Yesterday was Friday the 13th, a day that’s supposed to bring extraordinary bad luck.

It seemed like a good time to write about superstition, and all the ways it affects individuals and society. We don’t seem to have as much of it in 2024 as we had in the past. I had to think back to childhood for some of history’s best examples.

For one thing we had three famous monsters. They included Bigfoot from North America, the Loch Ness Monster from Scotland and Yeti the Abominable Snowman from the Himalayas in Asia.

Many of my friends and I seriously believed in all three of them. When we’d take family car trips to the Twin Cities to see relatives, I even nicknamed the Minnesota River valley “Bigfoot Country.”

Sharks were also popular at the time, as shown in the success of Jaws at the box office. It led to a popular belief that Great White sharks were maneaters.

Every once in a while a book still comes out on shark fiction. There’s been recent interest in megaladon sharks, prehistoric ancestors of Great Whites. There have been claims that the megaladon might still exist in the depths of the ocean, and that global warming could bring them back to the surface.

The UFO (unidentified flying object) was popular when I grew up. It involved much speculation about aliens from outer space.

People wondered whether they were out there in space, invisible to our telescopes. It was thought that maybe they’d already arrived on Earth disguised as humans.

The interest in aliens goes at least as far back as the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast War of the Worlds, which depicted a Martian invasion. By the 1970s there were numerous portrayals of aliens in the movies and on television.

Comic books featuring action heroes provided inspiration for both types of media. Traditional favorites such as Superman, Batman and Robin, Spiderman, and Aquaman were joined by new characters such as Flash and Apache Chief.

The super heroes featured incredible strength and agility. They were larger than life, something kids could enjoy role playing as they looked forward to being big like adults.

Sometimes the past provided a source of superstition. It was especially true with ghost towns such as Bodie, California, and Jerome, Arizona.

When you visited a ghost town, you couldn’t help but think that it might be haunted. It perhaps contained the ghosts of gold and silver miners, outlaws, saloon keepers and ranchers.

With all those things in mind, it’s clear that we’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about superstitious concepts. The question became whether that’s good or bad.

Someone could say it’s bad by pointing out that superstition lets the imagination run wild. It puts forth things that are not taken seriously by most scientists. They therefore don’t seem to be a reflection of serious scholarship.

Even though someone could go overboard with thoughts of the unknown, I think there’s more good than bad. People since the ancient Greeks have told stories about their world. If storytellers didn’t know things just by looking at them, they often made something up.

We’ve continued that. It still happens on a regular basis. The 20th century expanded storytelling greatly with the additions of television, movies, radio and affordable paperback books.

The unknown leads to a sense of excitement, and often a sense of fear. The unknown makes someone think of a worst case scenario. What if Bigfoot breaks down the door? What if aliens are snatching bodies?

Putting the unknown into the context of legends in many ways renders them harmless. They become something to enjoy and a way to be entertained.

It at least has an impact on pop culture. It can also affect serious art and literature. Washington Irving’s headless horseman from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is one such instance.

Storytellers are often popular around campfires and on stage. People enjoy legends, a process that includes wondering if somehow they might be at least partly grounded in reality. We have the ability to pretend, to suspend our disbelief. It would be a boring world if we didn’t have that.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter and

contributor to the Marshall Independent