If you're superstitious, you'll do your best to stay safe on Friday the 13th. But watch out for these other dates—they're even unluckier!
11 Days Historically Unluckier Than Friday the 13th
April 14
1865: Abraham Lincoln is fatally shot while attending a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
1912: The RMS Titanic hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic ocean.
1935: Texas and Oklahoma are hit by one of the worst massive sandstorms of all time, creating the area known as the Dust Bowl. Many people die, and countless others are forced to relocate.
1944: The first group of Jewish citizens transported from Athens, Greece, arrives at Auschwitz concentration camp.
1944: The massive freighter SS Fort Stikine explodes while docked in Bombay, India, killing hundreds of people.
1972: Twenty-four bombs go off across Northern Ireland, the work of the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
1986: A massive hailstorm hits Gopalganj, Bangladesh, killing 92 people. This storm holds the record for the largest hailstone ever recorded: a chunk of ice weighing 2.2 pounds.
1999: The National Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, accidentally bombs a convoy of civilian vehicles after mistaking them for Serbian military vehicles, killing 73 Albanian refugees.
2013: Eleven people die and 50 others are injured in a hotel fire in Xiangyang, China.
2017: A Meethotamulla rubbish dump collapses onto houses in Colombo, Sri Lanka, killing 26 people.
2019: 11 tornadoes hit the U.S. South, killing eight people in Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana.
April 20
1587: Queen Elizabeth I of England signs a death warrant for her cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.
1888: Hail kills a reported 246 people in Moradabad, India.
1889: Adolph Hitler is born.
1920: Tornadoes kill 219 people in Alabama and Mississippi.
1999: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 13 people and injure 24 others before committing suicide in the Columbine High School massacre.
2010: A Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion kills 11 and causes the rig to sink, initiating a massive oil discharge in the Gulf of Mexico.
2012: A plane crash near Islamabad, Pakistan, kills 127 people.
2013: A magnitude 7.0 earthquake strikes Lushan County, China, killing 193 people and injuring 11,826 people.
2013: Five snowboarders are killed by an avalanche in Loveland Pass, Colorado.
April 24
1184 B.C.: The Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse (traditional date).
1915: Over 1.5 million Armenians are massacred by Turks.
1960: An earthquake strikes Iran, killing 500.
1971: The play Frank Merriwell opens and closes on the same day at the Longacre Theater in New York.
1980: An American military operation to save 52 hostages in Iran fails. Eight soldiers die when their helicopters collide.
2013: A garment manufacturing building collapses in Bangladesh, India, killing 256 people and injuring 1,000.
June 28
1748: Rioting after a public execution in Amsterdam kills over 200 people.
1846: The saxophone is patented by Antoine Joseph Sax. Apartment dwellers will never sleep again.
1887: The Indianapolis Hoosiers baseball team suffers a lopsided shutout (24-0) at the hands of Philadelphia.
1914: The Archduke of Austria, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, are assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. World War I begins a few months later.
1941: German and Romanian soldiers kill 11,000 Jews in Kishinev.
1960: Dunmor, Kentucky, gets a record 10.40 inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period.
1965: President Lyndon Johnson authorizes the first American ground combat forces in Vietnam. The last troops will leave eight years later.
1975: Golfer Lee Trevino is struck by lightning at the Western Open in Illinois.
1987: Baseball player Don Baylor sets a career hit-by-pitch mark at 244.
2018: A gunman attacks the office of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, killing nine people.
Aug. 6
1890: The first-ever execution by electric chair occurs at Auburn Prison in New York.
1914: Austria-Hungary declares war on Russia, pitting two of the major powers of World War I against each other.
1945: The Enola Gay plane drops the first-ever atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, instantly killing 80,000 people.
1951: A massive typhoon hits the coast of Manchuria in northeast Asia, killing 4,800 people.
1964: The world’s oldest tree, known as Prometheus, is cut down by a graduate student conducting climate research. The tree, located in Great Basin National Park, was around 4,900 years old.
1997: A Korean Air flight crashes on the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. Of the 254 people aboard, only 26 survive.
2013: Twenty-five people are killed and 60 others are injured when a series of car bombs detonate in Baghdad, Iraq.
Aug. 15
483 B.C.: Buddha dies. The date is considered so unlucky in Japan that couples are advised to avoid being married on that day.
1040: King Duncan I of Scotland is killed in battle against his first cousin and rival, Macbeth. Although not murdered in his sleep, as per Shakespeare, the latter does succeed him as king.
1635: The first recorded American hurricane hits the Plymouth colony.
1914: A male servant of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright murders seven people in the architect’s Wisconsin home, Taliesin, and burns the living quarters to the ground.
1950: An 8.6-magnitude earthquake in India kills up to 30,000 people.
2007: An 8.0-magnitude earthquake off the Pacific coast devastates Peru, killing 514 people and injuring 1,090 others.
2018: A boat overturned in floods near the Nile in South Sudan kills 25 people. Most of them were schoolchildren.
Sept. 1
1482: Tatars plunder Kiev, Ukraine.
1689: Russia begins taxing men’s beards. Brooklyn Hipsters never recover.
1859: A solar superstorm affects electrical telegraph service.
1918: The baseball season ends early due to World War I.
1923: A 7.9-magnitude earthquake strikes Tokyo and Yokohama, killing 142,000.
1930: New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Crater disappears amid scandal, never to be found.
1939: World War II begins when Germany invades Poland. Over 60 million people worldwide will be killed by the end of the war.
1942: An American federal judge upholds detention of Japanese Americans.
1962: An earthquake in western Iran kills 12,000 people.
1974: A train accident in Yugoslavia kills 121 people.
1983: The Korean Boeing 747 Flight 007 strays into Siberia and is shot down by a Soviet jet.
Sept. 2
1666: The Great Fire of London begins, spreading to destroy much of the city.
1792: The September Massacres begin during the French Revolution; over the next four days, mobs attack prisons throughout Paris, killing over 1,000 prisoners.
1935: A Category 5 hurricane touches down on the Florida Keys. At the time, it is the most intense hurricane to ever hit the United States.
1944: Anne Frank is deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1949: A fire lasting for 18 hours sweeps Chongqing, China, killing over 1,000 people.
1956: In Mahbubnagar, India, a rail bridge collapses, causing two train cars to fall into the river; 121 people are killed.
1992: An earthquake strikes Nicaragua, killing 116 people.
1998: Swissair Flight 111 crashes in Nova Scotia. All 229 people on board are killed.
2018: A major fire at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro destroys the majority of its 20 million artifacts.
2019: A diving boat catches fire off the coast of California, killing 34 people who were asleep on board.
Sept. 11
1649: In the Seige of Drogheda in Ireland, Oliver Cromwell kills 3,000 royalists.
1857: In the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Mormons dressed as Indians murder 120 colonists in Utah.
1881: Triple landslides bury Elm, a village in Switzerland.
1939: The British submarine Triton torpedoes the British submarine Oxley.
1943: Jewish ghettos of Minsk and Lida Belorussia are liquidated.
1963: Typhoon Gloria strikes Taiwan, killing 330 people and causing $17.5 million in damage.
1974: Baseball fans are forced to sit through a 25-inning, seven-hour game until the Cardinals finally beat the Mets, 4-3.
1986: The Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its biggest one-day decline ever (at the time), plummeting 86.61 points.
2001: Terrorists hijack and crash passenger planes into New York City’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Another plane crashes in Pennsylvania after passengers fight off the hijackers. Nearly 3,000 people are killed.
2012: The U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is stormed, looted and burned down, killing five people, including the U.S. ambassador.
2015: A large crane collapses, killing more than 100 people in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
Oct. 29
1913: Floods in El Salvador kill thousands.
1929: The Black Tuesday stock market crash triggers the Great Depression.
1942: Nazis murder 16,000 Jews in Pinsk, Soviet Union.
1960: A plane carrying California State University’s football team crashes, killing 16 people.
1998: Hurricane Mitch, the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history (killing over 11,000 people), made landfall in Honduras.
1999: The deadliest Indian Ocean tropical cyclone hits Orissa, India, killing 15,000 people.
2011: A record-breaking snowstorm in the northeastern United States leaves nearly 2 million residents without power for more than 36 hours.
2012: Hurricane Sandy makes landfall in New Jersey, resulting in 110 deaths and $50 billion in damage.
2018: Lion Air flight JT 610 crashes into the sea just after takeoff, killing all 189 on board.
Dec. 7
43 B.C.: Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman orator and politician, is assassinated.
1941: The Imperial Japanese Navy attacks the American fleet at Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawaii, killing 2,403 people. The next day, the United States enters World War II.
1946: A fire at Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta kills 119 people.
1983: Two jets collide at Madrid Airport in Spain, killing 93 people.
1988: A 6.9-magnitude earthquake in Spitak, Armenia, leaves 25,000 dead and 5 million homeless.
1993: Long Island Rail Road passenger Colin Ferguson murders six people and injures 19 others on a commuter train in Nassau County, New York.
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. We verify all facts and data, back them with credible sourcing and revisit them over time to ensure they remain accurate and up to date. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
