The Eerie Reason Why Some Hotels Seem To Be Missing The 13th Floor

This has very likely happened to you: You arrive at a high-rise hotel, you check in, and you roll your luggage into an elevator. You're staying in one of the upper floors, so your finger searches for the right button. But just before you press, say, 12 or 14, you happen to notice that there's no number between them. A button for the 13th floor simply does not exist. "Hold on a second," you might think to yourself. "Is that floor missing because people are, like, superstitious about the number thirteen? Like it's bad luck or something?"

The short answer is: yes. Researchers believe that about 10% of Americans have "triskaidekaphobia," or a diagnosable fear of the number 13. Unlike fears of heights and spiders — which can tangibly hurt you, given the right circumstances — this number elicits a more abstract concern: 13 is considered a cursed or unlucky number. This supernatural fear has plagued famous personalities, such as Herbert Hoover and Napoleon Bonaparte, and millions more put stock in the number 13's diabolical power.

Of course, these fears can provoke us without full-on belief: Lots of people get the willies around Friday the 13th, the same way they knock wood or avoid stepping on cracks. Some hold to traditions, like this unexpected reason your charter boat captain won't let you bring bananas on board. We may not actively believe spotting a black cat means evil tidings, but the presence of one still gives us pause. Bowing to these anxieties, building architects often skip the number 13. As a result, the elevator in a 20-story building might suggest there are only 19 floors.

What does this mean for guests? Most people will overlook the missing number and simply head to their rooms, grateful for a comfy bed and some cable TV. Trivia enthusiasts may spot this idiosyncrasy right away and point it out to others, while some may just get confused or assume it's a mistake. Hotels with at least 13 floors are most common in dense inner cities, where they fit nicely into the vertical skyline, so this is where the custom is most pronounced: According to a report in the New York Post, only 5% of condominium towers in the Big Apple marked an official 13th floor. This phenomenon doesn't quite match the 40 most mysterious places in the whole entire world, but it's an astonishingly wide acceptance of an old-fashioned belief.

In Western societies, fear of the number 13 goes back generations, but numbers are connected to good or bad tidings around the globe. In traditional parts of China and Japan, four is the number that freaks people out, and 39 is considered a cursed number in Afghanistan. Using Scrabble-like logic, Italians cringe at the number 17, because the Roman numeral XVII can be rearranged as "VIXI," which is Latin for "I have lived" — implying that one's life is now about to end. One of the creepiest superstitions and bad omens from around the world comes from certain folks in Vietnam: If three people pose for a photograph, the middle one will prematurely die. A missing 13 may not have much of an effect on your hotel stay, but it remains a striking curiosity.