If you’re reading this, you obviously survived June 13, the only Friday the 13th we’ll see in 2025.
But don’t get too cocky. We’ll face three such unlucky Fridays in 2026, the maximum possible in a calendar year, according to TimeAndDate.com, an astronomy website.
If you’re like me, you won’t see any of them coming. More likely, your spouse or other loved one will casually mention the day’s arrival during breakfast, much as my wife did back in June. That’s when I predictably responded:
“Whenever it’s Friday the 13th, I think of Cuz Strickland.”
And then my wife nodded silently, hoping I wouldn’t tell her yet again about bowhunting southern Mississippi with Cuz on Friday the 13th in November 1998. But I did anyway. I like reminding her of my decades-old friendship with Cuz, Mossy Oak Camo’s longtime media guru, TV personality, and “Fistful of Dirt” podcast host.
“Yep. Ol’ Cuz hates Friday the 13th almost as much as he hates snakes,” I said. “Heh, heh. Yep. Cuz and I should have stayed in camp that morning.”
My wife’s coffee cup didn’t budge from her lips as she silently signaled me to stop. She’s heard the story nearly every Friday the 13th for 27 years. That’s 44 retellings, according to TimeAndDate.com.
I don’t think I’ve ever written this story, however, and my wife surely hasn’t shared it, so here’s the tale:
As Cuz and I ate our pre-dawn breakfast that warm day, he fretted about defying the well-known superstition of Friday the 13th. He wasn’t joking. I knew he would’ve stayed in bed if not feeling obligated to videotape my bowhunt.
A half-hour later, we stood atop a steep creekbank, scanning eroded trails with our headlamps for a safe descent. Cuz — toting a state-of-the-1990s video camera, which matched the size and weight of a portable air-conditioner — stepped down first to lead the way.
Suddenly, I saw Cuz’s headlamp — still strapped around his head — barrel-rolling down the 15-foot embankment, its beam flickering off tree trunks, and cartwheeling across branches above and the gurgling creek below. Cuz, being a good Christian, seldom swears, but he made several exceptions during his rapid descent and bone-bruising halt.
After retrieving and reassembling Cuz’s battered and scattered parts, we took stock of his video camera and muddied gear. Amazingly, everything snapped back into place. The camera’s little green lights twinkled their assurances while Cuz blinked his.
We then climbed the opposite creekbank and pressed on, careful not to speak of Friday the 13th and ponder the wisdom of spending our morning 20 feet high in treestands. But we survived the morning, as did the deer passing by beyond arrow range after dawn. When quitting around 11 a.m., Cuz descended first after lowering his pack with a rope. Then he unclipped his pack and slung it over his shoulder as I hauled up the rope to attach the camera.
Just as I began lowering it, I paused.
That’s odd. Where did Cuz go?
A split-second later, I saw a blur of Mossy Oak camo busting through brush and trampling a strip of saplings, spewing bark and woodchips in its wake. It was Cuz! And I swear he was cursing again, but louder and more distressed than before.
Once his churning legs got him on a flat plane and in full flight, Cuz’s right hand suddenly shot up, snatched his cap, and swung it wildly around his head as if swatting demons. Then he vanished, reappeared, and vanished again through the creek bottom, his shouts and snapping branches helping me track his route. Raising my binoculars, I watched him stop twice to look back and yell, only to shoot off seconds later on a new tangent, his camo cap again chopping air like a doomed helicopter.
Hmm. Pressed to guess, I’d swear something was chasing him.
Eventually, the woods fell silent and Cuz cautiously returned, his head snapping back and forth, eyes warily scanning. Finally, he stopped at a prudent distance and yelled fresh instructions:
“Be careful when you lower the camera and climb down. There’s a wasp nest in the ground by our tree. I lowered my pack onto it. When I picked it up, they got after me.”
I did as instructed, lowering the camera, my bow, and gear on the tree’s opposite side. Detecting only scattered yellowjackets launching from the hole, I descended, grabbed everything, and hurried toward Cuz, thinking I eluded the lookouts.
Seconds later, the subterranean nest gushed another demonic wave. We fled for Cuz’s truck, hands full and packs flapping, improvising a defense by somehow swatting and occasionally crushing wasps as they drilled our necks, noses, and noggins.
Once in camp, we pressed ice to our welts and washed and bandaged our wounds as Cuz commenced second-guessing.
“I knew we shouldn’t have gone out this morning,” he said disgustedly. “I knew better. I knew it!”
I knew Cuz was serious. Like most Yankees, I once viewed superstitions with more curiosity than respect. Then I served alongside Southerners in the Navy in the late 1970s, and learned they judge superstitions as seriously as they do grits, collard greens, and boiled peanuts. As Betsy Cribb Watson wrote in Southern Living magazine, Southerners treat hand-me-down superstitions like matters of good hygiene, “as routine as the old rinse-and-repeat.”
But they have far more superstitions than soap or washcloths. When hunting from Southern deer camps, you quickly learn not to lay your hat on a bed or peer at the sliver of a new moon through overhead limbs. Both offenses bring bad luck. You hang your hat on a peg, and you walk into a clearing before viewing a new moon.
Likewise, if you’re driving out to hunt and a rabbit crosses the road ahead from right to left, you might as well return home. When you first saw that rabbit, he was in the right, but then he went wrong. That heralds bad luck.
So scoff if you like, but don’t say you weren’t warned if you dare to go icefishing next year on Feb. 13. Or river fishing March 13. Or bowhunting Nov. 13, 2026. Those are unlucky Fridays, and flouting that fact is like ignoring a rocking chair that’s rocking on its own.
When empty rockers warn Southerners someone is about to die, they don’t assume it’s someone else.
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