Friday the 13th Is Here and the Freethought Society Is Holding an Anti-Superstition Bash

Happy Friday the 13th!

If the date makes you nervous, Orange County, help is here courtesy of the Freethought Society, which is hosting a ``Friggatriskaidekaphobia’’ Treatment Center and an Anti-Superstition Bash to celebrate this day of infamy.

Party guests will be challenged to walk under ladders, spill salt and generally testing fate by engaging in other superstitious acts at the Howard Johnson Hotel and Conference Center in Fullerton.

In any given year, Friday the 13th can happen as often as three times or as little as once. Today is the first of three times it will happen this year.

Supposedly a day of bad luck, leeriness of Friday the 13th transcends cultures and eras. According to a statement by the Association for Psychological Science, fear of this day is real enough to have its own phobia classification: friggatriskaidekaphobia (not sure what the phobia is for fear of hard-to-pronounce words).

The association cites the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute finding that 17 to 21 million people suffer from a fear of Friday the 13th.

Some psychologists speculate that the fear is caused or enhanced when people have a bad experience on a Friday the 13th and forever associate the day with a sense of foreboding.

Whatever the cause, the fear has real effects. According to the association, the stock market tends to fall on Friday the 13th and film producers in Bollywood avoid releasing new films on this day.

What do you think? Is it just another day or should we all be on alert for black cats and bad juju?

Editor’s Note: Parts of this article were originally published on Patch in 2012. City News Service contributed to this report.

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