Showing posts with label superstition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label superstition. Show all posts

Friday, November 13, 2009

Friday The 13th Superstitions Get Rare Workout In 2009

Traditionally an omen of ill fortune, a black cat crosses a Palermo, Italy, street in an undated photo. Unlike its feline fellow resident of the bad luck hall of fame, Friday the 13th doesn't have nine lives—it can't even exist more than three times a year, thanks to the eccentricities of the calendar. Photograph by William Albert Allard/NGS

From National Geographic:

Today, Friday the 13th superstitions are fraying nerves for the third time in 2009.

Luckily for paraskevidekatriaphobics—people who harbor Friday the 13th superstitions—three Friday the 13ths are the yearly maximum, at least as long as we continue to mark time with the Gregorian calendar, which Pope Gregory XIII ordered the Catholic Church to adopt in 1582.

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Monday, November 2, 2009

Where Do Ghosts Come From?

There's something scarily magnetic about Muncaster Castle (Image: Lee Stamper)

From New Scientist:

AS MEDIEVAL CASTLE bedrooms go, this one looks the part. Disturbing Flemish tapestries share the walls with stern portraits. On close inspection, the ornate fireplace's iron firedogs turn out to have devils' heads. This place is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Tom Skelton, a 16th-century jester said to have committed murder. The malevolent face of "Tom Fool" stares from a dimly lit oil painting just outside the bedroom.

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Saturday, September 19, 2009

Superstitions Stay With Us From Childhood

Despite what we may have learned as we grew up, some misconceptions often remain with us as adults, says a new study. Credit: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

GUILDFORD, U.K.: Superstitious beliefs we hold as adults may be a by-product of the processes we use to make sense of the world around us as children, according to a novel hypothesis.

The research offers an explanation for curious traditions such as crossing fingers or tapping wood, as responses to events that we can't explain in any other way.

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