Superstition can turn a loaf of bread into a shield, a train schedule into a bad omen, or an ordinary animal into a messenger of fate. This second collection explores 50 more strange beliefs, lucky charms, curses, rituals, and coincidences that influenced people, traditions, and even governments around the world. Missed the first collection? Read Part 1.
1 Bear Euphemism Erased Original Name
The original Northern European word for bear has been lost because ancient people reportedly feared that saying it aloud might make the predator overhear them and attack. They used “bruin,” meaning “the brown one,” as a safer euphemism, and the term eventually developed into “bear.” Since nobody knows which word it replaced, author Ralph Keyes described “bear” as the oldest-known euphemism.
2. US President William McKinley regularly wore a red carnation on his lapel as his trademark good-luck charm. During a public reception at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6, 1901, a 12-year-old girl named Myrtle Ledger asked for the flower, and McKinley gave it to her. Moments later, at 4:07 p.m., a man named Leon Czolgosz shot him twice in the abdomen with a concealed .32-caliber revolver. McKinley’s wounds became gangrenous, and he died eight days later on September 14.
3. In late 19th-century America, people formed “Thirteen Clubs” to demonstrate their lack of superstition. A US Civil War veteran named William Fowler organized the first meeting at 8:13 p.m. on January 13, 1881, when 13 guests dined in Room 13 after walking beneath a ladder and sitting among piles of spilled salt. Similar clubs spread across North America over the next 45 years and included five future US presidents, from Chester A. Arthur to Theodore Roosevelt. The movement eventually disappeared as public interest faded.
4. An Albanian superstition claims that hiccups begin when someone mentions the hiccuping person’s name during a conversation. To stop them, the person must recite the names of everyone who might have been talking about them. The hiccups supposedly end as soon as they say the name of the person who mentioned them.
5. A fisherman in the Philippines found a 34-kilogram pearl after his boat’s anchor snagged a giant clam more than a decade before 2016. Unaware of its potential value, he kept it under his bed as a good-luck charm and touched it before every fishing trip. When he moved away, he gave the pearl to his aunt, a woman named Aileen Cynthia Maggay-Amurao who worked as a local tourism officer. Reports suggested it could be worth more than US$100 million and become the world’s largest known natural pearl.
6 Substitute Kings Absorbed Deadly Omens
In ancient Mesopotamia, Assyrian priests responded to dire omens, particularly solar eclipses, with a ritual known as the “substitute king.” They selected a man, who did not have to be a commoner, dressed him in royal clothing, declared him king, and gave him a young woman as his queen while the real ruler withdrew from public view. The pair took on the evil fate that the omen supposedly reserved for the true king. Once the danger passed, the ritual required both substitutes to die, allowing the real king to return safely.
7. In Japan, Kit Kat became a good-luck snack for students because its Japanese pronunciation, “Kitto Katto,” resembles “kitto katsu,” meaning “you will surely win.” The wordplay reportedly began in Kyushu and spread nationwide by 2002. Students began treating the chocolate bars as omamori, or amulets, during entrance exams, while parents wrote encouraging messages on the wrappers. By 2019, one in three Japanese students reportedly bought Kit Kats before entrance exams, and one in five carried them to the testing site.
8. According to a popular English legend, King Charles I treasured a black cat because he believed it brought him good luck. When the animal died, he reportedly lamented that his luck had disappeared, and Parliamentary forces arrested him the following day. Charles was later tried for high treason and executed in 1649, turning the cat’s death into an ominous coincidence.
9. In 2017, two Chinese passengers separately threw coins toward aircraft engines before takeoff, believing the gesture would ensure a safe journey. In June, an 80-year-old woman identified by her surname Qiu delayed China Southern Airlines Flight 380 from Shanghai to Guangzhou for more than five hours after mechanics recovered nine coins, including one from inside the engine. In October, a 76-year-old woman repeated the ritual at Anqing airport, forcing a Lucky Air flight to Kunming to remain grounded overnight and prompting police to detain her.
10. During the Age of Sail, sailors often considered women aboard ships bad luck, but they made a striking exception for female nudity: they believed a woman baring her breasts could calm stormy seas. Roman writer Pliny the Elder recorded a version of this belief in Natural History in AD 77, claiming that a woman uncovering herself could lull a storm at sea. This old superstition may help explain why bare-breasted or semi-naked female figureheads became popular after the 1780s.
11 Pocahontas Hid Her Secret Name
The Powhatan woman known as Pocahontas was born around 1596 with the formal name Amonute and also carried the secret name Matoaka, historically recorded as Matoax. Historian William Stith claimed that the Powhatan concealed Matoax from the English because they feared that knowing her true name would give the colonists power to harm her. “Pocahontas” was instead a childhood nickname meaning “little wanton,” and she reportedly revealed Matoaka only after receiving the Christian baptismal name Rebecca.
12. In 1998, American NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt granted the Make-A-Wish request of a young girl named Wessa Miller, who wanted to give him a penny for good luck in the Daytona 500. Earnhardt glued the penny to the dashboard of his No. 3 Chevrolet and raced with it in place. On February 15, he won the Daytona 500 on his 20th attempt after failing to win his previous 19 starts.
13. The Mongols believed that spilling royal blood onto the ground could bring terrible natural disasters, so they developed bloodless ways to execute rulers and other dangerous figures. During the sack of Baghdad, Mongol ruler Hulegu reportedly had Abbasid caliph Al-Musta’sim wrapped in a carpet and trampled by horses, although another historical account says men beat him to death with their fists. After accusing a woman named Fatima of bewitching regent Toregene Khatun, the Mongols sewed up her orifices, wrapped her in felt, and threw her alive into a river to contain her bodily fluids. Another story claims they killed Otrar governor Inalchuq by pouring molten silver into his eyes and ears, but historians consider that account possibly apocryphal.
14. Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli gained such a reputation for causing scientific equipment to malfunction that his colleagues jokingly called it the “Pauli effect.” When an expensive measuring device suddenly failed at the University of Gottingen while Pauli was absent, institute director and physicist James Franck wrote to him that he was innocent this time. They later discovered that Pauli had been traveling to Zurich and changed trains at a nearby station at approximately the same moment the machine stopped working. Physicist George Gamow later recorded the coincidence in Thirty Years That Shook Physics, making it one of the best-known stories behind Pauli’s supposed jinx.
15. In 480, Eastern Roman emperor Zeno suffered an extraordinarily unlucky roll while playing tabula, a Roman game nearly identical to modern backgammon. He rolled 2, 5, and 6 with three dice, forcing him to break three paired stacks and leave eight checkers alone and exposed to capture. Zeno considered the position remarkable enough to preserve it in an epigram, which historian Agathias reproduced around 530. The surviving account allowed scholars to reconstruct the game centuries later, and some historians consider it the earliest recorded “bad beat” story.
16 Illuminati Opposition Spawned Conspiracy Myths
In 1776, Bavarian professor Adam Weishaupt founded the original Illuminati as an Enlightenment-era secret society opposed to superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of monarchical power. Bavarian ruler Charles Theodore outlawed the Illuminati and other secret societies through a series of edicts beginning in 1784, with encouragement from the Catholic Church. Conservative and religious critics later claimed that the group had survived underground and orchestrated the French Revolution, despite a lack of evidence. Popular books published in 1797 and 1798 spread the story of an international conspiracy, laying the foundation for modern Illuminati myths long after the original organization disappeared.
17. In the traditional Southern prison song “Midnight Special,” inmates beg an overnight passenger train to shine its light on them, treating the beam as a sign of salvation and possible freedom. A popular account places the train outside Sugar Land Prison near Houston, where its headlight reportedly swept across the cells. Prisoners there developed a superstition that having the light shine on you would bring fortune and freedom.
18. Japan’s Doctor Yellow trains were bright-yellow Shinkansen maintenance sets equipped to inspect tracks and overhead wires at speeds of up to 285 km/h. They made three monthly round trips between Tokyo and Hakata, but operators never published their schedules. Because sightings depended largely on chance, people began saying that seeing Doctor Yellow brought good luck or happiness, while rail enthusiasts created websites and social media accounts to predict its movements. JR Central retired its T4 set in January 2025, while JR West plans to retire the remaining T5 set in 2027.
19. European folklore commonly portrayed dragons as malevolent beasts that breathed fire, terrorized communities, and greedily guarded hoards of gold. Chinese and other East Asian traditions often treated dragons as benevolent beings that controlled water and rain while symbolizing wisdom, imperial authority, prosperity, and good fortune. Agricultural communities prayed to them for rain and plentiful harvests, making these dragons life-giving powers to honor rather than monsters for heroes to kill.
20. The earliest known non-Christian account of Christianity comes from a letter that Roman governor Pliny the Younger sent to Emperor Trajan around AD 112. Christianity had spread through cities and villages in Bithynia and Pontus, now part of northern Turkey, and Pliny wanted advice on dealing with its followers. His investigation uncovered harmless practices and what he called a “depraved, excessive superstition.”
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21 American Troops Weaponized Enemy Superstitions
The U.S. military has used superstition to scare enemies with ominous horoscopes, fake vampires, and recorded ghosts. During World War II, the Allies dropped frightening horoscopes over Germany; in the 1950s, U.S. Major General Edward G. Lansdale’s team staged an aswang attack against Communist Huk rebels in the Philippines; and in Vietnam, troops blasted ghost tapes filled with eerie music and voices. Only the vampire ruse clearly worked, causing an entire Huk squadron to abandon its hill, while the ghost tapes sometimes drew heavier enemy fire.
22. According to early European travelers’ reports, some African Pygmy tribes appeared to have no cults, rites, totems, deities, spirits, or even simple superstitions. They buried their dead without ceremonies or gifts and paid them no further attention. Because of this, the travelers described these tribes as essentially atheistic.
23. The Fire Horse appears once every 60 years in Japan’s sexagenary cycle, and superstition says girls born during that year will grow up to ruin or even kill their husbands. Fear of the belief led many Japanese couples to avoid childbirth in 1966, while some chose abortions, causing the birth rate to fall 25% from 1965. The Yamagata District Legal Affairs Bureau even organized a Fire Horse Banishment Campaign in November 1965 to challenge the superstition. The Fire Horse returned in 2026, although experts predicted that it would have little effect on modern birth rates.
24. During Iceland’s 17th-century witch trials, most people executed for sorcery were men, making the country unusual in Europe. Of the 22 recorded executions, 20 involved men and only two involved women, although one of the female executions remains unconfirmed. Icelandic society traditionally associated magic with literate men who used spells, runes, and magical books. In 1683, a man named Sveinn Arnason became the last person executed for witchcraft in Iceland.
25. In 1524, during iconoclast riots in Riga, Latvia, rioters accused a venerated wooden statue of the Virgin Mary in the city’s cathedral of being a witch. They subjected the statue to a trial by water and threw it into the Daugava River. When the wooden statue floated, they declared it guilty of witchcraft and burned it at Kubsberg.
