A researcher who analyzed decades of mortality and accident data says fear itself may be the real danger on Friday the 13th, not the date.
Ilya Nikitin, an independent researcher and founder of the Null Institute, examined multiple scientific studies tracking deaths and hospitalizations tied to the superstitious day. He concluded that while the date carries a dark reputation, the evidence does not support the idea that it brings worse outcomes. What does change, he argued, is how people act when they believe something threatens them.
Nikitin published his findings through the Null Institute, where he serves as founder. His analysis covered research spanning more than three decades and multiple countries.
The British data initially caught his attention. “A British study published in 1993 reported 65 hospital admissions after transport accidents on Friday the 13th, compared with 45 on Friday the 6th. That’s 44% more,” he said. That spike looked worrying at first glance.
But Nikitin noted that more recent and comprehensive research told a different story. He pointed to a Canadian study from July 2026 that investigated over 254,000 deaths by coroners across 15 years. The researchers examined 27 separate Fridays the 13th during that period.
“Across 27 Fridays the 13th, they found an average of 45.7 deaths per day, compared with 46.4 across the study period. There was no statistically significant increase,” Nikitin added. The Canadian study measured overall mortality rather than accidents specifically, but its massive dataset and long timeframe undercut the earlier British finding.
Nikitin summarized his position bluntly. While there is “no convincing evidence” that Friday the 13th is unlucky in particular, “fear itself might change how people behave,” he wrote in his published findings. The behavioral shifts driven by anxiety—driving more cautiously, staying home, or conversely taking risks to prove the superstition wrong—may create more real-world effects than any calendar date itself.
The date’s reputation has drawn serious scientific attention before, sometimes with stranger results. In 1960, physicist Heinz von Foerster and colleagues Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot published a paper in the journal Science that gave a precise doomsday: Friday, November 13. Their model projected that human population growth trends, if continued indefinitely, would approach infinity on that exact date. The paper appeared in Science on November 4, 1960, and the specific Friday the 13th landing added an accidental resonance with superstition that the authors had not intended.
No single historical event created the Friday the 13th fear. The number 13 has carried negative associations for centuries, with some traditions tracing it to the Last Supper where Judas Iscariot was said to be the 13th person seated. Friday separately accumulated dark connotations in Christian tradition as the believed day of Jesus’s crucifixion. Over centuries these two threads merged into the combined superstition.
The 2026 Canadian study and Nikitin’s analysis arrive as Friday the 13th this month coincides with a major global tech outage affecting multiple countries, reviving social media chatter about the date’s supposed curse. The convergence is coincidental—the outage stemmed from a faulty software update—but the timing has amplified online discussion of whether the date carries genuine risk.
Nikitin’s examination suggests that believers and skeptics alike may be looking at the wrong factor. The 44% accident spike in the 1993 British study has not replicated in larger, more recent research. What persists is the human tendency to pattern-match random bad events to a pre-existing narrative, a cognitive bias that keeps the superstition alive regardless of statistical reality.