The Biography of a Beastly Number

Why thirteen is the number of our nightmares

Mitch Horowitz
5 min readJun 21, 2017

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When you travel to a resort or hotel this summer, take a look at the panel of buttons in the elevator: the likelihood is that you’ll find no thirteenth floor.

Our fear of the number thirteen runs so deep that many hotels, casinos, resorts, and apartment towers simply omit the dreaded number from their floor…

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Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China