13th Friday

 Being wary of Friday the 13th is much more than a quaint superstition observed by a few uneducated people in distant, unreachable towns and hamlets. In the United States alone, it is estimated that between 17 and 21 million people dread that date to the extent that it can be officially classified as a phobia.

So why Friday the 13th is considered such an “evil” day?

The origins aren’t perfectly clear, but we do know that both Friday and, separately, the number 13 have long been considered unlucky and it was around the late 19th century that the first documented instances started popping up of people putting the two together to form the unluckiest day of all.

To start with, the most popular theory as to why Friday is considered unlucky or an evil day is thought by many to spring from Christianity. By tradition, Friday is considered the day that Eve gave Adam the “apple” and they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden- of course, “Friday” wouldn’t have been around yet.

(Note: The notion that it was an apple is a second century invention and contrary to what is stated in Genesis.)

Also by tradition, Adam and Eve were purported to have died on a the then nonexistent “Friday”. The Temple of Solomon was said to have been destroyed on Friday. And Jesus was traditionally considered to have been crucified on a Friday, the day we refer to now as Good Friday.  Though, interestingly, there are several references in somewhat recent history of Good Friday being considered the one exception to Fridays being bad luck.  Such as this reference from 1857:

Notwithstanding the prejudice against sailing on a Friday… most of the pleasure-boats… make their first voyage for the season on Good Friday.

Others theorize that Friday being unlucky predated Christianity.  The name “Friday” was chosen in honor of the Norse goddess Frigg, also known as Freyja, who was the multitalented goddess of love, beauty, wisdom, war, death, and magic.  Teutonic people are thought to have considered the day extremely unlucky, especially for weddings, due in part to the lovely goddess the day was named for. Later, the Christian church attempted to demonize the goddess, so that may or may not be a contributing factor as well.

Whatever the case, despite these quite old origin theories, well documented instances of the notion that Friday was popularly considered unlucky among the masses doesn’t seem to have popped up until around the mid-17th century.  Within the next two centuries after that, the idea continued to spread and by the 19th century was nearly ubiquitous in certain cultures.

As for the unluckiness of the number 13, as with Friday, there are numerous possibilities for the origin, the most popular of which also stems from Christianity. It is considered incredibly bad luck to have 13 people sitting at a table for dinner, which supposedly is due to the fact that Judas Iscariot was by tradition the 13th person to be seated to dine at the Last Supper.

However, the Hindus also believed that it was bad luck for 13 people to gather together for any purpose at the same time.

Far away in northern Europe, the Vikings of ancient times told a very similar story.  According to the Old Norse myth, 12 gods were feasting at the banquet hall at Valhalla, when Loki, the god of Mischief, showed up uninvited. This, of course, brought the count of gods up to the dreaded number of 13. Loki then encouraged Hod, the blind god of winter and darkness, to murder Balder the Good with a spear of mistletoe, throwing all of Valhalla into mourning, and once again providing another example of a story in history that congregating with 13 for dinner is a bad idea.

So why all these separate religions having such a similar tradition of demonizing the number 13?  There are those that theorize the number 13 may have been purposely denigrated by the founders of the patriarchal religions to eradicate the influence of the Mother Goddess. In goddess worshipping cultures, the number 13 was often revered, as it represented the number of lunar and menstrual cycles that occur annually. It is believed by those who adhere to this theory that as the 12-month solar calendar came into use over the 13-month lunar calendar, the number 13 itself became suspect.

It should be noted, though, that not all cultures in the ancient world recoiled at the number 13. The Ancient Egyptians believed life was a spiritual journey that unfolded in stages. They believed that 12 of those stages occurred in this life, but last, the 13th, was a joyous transformative ascension to an eternal afterlife. So the number 13 represented death to the Egyptians, but not death as in decay and fear, but as acknowledgement of a glorious eternal life.  Of course, it’s always possible the association with death from Egyptian tradition later morphed into death in an unlucky sense later by cultures influenced by Egypt.

As with the notion of Friday being unlucky, “13” being popularly considered unlucky really seemed to gain steam around the 17th-18th centuries, and by the 19th century in the Western world was likewise extremely widespread in several different cultures.

So when did Friday and the number 13 join forces like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of bad luck to terrorize the masses? You’ll often read that it’s when the Knights Templar were arrested on Friday, October 13, 1307.  However, that origin story is a modern notion with no basis in any documented history.

Others point to the last day of King Harold II’s reign on Friday, October 13, 1066. William of Normandy gave him the opportunity to relinquish his crown, which he refused. The next day William took it by force at the Battle of Hastings, causing Harold’s demise.  Again, it is a modern idea that this is where the first “Friday the 13th is the ultimate unlucky day” notion came about.

It perhaps isn’t surprising, given that both Friday and “13” as unlucky didn’t reach their zenith in popularity until the 19th century, that it wasn’t until around the mid to late 19th century that the two were put together as the ultimate unlucky day.

One of the earliest references of this comes from a club formed by William Fowler.  Fowler set out to prove that these sorts of superstitions are baseless. He thus formed a club known as “The Thirteen Club” in which club members would meet in groups of 13 to dine, with their first ever get together occurring, of course, on the unluckiest day of the week- Friday the 13th in January of 1881.

To thumb their noses even further at the fates, they had club members walk under a ladder before sitting down to a table in room 13 of the building they were in.  They also made sure there was plenty of spilled salt on the table before they dined.

A slightly earlier documented reference comes from 1869, in the biography of Gioachino Rossini where the author, Henry Sutherland Edwards notes:

He [Rossini] was surrounded to the last by admiring friends; and if it be true that, like so many Italians, he regarded Fridays as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that one Friday 13th of November he died.

(Interestingly, traditionally in Italy, Friday the 13th was not considered unlucky, with 13 being often considered a lucky number there until extremely recently when Western European and American influence started to change that. For Italians, classically, 17 was the unlucky number and thus Friday the 17th became the Italian version of Friday the 13th. Nevertheless, Henry Sutherland Edwards was British so, though he was writing about an Italian composer, applied his own superstition to Gioachino Rossini.)

The notion of Friday the 13th being the unluckiest of the unlucky picked up steam from around this point and once we get into the early 20th century, there are numerous documented instances of people referencing it in this way, such as the 1907 novel by stockbroker Thomas W. Lawson called Friday the Thirteenth, which told of a stockbroker’s efforts to destroy the market on that ominous date.

So, aside from the popular “Friday the 13th” film franchise, what makes the Friday the 13th superstition stick so stubbornly in our collective consciousness? Psychologists point to the fact that if anything negative happens on that specific date, people make a permanent association between the event and the date in their minds, conveniently forgetting all those times Friday the 13th has passed uneventfully.  In short, it is a classic example of confirmation bias.
 

World of Mysteries

Kiss the Blarney Stone

The Stone of Eloquence

The Blarney Stone is a block of Carboniferous limestone built into the battlements of Blarney Castle, Blarney, about 8 kilometres (5 mi) from Cork, Ireland. According to legend, kissing the stone endows the kisser with the gift of the gab (great eloquence or skill at flattery). The stone was set into a tower of the castle in 1446. The castle is a popular tourist site in Ireland, attracting visitors from all over the world to kiss the stone and tour the castle and its gardens.

The word blarney has come to mean "clever, flattering, or coaxing talk". Irish politician John O'Connor Power defined it this way: "Blarney is something more than mere flattery. It is flattery sweetened by humour and flavoured by wit. Those who mix with Irish folk have many examples of it in their everyday experience.

An early story involves the goddess Cliodhna. Cormac Laidir McCarthy, the builder of Blarney Castle. Being involved in a lawsuit, appealed to Clíodhna for her assistance. She told MacCarthy to kiss the first stone he found in the morning on his way to court, and he did so, with the result that he pleaded his case with great eloquence and won. Thus the Blarney Stone is said to impart "the ability to deceive without offending." MacCarthy then incorporated it into the parapet of the castle.

The proprietors of Blarney Castle list several other explanations of the origins of the stone on their website. Many of these suppose that the stone had previously been in Ireland, was taken to Scotland and then returned to Ireland in 1314. The stories listed include one suggesting that the stone was presented to Cormac McCarthy by Robert the Bruce in 1314 in recognition of his support in the Battle of Bannockburn. This legend holds that this was a piece of the Stone of Scone and was installed at McCarthy's castle of Blarney. Although colourful, this folk legend does not account for that fact that it supposes that the stone was removed from Scotland 18 years before Bannockburn, and modern analysis suggests that the stone is not related to the Stone of Scone.

World Of Mysteries

Green Children Of Woolpit

The legend of the green children of Woolpit concerns two children of unusual skin colour who reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, sometime in the 12th century, perhaps during the reign of King Stephen. The children, brother and sister, were of generally normal appearance except for the green colour of their skin. They spoke in an unknown language, and the only food they would eat was beans. Eventually they learned to eat other food and lost their green pallor, but the boy was sickly and died soon after he and his sister were baptised. The girl adjusted to her new life, but she was considered to be "rather loose and wanton in her conduct’’.  After she learned to speak English, the girl explained that she and her brother had come from St Martin's Land, an underground world inhabited by green people.

The only near-contemporary accounts are contained in William of Newburgh's Historia rerum Anglicarum and Ralph of Coggeshall's Chronicum Anglicanum, written in about 1189 and 1220 respectively. Between then and their rediscovery in the mid-19th century, the green children seem to surface only in a passing mention in William Camden's Britannia in 1586,  and in Bishop Francis Godwin's fantastical The Man in the Moone, in both of which William of Newburgh's account is cited.

Two approaches have dominated explanations of the story of the green children: that it is a folk tale describing an imaginary encounter with the inhabitants of another world, perhaps one beneath our feet or even extraterrestrial, or it is a garbled account of a historical event. The story was praised as an ideal fantasy by the English anarchist poet and critic Herbert Read in his English Prose Style, published in 1931. It provided the inspiration for his only novel, The Green Child, written in 1934.

Sources

The village of Woolpit is in the county of Suffolk, East Anglia, about 7 miles (11 km) east of the town of Bury St Edmunds. During the middle Ages it belonged to the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, and was part of one of the most densely populated areas in rural England. Two writers, Ralph of Coggeshall (died c. 1226) and William of Newburgh (c. 1136–1198), reported on the sudden and unexplained arrival in the village of two green children during one summer in the 12th century. Ralph was the abbot of a Cistercian monastery at Coggeshall, about 26 miles (42 km) south of Woolpit. William was a canon at the Augustinian Newburgh Priory, far to the north in Yorkshire. William states that the account given in his Historia rerum Anglicarum (c. 1189) is based on "reports from a number of trustworthy sources"; Ralph's account in his Chronicum Anglicanum, written some time during the 1220s, incorporates information from Sir Richard de Calne of Wykes,^[a] who reportedly gave the green children refuge in his manor, 6 miles (9.7 km) to the north of Woolpit. The accounts given by the two authors differ in some details.

Story

One day at harvest time, according to William of Newburgh during the reign of King Stephen (1135–1154),  the villagers of Woolpit discovered two children, a brother and sister, beside one of the wolf pits that gave the village its name. Their skin was green, they spoke an unknown language, and their clothing was unfamiliar. Ralph reports that the children were taken to the home of Richard de Calne. Ralph and William agree that the pair refused all food for several days until they came across some raw beans, which they consumed eagerly. The children gradually adapted to normal food and in time lost their green colour. The boy, who appeared to be the younger of the two, became sickly and died shortly after he and his sister were baptised.

After learning to speak English, the children – Ralph says just the surviving girl – explained that they came from a land where the sun never shone and the light was like twilight. William says the children called their home St Martin's Land; Ralph adds that everything there was green. According to William, the children were unable to account for their arrival in Woolpit; they had been herding their father's cattle when they heard a loud noise (according to William, the bells of Bury St Edmunds) and suddenly found themselves by the wolf pit where they were found. Ralph says that they had become lost when they followed the cattle into a cave and, after being guided by the sound of bells, eventually emerged into our land

According to Ralph, the girl was employed for many years as a servant in Richard de Calne's household, where she was considered to be "very wanton and impudent". William says that she eventually married a man from King's Lynn, about 40 miles (64 km) from Woolpit, where she was still living shortly before he wrote. Based on his research into Richard de Calne's family history, the astronomer and writer Duncan Lunan has concluded that the girl was given the name "Agnes" and that she married a royal official named Richard Barre.

Historical explanations

Many Flemish immigrants arrived in eastern England during the 12th century, and they were persecuted after Henry II became king in 1154; a large number of them were killed near Bury St Edmunds in 1173 at the Battle of Fornham fought between Henry II and Robert de Beaumont, 3rd Earl of Leicester. Paul Harris has suggested that the green children's Flemish parents perished during a period of civil strife and that the children may have come from the village of Fornham St Martin, slightly to the north of Bury St Edmunds, where a settlement of Flemish fullers existed at that time. They may have fled and ultimately wandered to Woolpit. Disoriented, bewildered, and dressed in unfamiliar Flemish clothes, the children would have presented a very strange spectacle to the Woolpit villagers.  The children's colour could be explained by green sickness, the result of a dietary deficiency.  Brian Haughton considers Harris's explanation to be plausible, and the one most widely accepted.  Although not without its difficulties. For instance, he suggests it is unlikely that an educated local man like Richard de Calne would not have recognised the language spoken by the children as being Flemish. Historian Derek Brewer's explanation is even more prosaic:

The likely core of the matter is that these very small children, herding or following flocks, strayed from their forest village, spoke little, and (in modern terms) did not know their own home address. They were probably suffering from chlorosis, a deficiency disease which gives the skin a greenish tint, hence the term "green sickness". With a better diet it disappears. 

World Of Mysteries

Extraordinary People - Child Frozen In Time

Brooke Megan Greenberg

 (January 8, 1993 – October 24, 2013) was an American Syndrome X patient from Reisterstown, Baltimore County, Maryland, who remained physically and cognitively similar to a toddler, despite her increasing age. She was about 30 inches (76 cm) tall, weighed about 16 pounds (7.3 kg), and had an estimated mental age of nine months to one year. Brooke's doctors termed her condition "Syndrome X".

Birth and early life

Brooke was born on January 8, 1993, to Jewish parents Howard and Melanie Greenberg at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, one month before her due date, weighing just four pounds (1.8 kg). She was born with anterior hip dislocation, a condition that caused her legs to be swiveled upward toward her shoulders; it was corrected surgically. Otherwise, Brooke appeared to be a normal infant.

In her first six years, she went through a series of unexplained medical emergencies from which she recovered. She had seven perforated stomach ulcers. She also suffered a seizure. This was followed by what was later diagnosed as a stroke; weeks later, no damage was detected. At age five, Brooke had a mass in her brain that caused her to go into a deep sleep (after confirmation that it was not a coma) for 14 days. The doctors diagnosed the mass as a brain tumor. She later awoke, and physicians found no tumor present. Brooke's pediatrician, Dr. Lawrence Pakula, states that the source of her sudden illness remains a mystery.

During an interview on the talk show Katie, her father stated that between the ages of four and five, she stopped growing.

 Unexplained condition

Over several years, the Greenbergs visited many specialists, looking for an explanation for their daughter's strange condition, yet there was no diagnosis of any known genetic syndrome or chromosomal abnormality. In 2001, when Dateline documented Brooke, she was still the size of a six-month-old infant, weighing just 13 lb (5.9 kg) at 30 inches (76 cm) tall. The family still had no explanation. Brooke's mother Melanie said, "They [the specialists] just said she’ll catch up. Then we went to the nutritionist, the endocrinologist. We tried the growth hormone…” The growth hormone treatment had no effect. Howard, Brooke's father, said, "I mean, she did not put on an ounce, or she did not grow an inch... That’s when I knew there was a problem." After the growth hormone administration failed, the doctors, unable to diagnose a known condition, named her condition Syndrome X.

The Greenbergs made many visits to nearby Johns Hopkins Children's Center and even took Brooke to New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, searching for information about their daughter’s condition. When geneticists sequenced Greenberg's DNA, they found that the genes associated with the premature aging diseases were normal, unlike the mutated versions in patients with Werner syndrome and progeria.

Medical studies

In 2006, Richard Walker, PhD in endocrine physiology of the University Of South Florida College Of Medicine said that Brooke's body was not developing as a coordinated unit but as independent parts that were out of synchronization. She was never diagnosed with any known genetic disorder or chromosomal abnormality that would help explain why. Her telomeres seemed to be shortening at the normal rate.

In 2009, Walker said, "There've been very minimal changes in Brooke's brain … Various parts of her body, rather than all being at the same stage, seem to be disconnected." Walker noted that Brooke's brain, for example, was not much more mature than that of a new-born infant. He estimated her mental age at around nine months to a year old. Brooke could make gestures and recognize sounds but could not speak. Her bones were like those of a ten-year-old, and she still had her baby teeth, which had an estimated developmental age of about eight years. Said Walker, "We think that Brooke's condition presents us with a unique opportunity to understand the process of aging. ‘’Different parts of her body are developing at different rates, as if they were not a unit but parts of separate organisms," Walker explained.  Dr. Walker did not say whether the genes responsible for development are the same ones responsible for aging.

Death

Brooke Greenberg died on October 24, 2013, at the Herman and Walter Samuelson Children's Hospital at Sinai Medical Center in Baltimore (the same hospital where she had been born in 1993). Her funeral service took place on October 27, 2013, and that same morning, she was buried at Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery - Berrymans Lane, in Reisterstown, Maryland. The cause of her death was bronchomalacia, a medical condition usually occurring in children, which results in difficulty breathing due to weak cartilage in the walls of the bronchial tubes.

Comparable cases

Dr. Walker believed that Brooke Greenberg's condition had resulted from a failure of central control genes. He identified two more people with similar developmental issues: Gabrielle Williams of Montana (born in 2004) and Nicky Freeman of Australia (born in 1970), a 44-year-old man who looks like a boy.

Gabrielle Williams's condition has since been determined to have been the result of a genetic mutation. Nicky Freeman has been diagnosed with deformity of the pituitary gland.

María Audenete do Nascimento, a brazilian woman who lives in the town of Caucaia near Fortaleza in the state of Ceará, Brazil, was once thought to have also been suffering from a condition similar to Greenberg's. She was reportedly born in May 1981 but stopped growing after nine months. She has been diagnosed with severe hypothyroidism.

             

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Crying Boy Painting

The Crying Boy 

A mass-produced print of a painting by Italian painter Bruno Amadio, also known as Giovanni Bragolin It was widely distributed from the 1950s onwards. There are numerous alternative versions, all portraits of tearful young boys or girls. In addition to being widely known, certain urban legend  attribute a "curse" to the painting.

Curse

On September 4, 1985, the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a firefighter from Yorkshire was claiming that undamaged copies of the painting were frequently found amidst the ruins of burned houses. He stated that no firefighter would allow a copy of the painting into his own house. Over the next few months, The Sun and other tabloids ran several articles on house fires suffered by people who had owned the painting.

By the end of November, belief in the painting's curse was widespread enough that The Sun was organising mass bonfires of the paintings, sent in by readers.

Karl Pilkington has made reference to these events on The Ricky Gervais Show. Ricky Gervais dismissed the curse as "bollocks".

Steve Punt, a British writer and comedian, investigated the curse of the crying boy in a BBC radio Four production called Punt PI. Although the programme is comic in nature, Punt researched the history of the Crying Boy painting. The conclusion reached by the programme, following testing at the Building Research Establishment, is that the prints were treated with some varnish containing fire repellent, and that the string holding the painting to the wall would be the first to perish, resulting in the painting landing face down on the floor and thus being protected, although no explanation was given as to why no other paintings were turning up unscathed. The picture was also mentioned in an episode about curses in the TV series Weird or What?  in 2012.

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