good, but because Catholics and Christians believe that Christ's sacrifice is what saved humanity. Yeah, and he gets to come back a few days later. He takes the weekend off. There you go. It was good. The resurrection work week starts again on Monday. Yes. There are other negative biblical connections to Friday, though none of them seem to have had quite the impact of Good Friday on the idea of a cursed day. According to History's overview, Friday was also said to be the day Eve gave Adam the fateful apple from the tree of knowledge, as well as the day that Cain killed his brother Abel. Neither of which I'd ever heard before, but. That they were on Fridays. That they were on Fridays. Yeah, I don't know why. I mean, I guess, you know, you give them the apple... I don't know. I just don't think the weekends was a thing until well after the Industrial Revolution. So I don't even, this doesn't even hold water that they're not working those days. Yeah, the days of Adam and Eve, certainly Friday seems like the idea of the day of a week doesn't even, I don't know what that would be. I mean, because I think God did things in days. Sure. The first day did this, the second day. But I don't remember it being like, and on Friday he did this, and on Saturday he did this, and on Sunday he slept. But we do know that Sunday is the like rest day. Mm-hmm. And so we were always working off the assumption that Monday was day one, unless you're filling out a time card, in which case, it's not. Well, this collection of biblical misfortunes is possibly what resulted in Jeffrey... Epstein's Island. Jeffrey Chosh... Why can't I say. Well, what is it? How's it spelled? The guy who wrote Canterbury Tales. Chaucer. Chaucer. Thank you. This collection of biblical misfortune is possibly what resulted in Geoffrey Chaucer's Friday shout-out in Canterbury Tales, written way back in the 1300s, where he says, quote, and on a Friday fell all this mischance. So there are some scholars who really think that the idea of Friday the 13th, well, of Friday, of the Friday part of that equation, was essentially good for a couple of other biblical things. Chaucer distilled it into the Friday of mischance and just this one line and that sort of spread across Europe. In Britain, Friday was once known as Hangman's Day because it was usually when people who had been condemned to death would be hanged. I think that may have been something to do with pre-gaming the weekend. You know, like you get things started right with a little. But again, we didn't get a weekend until we fought for it. Well, that's true. I guess anyone observing a hanging back in those days probably was in the fields the next day. There was no. No, we genuinely walk around this planet Earth in this here country... uh, get with labor day and, and weekends because of some bad-ass people striking and fighting and going crazy and being like, fuck you people were doing, you know what I mean? So we didn't get that until post industrial revolution. Sure. They may not have had weekends, but by that point they did certainly have days of the week. They were keeping track of the calendar and the days of the week. Historically, it seems that sailors also had particular objections to Friday and William Henry Smith's The Sailor's Word book, published in 1867, actually has an entry for the word Friday, which it calls the dies in Faustus, or unlucky day. The book explains that older sailors were reluctant to get underway on a Friday because they considered it a bad omen. So all of these things about Friday were pretty bad, but it wasn't until- The. Cure wrote Friday I'm in love. We're turned around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't until we added the number 13 to the day that things got the reputation for really going south. But what is it about the number 13 that on its own seems to have it out for humanity? I don't know. So the term for a fear of the number 13 is Triskaidekaphobia. Okay. I don't know why it just made me hungry for Triscuits all of a sudden. I don't want to say it's common, but I've heard that kicked around before as an actual phobia that people have of the number 13, not specifically the day, Friday the 13th. But the origin of 13 as an unlucky number is as murky as Friday being an unlucky day. If we throw it back to the Christians again, they'll tell you it's because there were 13 people total at the Last Supper. Jesus plus 12 apostles, including Judas, who betrayed him. And the guy who took the picture. I'm just kidding. Obviously, that's a painting. Some people also say that Judas was specifically the 13th guest to arrive, but that's not in the Bible. Order of arrival seems to be a modern twist to the historical account. Although I do kind of love the idea that the traitor comes scraggling in last. Sorry, I was late. I'm planning to do something here I'm not super pumped about. Yeah, probably didn't even bring an app to share or anything. Just showed up at the last minute. And honestly, this, the... the close tie between the number 13 being unlucky and the idea that some of that is rooted in the number of people at the last supper is part of why I was surprised that my dad told me that in Italy, 13 was considered, uh, or was not considered. Those people love Jesus and stuff. They love Catholic stuff. So that, that kind of surprised me. But according to Wikipedia, uh, Since at least 1774, a superstition of 13 at a table has been documented. In other words... I'm suspicious of anyone who can afford 13 chairs and enough food to feed 13 mouths. If 13 people sit at a table, the superstition goes, then one of them must die within a year. What? Which, I mean, up until fairly recently, if you had 13 people sitting around a table, one of those motherfuckers was out the door sooner than later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From disease. From whatever they ate at that meal. Assassination. Yeah, whatever they ate that night. The origin of this specific superstition is unclear. Various theories have been floated. One writer, Johann August Ephraim Goetz, speculated, quote, Since I know from experience that superstition loves nothing better than religious matters as its proof, I believe I'm almost certainly unmistaken when I derive the origin of the matter of the number 13 from the passage of the gospel where the Savior sat at the table with 12 disciples for his Easter meal. What? I think this guy would have been a great podcaster. He's very sure of himself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's South African, it sounds like, by that name. I'm not sure where exactly he's from. That's a South African-ass name, so he's either Dutch or... Whatever the hell people went there. Johan August Ephraim Goetz seems Germanic or Dutch. Yeah. So that other guy I think is like a Dutch colony or was Dutch people were down there, dude. Turns out this guy was not, but then stands by his declaration that quote, Dutch people were down there, dude. Also like many podcasters, he might be wrong. There's another famous legend involving an uninvited 13th guest that contributed to the number's sinister reputation. the Norse myth of Baldr's death. According to some sources, 12 gods were enjoying a banquet in Valhalla when the trickster god Loki arrived unannounced as the 13th attendee. Loki manipulated the blind god Hr into shooting his brother Baldr with an arrow crafted from mistletoe, the only substance capable of harming him. Oh my God, it's one weakness. It's sort of, I never would have guessed that mistletoe would have been a God's kryptonite, but there you go. This guy had other issues. He's fucking blind. I don't know, the brother he shot was mistletoe, had mistletoe issues. Balder had the mistletoe allergy. And then his blind brother shot him, which is Loki. That's pretty low-hanging fruit, buddy. Balder died immediately, and sort of like the Judas being the 13th to arrive detail, Not all scholars agree on this interpretation, but it is one interesting story that I found. The oldest known- We should have. Parties and then the 13th person to arrive would just beat the shit out of them. The unlucky 13 party. Yeah. It really would encourage people to get there on time. Get there on fucking time, yeah. The oldest known potential reference to the fear of the number 13 can be found as far back as the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi, a Babylonian code of law that dates- to approximately 1760 BC, so a long-ass time ago. Yeah, but it's not the ones that I get nervous about, like 2B to B to C or whatever, like the ones where it's like 25,000 years BC. Sometimes we'll get into that weird shit with cavemen and stuff. Yeah. I can handle some 2000 BC. So the laws in the Mesopotamian Code are numbered, but the number 13 is omitted along with With numbers 66 through 99. So they knew 69. Was going to be a problem. And 67 now. And so there's a lot of laws or numbers missing from these laws. No one is sure why. Most scholars agree that it is most likely a clerical error. But if it is, it's an interesting coincidence that at least raises the possibility that the number 13 was feared long before Jesus sat down with his most famous hater. That's probably the case. In the present day, like. Christmas is a pagan holiday they just slapped Christmas onto, right? Yeah. Like Christmas trees are just like gerbatic trees with apples or whatever on them. It wouldn't be the first time you're like, yo, throw our name on that. Well, I guess I should have looked up exactly how many laws there are in the Mesopotamian Code of Hammurabi because. Over 60. Well, it seems like a large... portion of them are missing numbers okay uh because 13 along with 66 through 99 are which would be 33 laws are unnumbered at the end and. 33 day jesus died the year jesus died. That's how old he was how old he was look. What you just did there a wrinkle in time. In the present day as we noted earlier most western hotels omit the 13th floor many airlines skip the 13th row in seating and Even some cities and towns have a 12th and a 14th street, but not a 13th street. No. Well, because that's one of those, I've always found that so weird because you can omit the labeling of the 13th. Row, but there- Yeah, a lot of comedians have done work on this. 13th row, yeah. Jump off the 13th floor. Hey, listen, excuse me. I'm working out a bit here, all right? Fear of the number 13 has earned its psychological term, Triskaidekaphobia, and enough people suffer from it that it is classified as a phobia and not a superstition. While the fear of. You want to sell every seat in your airline, so why ostracize enough people that it's like in a manual? Yeah. While the fear of Friday doesn't have an official name that I could find. Fear of Freaky Friday. The fear of Friday the 13th does... Frigatriskadekaphobia, or the even more tongue-defying Paraskevidekatreophobia. These are just Harry Potter spells at this point. I know, I'm half expecting something to appear in the studio as I say them aloud. Frigatriskadekaphobia is fun to say. Paraskevidekatreophobia isn't as interesting to me. One theory goes that this date was etched into history at dawn on Friday, October 13th, 1307. According to an examination in Time Magazine, this was the morning that agents of the French government, quote, swooped in on every property belonging to the world-famous Knights Templar, arrested their members on false charges, and began a process of interrogation, public examination, and reputational demolition of that ended four and a half years later with the order being dissolved. These are the people who hung out with the Holy Grail? Yes. So prior to the Friday the 13th arrests, the king's ministers had spent more than a year interviewing disgruntled former Templars and compiling a small, questionable, what Time Magazine calls a sexed-up dossier of supposed misdeeds including allegations that Templars had spat on the cross, denied Christ, kissed one another in homoerotic induction rituals, and worshipped false idols. Okay. In reality, the Templars began as a medieval military order during the Crusades, establishing their headquarters on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. Which is why they wear those same outfits from the Crusades. Yes. Yes. Western Christian knights took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, lived in monastic. No vow of not spitting on shit. As far as I'm concerned, they're fine. They lived monastic lives wearing distinctive white or black robes marked with a red cross. What started as a small group guarding pilgrims grew into a formidable fighting force across Syria, North Africa, and Iberia, supported by a vast, basically tax-exempt real estate empire. I mean, they're still- You've been to the Vatican? Well, yes. However, by 1307, the Crusades were failing and support for the order of the Knights Templar was waning. King Philip IV of France was heavily in debt and saw an opportunity to destroy the Templars and seize their wealth to solve his financial crisis. Because the Templars' confessions to all of these things about kissing boys and spitting on the cross or whatever... were extracted under torture, the official charges were widely dismissed even at the time as fabricated. But over time, the fact that there is such mystery around why this raid happened and why the Knights Templars had come under the scrutiny of the king, all of that fueled the myths that the Templars were this secret order, that they survived, that they still survived, that they guard the Holy Grail. And a lot of that whispered rumor and innuendo is what led to the formation of modern secret societies, turning what was essentially a medieval political land grab into this enduring conspiracy that still, you know, touches entertainment today. Yeah, I mean, Mrs. Davis was one of the all-time great shows from a few years ago on Peacock as a big Knights of the Templar component. Yeah, the Templars are in the Assassin's Creed franchise. They are, I think they're in the Dan Brown books. I think, actually think Dan Brown may have played a part in making the resurgence of them. Anyway, a lot of that's either here nor there. The Templars became part of myth and legend and many modern scholars have come around to the idea that the raid on their properties had very little to do with why Friday the 13th is seen as a date of horror and misery. The truth is that no one is entirely sure how the superstitions around Friday and 13 were combined other than it seems, gradually and consistently. According to Britannica.com, we know for sure that Friday the 13th and its association with bad luck was first written about in 19th century France. An article published in 1834 in the French literary magazine Revue de Paris by Italian author Marquis de Salvo refers to a Sicilian count who killed his daughter on Friday the 13th. The article, titled Le Chateau de Carini, states... It is always Fridays and the number 13 that bring bad luck. A character in a French play from that same year, the finesse of the scribble, which I kind of want to read, sounds amazing, says, the quote from the play is, I was born on a Friday, December 13th, 1813, from which come all my misfortunes. Okay, so misfortune shows up a second time in literary works here. In a modern retrospective commentary, Stephen Winnick, a folklore specialist at the Library of Congress, offers context on how these fears spread. He suggests that 19th century anxieties migrated to America through the French literature and this newspaper coverage. But even when articles mocked the superstition, they had the side effect of introducing American readers to the idea that someone thought that Friday the 13th is a very dangerous date. So it was almost like a version of the Streisand effect where it wasn't a problem until everybody was talking about how it was a problem. Sure. And then that is how it spread through America. Now, a little more than 70 years before the debut of Friday the 13th in theaters, one enterprising writer, Thomas William Lawson, took advantage of the doomed date as a way to drum up attention for his novel, Friday, the 13th. Okay. Now, is that protected by copyright? Could we call a movie Friday, comma, the 13th? I don't know. We should look into it, though, because Scared All the Time presents Friday, comma, the 13th could be a big hit. Huge hit. This guy, Thomas William Lawson, is kind of a footnote in history today, but when he was alive, from what I can tell, he was sort of a big deal. In addition to being a writer, Wikipedia describes Lawson as, quote, a highly controversial Boston stock promoter. known for both his efforts to promote reforms in the stock markets and the fortune he amassed for himself through highly dubious stock manipulations. There you go. These reforms are like, someone should stop me. Someone should do something to stop me. There is one of my dream movies to see come to fruition, although I don't think it necessarily will ever, is an Adam McKay script called Average Height, Average Build. that is about a super wealthy serial killer who lobbies Congress to change laws to make it easier for him to continue serial killing. And apparently I've, I've never read the script. Apparently it's very good. And I think Robert Pattinson, the killer was very much in the Patrick Bateman mold and Robert Pattinson was going to play him and, someday maybe I mean it's. Got Robert Pattinson has such good taste I'm sure it was a good script. But it kind of this is this guy's kind of doing the same thing it's like he got rich and then was like fighting for reforms that almost certainly were going to make it easier for him to be a criminal but the novel that Thomas William Lawson wrote tells the story of a New York City stockbroker who plays on superstitions about Friday the 13th to create chaos on Wall Street and make a killing on the market While it's unclear if this is something Lawson ever tried, he was a big enough deal and made enough money through whatever unsavory means that he even had a ship named after him. I mean, this is something like, if I did it. Yeah, right? But here, this is a really crazy coincidence. What's really weird, and as far as I can tell, 100% true and something that actually happened and was not a marketing stunt for his book, The very ship named after him, the Thomas William Lawson, sank on Friday, December 13th, the same year that the book came out. Why was it named after him to begin with? It's not like the USS Thomas William Lawson. It's just like a boat. He must have been a big enough deal. I mean, he got a boat named after him. So we've never heard of him now. Or he just bought a boat and then named it that. Maybe, but it was- And then sank it to your point for publicity. I mean, maybe. I'm pretty sure this was a boat that was like, In use. It wasn't like a private yacht. It was a sailing ship. I don't know. And it sank on Friday the 13th, the same year the book came out. So I have a hard time believing that it was completely an accident, but. There definitely wasn't an accident. Yeah. Lawson, though, might have been on to something when it comes to Friday the 13th and its effect on the market, be it through superstition or curse. Or self-promotion. Or self-promotion. I found a mention in the Christian Science Monitor of all places that there is actually some truth to the idea of the stock market behaving strangely on Friday the 13th. I think Friday and Monday were both like the two big crashes, right? One was like Black Monday or something. Oh. One was like Black Friday. I mean, that would make sense. The day the market opens or closes. The day it closes, yeah. So the Christian Science Monitor reported on a 1987 study by two finance professors at the University of Miami that showed you are more likely to lose in the stock market on a Friday the 13th as opposed to a, quote, normal Friday. Robert Kolb and Ricardo Rodriguez studied stock market returns for 39 Friday the 13th from 1962 to 1985 and compared them with the other 1,141 Fridays on which the stock markets were open in the same period. Their result, quote, returns for Friday the 13th have been significantly lower than the returns for all other Fridays over the long period. Shit, man. I don't know. I don't do anything. I don't do anything with stocks anyway, but I think a lot of people who have stocks, let's say it's like 401k, it's not like you're trading on that day. It's just you'll see a dip that day maybe. But I guess if it's your actual life where you're like trading and shorting and whatever, yeah, maybe it's a day to avoid. Well, and I'm not sure there's an interesting chicken or the egg thing happening there where I assume that especially in the 60s and well before the 60s, you know, 1900s, that superstitions around those dates– might cause people to make moves that they might not normally make, which could cause market disruptions that then seem to prove that the date is having a negative effect. And then, you know, it compounds and compounds. Yeah, who knows, man. As these fears took root in American culture, they did not go entirely unchallenged. In fact, one group of New Yorkers decided to confront the growing superstitions around Friday the 13th head on. Captain William Fowler was a native New Yorker born in 1827. He'd worked as a building contractor before serving as a Union Army officer in the Civil War. He was wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run, survived, and eventually settled into running Manhattan's Knickerbocker Cottage, a popular tavern at 6th Avenue and 27th Street. According to Atlas Obscura, Fowler had actually adopted the number 13 as a lucky talisman. He'd attended PS 13, public school 13, and graduated at age 13. Okay. During a brief stint as an architect, he built 13 public buildings. When he fought in the Union Army, he'd survived 13 battles. Like many men of his time, Fowler had another great love, social clubs. He eventually belonged to. 13 clubs. Yep. That you're wearing yourself thin there. One of which was just him and one friend who would get together to drink boiling hot whiskey. Okay. I assume to forget about the horrors of the Civil War is the only reason. Yeah, I don't know. Or it's like, I'm kind of the 13 guy. Can we just form this? I need one more. I need one more. You're a severe alcoholic. Yeah. Also, we're so broke from spreading ourselves thin with 12 other social clubs. Just boil whatever you got back there. Yeah. Whatever the cheapest that you got is, just boil away the bacteria. So. In the midst of this guy's very active social life. Yeah, it's pretty wild. I can't imagine having 13 friends. Never mind going to 13. Even Jesus didn't. He stopped at 12. Anyway, he decided this wasn't enough, and he decided that he would start another social club, the 13 Club, dedicated to deliberately violating as many superstitions as possible, including the one. You gotta break a mirror when you come in and walk under a ladder. Literally, yes. Yes. So the central one was 13 people eating at the same table because that's what every dinner was arranged around was eating. Oh, so that was popular and known enough at the time. Yes. Okay. According to Sadie Stein's account in the Paris Review, the first dinner took place on January 13th, 1882 at the Knickerbocker Cottage. They met in room 13 at 8.13 PM and they were served 13 courses. I mean- Room 13 is any room he had enough room in that he wrote 13 on, if you think about it, but yeah. Guests entered under a ladder. They spilled salt and weren't allowed to throw any over their shoulders to counteract the bad luck. There were wine lists designed to look like tombstones, lobster salad shaped like a coffin, and a cake shaped like a black cat. members could be put through mock trials for being superstitious. Oh my God. They also tried to do something about Friday's reputation beyond hosting dinners. The club urged officials to stop scheduling executions on Fridays because regularly hanging people on that day wasn't helping convince anyone that it was a good day. That is awesome. So they were like. This guy rules. Yeah, they were. I mean, I don't. He wasn't a capital punishment. He wasn't even anti. He's doing it on Thursday. Yeah, but he's like an early justice. I'm anti 13 hatred. But I'm pro all the other horrible shit. I don't care what you do. Yeah. But the love of my life is the number 13. And I will not stand here and have its name besmirched because you obsess with hanging people. He has 13 wives that he has to keep explaining to all of them that this is just the way that. He needs to be. I know he reminds me of a little bit. He's actually a little cooler. But he reminds me of the guy, the leprechaun guy who had leprechaun bones and they started that bar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like a lot of shit that was like, yeah, all that stuff's like to benefit him. So the club also kept track of what happened to its members, because obviously if you started this club and people were dropping dead left and right, you'd want to, you would have tested a theory and found out that you should stop doing it. Stein tells us that after the first year, the secretary reported that nobody had died or even been seriously ill. The report emphasized the lack of deaths in capital letters. So they almost had their own little press release being like, hey, fuck you. Everybody's fine. One year at the unluckiest place. Yeah. That's not to say that nothing bad ever happened in relation to the 13 Club. Not until shit got rough and they had to burn it for insurance purchases. Then it's like a harder, oh, I guess it was unlucky after all. Members stopped paying dues and all of a sudden, the Knickerbocker Cottage, a couple sparks landed in the wrong flower pot. As word spread and the club's popularity grew, more 13 Clubs popped up around the country. Of course. And that is when a spate of bad luck kicked in. At one club meeting, a waiter fractured his skull when the traditional indoor ladder collapsed on him. I will say this is a, we just talked recently about haunted houses and there's like, once you start franchising out or other people copycat you, they don't necessarily bring the same level of care and level of detail that you are. And you find the thing that you started ended up becoming like crummier. Yeah. Because I don't know if this guy is in charge or involved with these other ones. Is he just other people are copycatting? No, I think they were just copycatting. Yeah, exactly. Giving him a bad name. Yeah. Hanging least of his problems now. At another club in New Jersey, someone blew up the clubhouse with dynamite. Well, New Jersey. The members inside escaped with bruises. And I actually found the original New York Times article from March 19th, 1898. Headline, unlucky after all. No, they didn't rub it in. The headline is wrecked by dynamite. The 13 club blown up and three hurt. Woodbury, New Jersey, March 18th. The house of the 13 Club on the creek was wrecked last night with dynamite, which was placed under the building. The windows were blown out, the floors ripped up, and the entire place made a wreck. Three members were in the clubhouse at the time and were thrown some distance, but escaped with a few bruises. There is no clue to the fiends. A man went by the house in a boat a few minutes before the explosion and is presumed to be the guilty party. No reason is known for the act. How was it? Was it on stilts, the place? How was the guy on a boat throwing dynamite underneath the building? I mean, it says it was on the creek. So I wonder if it was sort of like a social club, you know, out on like it had a patio or deck on a patio. I don't know if I tell you right now, none of that sounds unlucky. It sounds like somebody targeted your building. It also sounds lucky in the sense that the three people who were inside weren't Terribly injured. They got blown up and were fine. Either blown into the water or blown into like stacks of hay. Even the occasional clubhouse bombing, though, couldn't kill the appeal of getting together to annoy fate. By the 20th century, Chicago had its own anti-superstition society founded by a businessman named Nathaniel Leverone. Leverone was the man behind, incredible invention here that you will appreciate, the Automatic Canteen Company. a vending machine business that became a multimillion dollar. Oh, automatic. So company is the name of the company. For some reason, I thought you were describing AI chatbots, like an automatic canteen company. No one will come with you to the bar. Well, we will provide you company. No. Because it automatically has to hang out with you. No, no, no, no. That's what they're selling now. That's what they're selling now. No, this was a very different canteen company. It was vending machines. And this- I do love that. Became a multimillion dollar operation. Oh, yeah. According to Leverone's Dartmouth... Dartmouth is New Hampshire? It's the college. Yeah, Dartmouth is New Hampshire. According to Leverone's Dartmouth obituary, the idea for the automatic canteen company came after he put five pennies into five different vending machines on a Chicago train platform and got what I could only find described as, quote, infuriating results. He spent the next year developing a better machine. Love it. I don't know what those infuriating results were. I think he probably lost four of those pennies and got no peanuts or whatever out of it. Probably. His biographer describes meetings at the Blackstone Hotel... almost as good as the Bloodborne, whatever other house, in suite 1313 on the 13th floor, starting at 6.13 p.m. It was just a meeting he took or he set the suite? He set these. Okay. Also, Blackstone Hotel has no problem with the 13th floor, apparently, because that's where they're holding these meetings. Yeah, I guess you're right. Well, it also had the headless horsemen working the front doors. Members entered beneath a ladder topped with an open umbrella. Inside were skulls with blinking eyes and tables decorated with overturned salt shakers. Leveron called the meeting to order by smashing a mirror with his gavel. That's sick. Apparently, he did keep a supply of replacement mirrors. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's got to be one of your larger expenses. Life magazine photographed their jinx-jabbing jamboree in December 1940. Wow. For the occasion, they advertised for a black cat and received 159 offers, eventually selecting one named Panther as their official club partner. Pet okay i take it back we should be putting all these mirrors towards the war effort and who are all these guys not fighting in it. Well one of them is photographed it at the jinx jabbing jamboree thomas j gallaghan the head of the secret services chicago district was uh be photographed at this jamboree being initiated in a coffin so. Okay, so this is law enforcement? I'm not particularly superstitious. I don't know that it's a great idea to have the heads of the Secret Service doing everything they can to attract bad luck to them. Seems like, you know. What's that thing that the Secret Service is actually known for? It's not protecting the president. Is it like check fraud, bank fraud? Like, what's the thing that they do? Oh, yeah. Because, like, why would there be a Secret Service in Chicago, I'm saying? I think it's mail fraud. I think it's, like, mail fraud or something weird. But, yeah, so this guy was like, you know what? Nobody's sending mail anywhere but to the front lines. I'm going to go hang out in this coffin. The Secret Service was originally founded in 1865 to combat the counterfeiting of U.S. currency. While not mail fraud, it's equally not something you first think of when you think of the Secret Service. So Leveron's argument was that superstitious people worried so much about imaginary dangers that they neglected things that actually mattered. Like, to your point, the war. But a 1944 interview included a detail that probably wasn't helping recruitment. According to Leveron, NBC executive Sidney Strotz, who was a member of the anti-superstition club, wrecked his car on the way home from the first meeting. From the first meeting. Yes. He didn't die. But he wrecked his car and he never came back. Yeah, he might not have even gotten his card yet. He's a card-carrying member of the. Probably not. I don't think they... Yeah, they probably hadn't printed them. Philadelphia had a Friday the 13th club of its own. According to Time, advertising man Philip Klein started it in 1936. Another man not too concerned with the war effort, I guess. Well, 36 pretty early on. There were some things going on across the world in 1936. Yeah, yeah, yeah. According to Time, advertising man Philip Klein started the Philadelphia Friday the 13th Club in 1936. They met for lunch at 113 and smashed mirrors with a glass supplier helping keep them in stock. The club's schedule, written at the time, extended through the year 2000, by which point the original members figured. They'd be dead. Okay. They weren't accepting new members? I don't know if they just figured this was- You. Obviously weren't in the Doolittle raid. I think you could probably add more people. I do appreciate their groundedness in extending that calendar. I also think this is a good bit of evidence that the Mayan calendar also maybe didn't end in 2012 for any- They just stopped. Important reason. They were just like, hey, we're not going to be around. Of course, if you go looking for them, terrible things have happened on Friday the 13th. There's a laundry list of them. The Germans bombing Buckingham Palace happened in September 1940 on a Friday the 13th. The murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York, which is the murder where she was calling for help and nobody called for help because everybody thought that other neighbors were calling for help. Got you. A cyclone killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh in November 1970 on a Friday the 13th. I thought you were going to talk about the roller coaster. Killed 300,000 people. I mean, since it's opened? Maybe. The cyclone roller coaster? I know, I'm joking. The disappearance of a Chilean Air Force plane in the Andes was October 1972 on a Friday the 13th. The death of Tupac Shakur was a Friday the 13th. Didn't know. And the crash of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the coast of Italy, which killed 30 people in January 2012, happened on a Friday the 13th. Shit, man. So take that, Italians. I think based on some of these other Italians who wrote in French magazines about it, it sounds like it's just your dad. Maybe it's just my dad. Everyone else might be on board with it. It wouldn't be the first thing that only my dad believes. One horrible case that gets called the, quote, real Friday the 13th murders is happened in Worcester, England on Friday, April 13th, 1973. This was seven years before the first Friday the 13th movie, and there's no evidence that it really had any influence on the film or if Sean Cunningham was even aware that these murders had happened. I'm starting to come more and more around to the fact that that was just one of the dates on the drafts. So the real story here is so much more horrific than anything that has ever happened in the Friday the 13th movies. David McGreevy was a 21-year-old Royal Navy veteran who'd been discharged for misconduct and asked to leave his parents' home. A local couple, Clive and Elsie Ralph, took him in as a lodger at their home at Gillum Street in Worcester. He'd served with Clive's brother, so the family trusted him and knew him fairly well. For two years, McGreevy lived alongside them as a familiar, dependable presence, paying rent and regularly babysitting their three young children, Paul, who is four, Dawn, who is two, and Samantha, who is nine months old. Okay, so good egg. Good egg. On the night of Friday, April 13th, 1973, Elsie was working her shift at a local pub and Clive left to pick her up, leaving McGreevy alone with the kids. While they were gone, good egg McGreevy flew into a violent rage and savagely murdered all three children. One was strangled, one had their throat cut, and one had a compound fracture to the skull. Is there activities of a bad egg? As if that wasn't enough, he then mutilated all three bodies with a pickaxe, brought the corpses outside, and impaled them on the spiked iron railings of a neighbor's garden fence. The egg has gone rotten. The egg smells from the inside. Also, how far away is this pub you went to pick her up at? I don't think that far. I mean, it's an English, I've never been to Worcester, but it's an English town, so. Sure, I don't know, man, but yeah, this guy had time to do all that. When police arrested him shortly after, the only explanation he offered for committing one of the most horrific crimes in modern British history was simply that the baby wouldn't stop crying. I mean, you're a parent. I mean, look. You haven't felt this way yet, right? No, I haven't felt this way and I'm not excusing his behavior, but you know, the baby, sometimes you want it to stop crying. Um, No, I mean, it's absolutely insane. There's some evidence that he had also gone out drinking and gotten in a fight at a bar and then come back. And so that he was already like, I mean, again, not even that it excuses it, but it seems like there potentially was more involved than just the baby cry. I don't think there's, I'm not sure there's any amount of booze. Yeah. That changes you. So like that changes your, whatever you are enough to be like, yeah, I'm going to, kill three kids? Yeah, just in a rage. That's a pickaxe he brought from home, maybe. That is something he's been waiting to do, maybe. McGreevy received a life sentence and spent 46 years in prison before being released in 2019. Kind of feels like something you shouldn't be released for. Kind of does feel like something you shouldn't be released for, especially because when his release was approved, the parole board cited his improved self-control and ability to stay calm under stress. Oh, you know what, President? There's no babies and no pickaxes. I don't know where he's been able to show an example of The things that led me here, look how I overcame them. I just think it's a questionable... I mean, prison, I'm sure, is a very stressful environment. Yeah, but... And people cry, I'm certain. Yeah. But not like a baby's wail. But damn, yeah. I don't know that just getting a little bit better at not boiling over is a great reason to get out of prison after murdering three children for no reason. I need to see at least a decade where he wakes up every morning to a crying baby alarm clock. Yeah. There's no evidence that McGreevy chose the date or was impacted by Friday the 13th in any way, but it has become part of the horrific lore of Friday the 13th. These are people who have Friday the 13th clubs going. You gotta be kidding me. We've opened 30 locations to undo this in one night. Somebody really should have checked to make sure that he didn't belong to any of those Friday the 13th clubs. I would like to see what boats he was or wasn't on. a few years earlier and what dynamite he had access to. I hope, I certainly hope that, uh, that if he was a member of the 13 club, that, that he was a put through one of those mock trials. Yeah. After this, or you could give it away when he was like caught and he was like, I had 10 more to go. Shit, man. Well, I guess only two died, right? No, all three died. Oh, okay. It was one I thought was like a skull fracture or something. Well, then impaled on a fence. Oh, I didn't hear that last part. All three of them were mutilated with the pickaxe and impaled on the neighbor's fence. What did the neighbor do? You know what I mean? I'm probably throwing them out a window. I'll tell you why. I don't know. We shouldn't be thinking any further about this. I don't know. R.I.P. God bless. R.I.P. God bless to the whole family. And fuck forever to David McGreevy. Who's apparently as of 2019. Do you think he started COVID? To finish the job? I don't know. I don't know what this man's been up to. By the late 1980s, there was a different Friday the 13th threat that really did take the date into account. And this one was actually a worldwide crisis. Someone, and I never knew this, programmed a computer virus that sounds like a plot from like a Steven Seagal movie. The computer virus would only activate on Friday the 13th. It was called the Jerusalem virus, named after its discovery and identification in Israel. And it became notorious in 1988, spreading through businesses and universities, often sitting unnoticed on a computer until it would activate on Friday the 13th and begin deleting applications as you tried to run them. That's fun. That's a fun little trick. To play on people. It's better than ransomware, but yeah, it is. It's inconvenient. It's interesting because files, if you're a younger person listening to this podcast, you think of file transfer as something that happens almost immediately from your phone to your computer or over email. But back in the 1980s, files were shared a lot more slowly. They had to be copied manually from floppy disk to floppy disk, which if you don't know what a floppy disk is, I don't know what to tell you. Imagine sort of a greeting card shaped thing that had data on it and you slapped it in a computer. So you had to copy things and data traveled around the world a lot more slowly. You also could load the virus onto your computer and have no idea that it had been copied off of a floppy disk. Which hasn't changed. You could still click a link. The programming of the virus and the slow speed at which it spread allowed it to spread pretty far and wide because the only day you'd notice your computer had A virus was one day out of the year. It'd be sick. We should get that day off. What, do you want to lose all the apps? Is that really how you want this to go? Yeah, man. We'll see you on Monday. According to one source, quote, contemporary media warnings about this early mainstream example of malware are fascinating. For instance, in October 1989, the New York Times called one form of malware the spread of infected diskettes the computer equivalent of sharing a dirty hypodermic needle. Yeah, they had to have comparisons because there wasn't like computers weren't, you know, outside of the office you worked at. Yeah. The Times also explained viruses could spread through infected downloads, exchanging infected files on a network or by a bad actor. And interestingly, while this virus did do some damage, it's better known for leaving a long, positive legacy on computing because get this, it's a little complicated, but as far as I could understand it, the primary effect of the virus outside of deleting apps, as you ran them, when you opened them on Friday, the 13th, the only other primary effect was that it would bloat infected executables until they were too large to run. So you'd have like Microsoft word version one or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And you would open it. And if your computer was infected with this virus, pieces of data of the virus would copy itself on that app that you were trying to open. So over time, these programs would get too large to run. It's not even that they were deleted. It's just that. Right. The virus would copy itself. The size of those files would grow. And most people didn't even notice that that was happening until their computers started to slow down. It happens to me all the time. Sometimes I'll have some shit where like, iCloud or whatever, which I always tell it I don't want, will start saving messages on my computer as well as my phone. I'm like, why do I have like 11 gigabytes? It should have like 30. Then you got to go find what the hell is taking up the space. It's not necessarily, it's a Mac, so it's not necessarily a virus like most of the Windows people are dealing with, but I'm saying... there is just shit where you're like, how long has this been going on? Yeah. So that is what would happen every day of the year that wasn't Friday the 13th. But the reason that's important to the positive legacy that this virus left on the computing industry is because it was that that caused two Israeli university students to notice something was going on And they began working with other computer scientists to develop software that would scan your machine to look for viruses. They, yes, kind of literally, I mean, not literally McAfee software, but they invented the first form of antivirus software to battle the Friday the 13th computer virus. See, that's such a better idea than mine, which is just like, we don't work on the 13th. Yeah. Well, I actually would say that your idea is better, but this one was much more easy to turn into a business. Gotcha. That not working on the 13th is making any. That's how you fail business. Yeah. Last but not least, before we finish, there is a Friday the 13th on the horizon that might be the scariest one yet. Oh, good. Because if we are unlucky enough, it might be the last Friday the 13th that we ever live through. That day... April 13th, Friday, April 13th, 2029, is the day that an asteroid called Apophis will make an exceptionally close path to Earth. The average diameter of this thing is about 1,100 feet, and it's named, I don't know why you would name it this, but it is named for an Egyptian god associated with evil and destruction. Stop this madness. I thought it was going to be called Jesse's Machete. No. I'm sorry, what's his name? Jason. Jason's Machete. Jesse's? Jesse Voorhees? Uncle Jesse Voorhees? Ah, man. Some idiot's making that in AI right now. Some trailer. So on Friday, April 13th, 2029, an asteroid named after an Egyptian god of evil and destruction is going to pass extraordinarily close to planet Earth. When it was discovered in 2004, early calculations briefly put the chance of an impact at 2.7%, which is roughly 1 in 37% Not a very large chance that it would hit Earth, but large enough that I don't like it. And it would probably be one of the more nerve-wracking Friday the 13th. And I'm sure their original entry into this was like, 2004, we discovered this thing that we're going to name something awesome. But before we do, we should tell people about it because they're probably really disappointed if it blows up Earth. Not realizing that by 2029, we'd be grateful. Yeah. For this. For this asteroid. Yeah. Additional observations ruled out that 2029 impact, and later radar measurements allowed scientists to rule out an impact for at least the next 100 years. So it is going to pass within 20,000 miles of the Earth's surface, which is a lower altitude than some satellites. But it does- Wait, what? That's going to still be a- Seems like it. That's gonna like slam through satellite. That might hit the moon. I don't, I think they would know if it was gonna hit the moon. It's not like they won't know until it happens. There was another stage to this. Cause you know all this shit that's watching that now is getting their fucking budgets cut. There is another stage to the scare in the sense that once astronomers realized it would miss us in 2029, they still had to work out what gravity, what our gravity would do to its orbit. And for a while, they were very worried that its collision would happen on its return in 2036. Yeah. I mean, because it's... We're going to have to just wait and see. Yeah. It will come within 20,000 miles of the surface. That seems so fucking close. And. NASA estimates an asteroid this size comes this close to Earth once only every 7,500 years. Nobody we can ask. They're all dead. Yeah, they're all gone. We don't know. Hopefully nothing worldwide bad happened 7,500 years ago to the day of this thing passing by. But I don't know. Get out there. In parts of the Eastern Hemisphere, weather permitting, you'll be able to see this thing without a telescope. I hate that. What I'm hearing. Is it because it's going to have like a Halley's Comet style like big tail? I assume so. I mean, I assume it'll look like, yeah. Oh, a tail of fucking exploding satellites? Yeah. Because, yeah, by 2029, there's going to be, I don't know... How many satellites there are now? It has gone up astronomically since SpaceX. Since we got cheaper to put them up, it's like 30x. I'm making this number up, but I mean really a lot. I've read that it's becoming like a problem now. It's like space trash now. Yeah, when you want to launch a satellite, the chances that you'll just. More importantly, you want to launch a thing to the moon or something. I imagine you have to take that into account now. Yeah. But I also don't know. For all we know, like every satellite's like 14 miles between satellite. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know what it's like up there. Yeah. That's not what this episode's about. So I don't need to know right now. We can look it up later. We'll look it up later. Jason went to space. We should ask him. That is maybe the best possible place to end this episode. So, Ed, with that. Let's put Friday the 13th on the fear tier. Where do you place Friday the 13th on your personal fear tier? It's a zero until this thing comes that day, in which case it's no less about the day and more about the giant asteroid. No, yeah, I would put it as a two. Okay. I'm going to put it as a one. On my fear tier. I would kind of like to be involved in some of these clubs. So part of my fear is I'll be rejected. You won't be able to get into a 13 club. I mean, the good news is I don't think they're very popular anymore. We got to bring it back. We could start one. It's got to be in person. You don't live here no more. Patreon tier 13 club. We only let 13 people in it. Oh, boy. What do we give them? broken glass in the mail a present every Friday the 13th. Sending you fragile shit with zero stickers that tells anyone that it's fragile yeah yeah I thought a bad idea the 13th club tier that's something let us know send us an email hatman at scaredoldtime.com. If you're interested in paying a lot more for a 13th Club subscription that only has 13 Scaredy Cats in it. We don't even know what that's going to be, but you can work with us on figuring out what that is. So email us. If you think that would be a good idea, let us know. If the interest is there, maybe we'll figure something out. It sounds fun. And if not, we'll start a 13 Club anyway. You just won't be a part of it. That's true. So whatever. That's true. All right, guys. Until next time, I'm Chris Colari. And I'm Ed Ficola. The show is Scared All the Time, and we'll see you soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Scared All the Time is co-produced by Chris Colari and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Colari. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is. And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for our Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Don't worry, all scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Tonight, we are in this together. Together. Together.