A history of bad luck and tragedy on Friday 13th

Whether you take Friday 13th superstitions at face value or think they are nothing more than urban legends, here are 13 unlucky - and sometimes tragic - events that have occurred on Friday the 13th.

1. The ‘Friday the 13th virus’ infected hundreds of IBM computers across the UK on 13 January, 1989. It wiped out program files and caused considerable anxiety at a time when large-scale computer viruses were a relatively new threat.

2. Well known rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur was pronounced dead on Friday, 13 September, 1996.

3. On Friday, 13 November, 1829, American stuntman Sam Patch scheduled his largest ever jump – a 125-foot jump into the Genesee River, USA. Known as ‘The Yankee Leaper’ Patch became the first famous American daredevil after he successfully jumped from a raised platform into the Niagara River. The Genesee River jump killed him.

4. On 13 September, 1940, five German bombs hit Buckingham Palace and destroyed the Palace Chapel, as part of Hitler's strategic ‘Blitz’ bombing campaign.

5. A chartered plane carrying 45 rugby team members and their friends and families crashed in the Andes Mountains on Friday 13 October, 1972. Sixteen of the group survived for 72 days while the world thought they were dead, in what would become headline-making acts of cannibalism. Their ordeal was made famous by a 1974 book called ‘Alive!’ by Piers Paul Read and was later made into a film named ‘I am Alive’.

6. On Friday, 13 November, 1970, a massive storm killed approximately 300,000 people in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and created floods that killed as many as one million in the Ganges Delta.

7. A Swedish military DC-3 plane carrying a crew of eight disappeared over the Baltic Sea On 13 June, 1952. After one of two Catalina rescue planes sent to search for the plane was attacked by Soviet forces the incident became known as the ‘Catalina affair’. In 1991, the Soviet air force conceded it had also shot down the DC-3.

8. On 13 June, 1997, 59 people were killed and 103 seriously injured in a stampede during the premiere screening of ‘Border’, a patriotic Hindi movie. Known as the Uphaar Cinema fire, it is one of the worst fire tragedies in recent Indian history.

9. On 13 October, 1989, the Dow Jones experienced the second largest drop in history at that time. This event was later nicknamed the ‘Friday the 13th mini crash’.

10. The asteroid ‘99942 Apophis’ will reportedly make a very close encounter with Earth – closer than the orbits of communication satellites – on Friday, 13 April, 2029.

11. On Friday, 13 August, 2010, a runaway London Underground engineering train travelled four miles through five stations without a driver. The train in front was forced to skip several stations and was diverted to another branch of the network.

12. Hurricane Charley caused destruction in south Florida on Friday, 13 August, 2004. The strong Category 4 hurricane lasted six days altogether and hit Florida at maximum strength, making it the strongest hurricane to hit the United States since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Damage in the state totaled approximately £8billion.

13. On Friday, 13 October, 2006, the ‘Friday the 13th Storm’ struck Buffalo, New York. The unusual early-season snow storm … It is also known as the ‘Arborgeddon Storm’, ‘Columbus Day Massacre’ and the ‘Octoblizzard’. An estimated 400,000 people were without power on Friday the 13th.