The Hidden Meanings Behind 10 Common Superstitions

In much of Europe and colonial America, black cats got tangled up with the fear of witchcraft. By the late Middle Ages a cat — especially a black one — was imagined as a witch’s companion, or even the witch herself in disguise, and a cat crossing your path could mean bad luck was close behind.

Worth remembering that this is a local grudge, not a universal one. In much of Britain and in Japan, a black cat is considered good luck. The animal didn’t change; the story people told about it did.

The tidiest explanation is also probably the true one: a ladder leaning against a wall forms a triangle, and walking through it felt like breaking a shape long treated as sacred — a symbol of the Holy Trinity in Christian Europe, and of life itself further back. Passing through it was seen as tempting fate.

There’s a plainer reading too. Ladders are where people are working overhead with tools and paint, and standing under one has always been a fine way to get something dropped on your head. Sometimes a superstition is just old safety advice in a spooky costume.

Ancient Greeks and Romans treated a reflection as more than a picture — closer to a glimpse of the soul. Damage the reflection, the thinking went, and you damaged something about yourself. The oddly specific “seven years” is usually traced to the Roman idea that the body renewed itself on a seven-year cycle, so that’s how long you’d wait to be whole again.

Treat that neat backstory with a little caution — it’s the popular account, not a documented paper trail. There’s a very down-to-earth angle as well: good mirrors were once wildly expensive, and “seven years of bad luck” was a memorable way of saying you’d just smashed something you couldn’t easily replace.

Salt was precious for most of human history — a preservative, a currency, a thing you did not waste. Knocking it over was a small disaster, and it’s easy to see how spilling it came to feel like a genuine bad omen rather than just a mess to sweep up.

The over-the-shoulder fix comes with a familiar folk story: the devil lurks behind your left shoulder, so a pinch of salt in his eye keeps him off your back. It’s a charming explanation, and an old one, but it reads more as after-the-fact justification than proven origin. Toss the salt if it makes you feel better — it’s harmless enough.

This is one of the honest question marks. A popular story says early European peoples believed spirits lived in trees, so touching or knocking on wood called on that protection — later reframed by Christians as touching the wood of the cross. It’s a lovely idea with almost no hard evidence behind it.

The folklorist Steve Roud makes a more grounded case: the habit may trace to a 19th-century British children’s tag game called “Tiggy Touchwood,” where you were safe from being caught as long as you were touching wood. A game about protection quietly becoming a grown-up reflex about protection — that fits better than most.

This is really two old unease combined. Thirteen has long been treated as an unlucky number — one theory points to the thirteen guests at the Last Supper — while Friday picked up gloomy associations of its own in Christian tradition. Neither is a firm origin so much as a long-running habit of mind.

Here’s the catch: the specific combination of the day and the number as an unlucky pairing only really shows up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Whatever ancient dread you’ve heard attached to it, the modern Friday-the-13th panic is a surprisingly recent invention.

You’ll often read that it goes back to Egypt, where sun parasols were sacred and opening one in the shade insulted the sun god. That’s a fun claim, and also a shaky one — treat it as a story people repeat, not settled fact.

The more believable explanation is almost boringly practical. Early rigid-framed umbrellas were bulky, spring-loaded things, and snapping one open in a crowded room was a good way to knock over a vase or catch someone in the eye. A sensible “don’t do that indoors” hardened, over time, into a warning about luck.

This one has an unusually traceable path. The custom is generally credited to the Etruscans in ancient Italy, who treated birds as fortune-tellers and saved the wishbone as a lucky relic. The Romans picked up the practice, and the idea of two people snapping it to compete for a wish came along with it.

From there it traveled through Europe and eventually onto English and American holiday tables. So if you tug a turkey wishbone at Thanksgiving, you’re taking part in a ritual that’s a couple of thousand years old — one of the better-documented origins on this list.

Iron itself was long thought to ward off evil, and a horseshoe added a second layer of good fortune — the crescent shape, and its link to a valuable working animal. Hang one over the door and you were, in folk logic, doubling your protection.

People still argue about which way it should point. One camp says open-end up, so the luck collects like water in a cup; the other says point it down so the luck pours out onto everyone who enters. There’s no correct answer — both are genuine folk traditions, which tells you something about how these rules really work.

The story you’ve almost certainly heard blames the plague: Pope Gregory the Great supposedly urged people to bless sneezers during a sixth-century outbreak, since a sneeze might be the first sign of illness. It’s repeated everywhere — and it’s far from proven.

Older ideas run deeper still: that a sneeze briefly let the soul escape, or opened a door for evil, so a quick blessing set things right. The truth is that people have reacted to sneezes with little verbal charms across many cultures for a very long time, and pinning it to one tidy origin is more wishful than accurate.