It's Friday the 13th, Are You Superstitious?

For some Paraskevidekatriaphobics — people afflicted with a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th — among us, today is a good day to stay cloistered under the blankets and put off until Saturday what needs to be done today.

What's the oddest thing that ever happened to you on Friday the 13th? Tell us in comments.

Or perhaps, as the great 19th century French composer Hector Berlioz once noted, you just believe “the luck of having talent is not enough; one must have a talent for luck.” 

Superstitions about Friday the 13th abound. In a 2003 National Geographic report, Donald Dossey, founder of the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, NC, traced fear of the number 13 to Norse mythology.

According to that version, as 12 Norse gods were having a dinner party at Valhalla, their heaven, an uninvited 13th guest, Loki, arranged for the god of darkness to shoot the god of joy. 

"It was a bad, unlucky day," Dossey told the magazine. “From that moment on, the number 13 has been considered ominous and foreboding.”

Are you the owner of a black cat? Let's bypass superstition and upload your photos of that dark feline to this story.

But there are other theories, including those steeped in religious tradition. Legend traces the decline of the Order of the Knights Templar in the Middle Ages to Friday the 13th, when the Knights’ grand master, Jacqueas de Molay, and 60 of his senior knights were arrested in Paris.

Another legend notes that Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th guest at the Last Supper.

And today isn't the only Friday the 13th on our 2012 calendar. We'll also have to face a Friday in July that falls on the 13th.