Celebrity Superstitions and Famous Lucky Rituals
Being rich, famous or extraordinarily successful doesn’t make you immune to superstition. If anything, some celebrity careers create perfect conditions for it. Actors wait to hear whether they got the part. Musicians walk onto stages in front of thousands of people. Designers send months of work down a runway in a matter of minutes. You can prepare as much as possible and still reach a point where the result is out of your hands.
That’s exactly where lucky numbers, charms and little rituals tend to creep in.
There is a catch when it comes to celebrity superstitions, though. The internet is full of claims that somebody refuses to wear a certain colour, insists on a particular number or carries an unusual object for luck, even when nobody can find the person actually saying it. So the examples here stick to beliefs that have been acknowledged by the person themselves or recorded by sources close enough to know.
When does a celebrity habit become a superstition?
Not every unusual habit counts. An actor who always drinks tea before filming could simply like tea. A singer who follows the same vocal warm-up every night is doing something that helps them perform. Wearing the same perfume because you love it doesn’t make the bottle lucky.
The difference comes when the habit becomes connected with an outcome it can’t realistically control. You wear the bracelet because things seem to go better when it’s there. You step onto the plane with the right foot because the alternative makes you uneasy. You notice a particular number and feel reassured that everything is heading in the right direction.
That’s the same distinction we make in what counts as a superstition. Repetition on its own is just a habit. The lucky or unlucky consequence is what changes it.
Taylor Swift turned unlucky 13 into her lucky number
Taylor Swift might be the easiest modern example of somebody taking a number with a terrible reputation and deciding it means the exact opposite.
Thirteen has followed her for years. She was born on December 13, turned 13 on a Friday the 13th and began noticing other successful moments that seemed to involve the same number. Her first album reached gold status after 13 weeks, and one of her early number-one songs happened to have a 13-second introduction.
It went far beyond noticing coincidences. During performances earlier in her career, Swift was known for writing 13 on her hand, and fans quickly learned to watch for the number in release dates, announcements and other details surrounding her work.
What makes this more than fan speculation is that Swift talks about the number herself. In a Rolling Stone conversation with Paul McCartney, she explained that 13 feels lucky because so many good coincidences have become attached to it. When she sees it now, she treats it as reassurance that things are moving in the direction they’re supposed to.
That’s quite a turnaround for a number associated with Friday the 13th and bad luck in much of Western superstition. Swift hasn’t just ignored the unlucky reputation. She has built an entirely different personal meaning around it.
Coco Chanel trusted the number 5
Long before Taylor Swift made 13 part of her public identity, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel had already done something similar with 5.
Five was Chanel’s lucky number. When perfumer Ernest Beaux presented her with a series of fragrance samples in 1921, she chose the fifth one. Instead of giving the perfume an elaborate romantic name, she kept its sample number and Chanel No. 5 was born.
The number wasn’t chosen accidentally. Chanel itself describes 5 as Gabrielle Chanel’s lucky number, while the house’s historical material says she liked presenting collections on the fifth day of the fifth month and hoped the number would bring the new fragrance luck.
That makes one of the most famous names in perfume partly the result of a personal lucky-number belief.
Five has collected plenty of other meanings outside Chanel’s world too. You can read about those separately in the meaning and symbolism of the number 5. They don’t prove why Chanel herself became attached to it, but they show how easily one number can gather completely different meanings depending on who is using it.
Christian Dior carried enough lucky charms for several people
Christian Dior didn’t limit himself to one lucky object.
The designer was openly superstitious and remained interested in fortune-telling throughout his life. He consulted clairvoyants, watched for signs and carried an assortment of objects he considered fortunate.
Among them were hearts, a sprig of lily of the valley, a piece of wood, a gold star and a four-leaf clover. Dior has continued to use many of those symbols long after his death. In 2026 the fashion house even released a Lady Dior design covered in four-leaf clovers, explaining that Christian Dior always carried a clover in his suit pocket.
His gold star had its own story. According to Dior’s later account, he found a metal star on the ground in Paris at a moment when he was deciding whether to accept financial backing to establish his own fashion house. He interpreted finding it as a sign that he should go ahead.
British Vogue’s guide to Dior’s lucky symbols describes just how deeply fortune-telling and talismans became woven into his work. He didn’t merely like the imagery. He genuinely looked to lucky objects and predictions when making important decisions.
The four-leaf clover and piece of wood are especially familiar because neither belonged only to Dior. Carrying a rare clover for good fortune and touching or knocking on wood both have much wider histories as luck traditions. Dior simply gathered several of them around himself at once.
Clark Gable let a coin make major decisions
Clark Gable claimed he wasn’t particularly superstitious. He walked under ladders, ignored bad hunches and didn’t pay much attention to the usual rules about luck.
There was one exception. If he reached a decision he genuinely couldn’t make, he flipped a coin and followed whatever the first toss told him to do.
Gable explained the habit in a 1935 interview later preserved by the Clark Gable archive Dear Mr. Gable. He said he didn’t keep flipping until he got the result he wanted either. The first answer stood, and he claimed he had used the method several times without regretting the decisions it produced.
That’s slightly different from carrying a lucky charm. The coin wasn’t supposed to make the outcome better. Gable was handing the choice over to chance when thinking about it himself had got him nowhere.
He even credited a coin toss with helping him decide whether to take an early film role or return to the stage. Considering where his career went afterwards, it’s easy to see why he didn’t lose faith in the method.
Marilyn Monroe looked to astrologers and psychics for guidance
Marilyn Monroe didn’t leave behind one famous lucky object in the way Christian Dior did, but she was interested in something much harder to carry in your pocket. She sought advice from astrologers and psychics.
This wasn’t a story added to the Marilyn legend decades after her death. In 1959, Time reported that Monroe sought zodiacal advice, although she didn’t use Hollywood astrologer Carroll Righter, whose celebrity clients included Marlene Dietrich and other major stars of the period.
When Righter once tried to impress her by pointing out that she shared the Gemini sign with several Hollywood actresses, Monroe apparently had a rather better list ready. She replied that she shared it with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Queen Victoria and Walt Whitman.
Another Time article published shortly after Monroe’s death named astrologer Blanca Holmes among the people she had consulted. Psychic Kenny Kingston also gave Monroe readings while she was alive. The Los Angeles Times later confirmed that Kingston met Monroe in San Francisco and gave readings to her.
Kingston remained part of her life much later too. Anthony Summers, whose biography of Monroe drew on hundreds of interviews, records that she had been consulting him in the months before her death. Vanity Fair also describes Kingston as a psychic Monroe had consulted.
It doesn’t mean every decision Monroe made depended on a horoscope or psychic prediction, and there’s no reason to exaggerate the evidence into that. What we can say is that she was willing to look beyond ordinary advice when she wanted another idea of what might be waiting ahead.
Old Hollywood could make up its own rules
The film stars of the 1930s had plenty of smaller superstitions too, and some of them completely reversed the rules everyone else was following.
A 1938 newspaper feature on Hollywood superstitions claimed that Myrna Loy carefully placed her shoes left and right beside the bed each night to keep bad omens away. Rosalind Russell and child star Freddie Bartholomew were even more contrary. They supposedly believed walking under a ladder brought good luck.
Actor Warren William reportedly stopped whistling whenever he passed through the studio gates because whistling on the lot was considered unlucky, while Bruce Cabot was said to dislike the number 13 enough to avoid working on the thirteenth day of the month.
These beliefs were reported at the time rather than being reconstructed decades later. You can read the original 1938 feature in the National Library of New Zealand’s Papers Past archive.
Rosalind Russell’s version is particularly good because it shows how personal superstition can be. Walking under a ladder is normally supposed to bring bad luck. Apparently Russell looked at the same ladder and reached the opposite conclusion.
Frank Sinatra had a thing about seven
Frank Sinatra had his own lucky number, and apparently he wasn’t subtle about using it.
A 1950s profile of Sinatra describes seven as his lucky number and claims his morning routine could include seven doughnuts and seven cups of coffee. That is an alarming amount of coffee even before you get to the superstition.
The original magazine profile survives among the Frank Sinatra material released through the FBI Vault. The writer explicitly identifies seven as Sinatra’s lucky number while describing the repeated sevens in his routine.
Seven had already been considered fortunate for centuries before Sinatra came along. Religious traditions, folklore and games have all helped give it an unusually lucky reputation, which you can read more about in the meaning of the number 7.
That doesn’t tell us why Sinatra personally became attached to it. What it does show is that one of Hollywood’s biggest stars was using a lucky number in much the same way people still do now.
Luciano Pavarotti wanted a bent nail before he sang
Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti had one of the stranger lucky objects on this list. Before performing, he liked to have a bent nail nearby.
Not a polished charm made specially for him. A bent, preferably rusty-looking nail.
The superstition became well enough known that people working around him could make sure one was available. Pavarotti would keep the nail with him for luck, and it became one of the small rituals attached to preparing for a performance.
He had colour superstitions too. During a 1983 visit to Sydney Opera House, Pavarotti reportedly refused to cross a purple-carpeted foyer because he regarded purple as unlucky and associated it with coffin linings. The planned press conference had to be moved elsewhere.
The Guardian’s history of the Sydney Opera House records the purple-carpet incident and Pavarotti’s habit of keeping the bent nail for luck.
That might sound excessive until you look at the wider collection of theatre superstitions. Performers have spent generations avoiding particular words, colours and objects before walking onto a stage. Pavarotti’s nail was personal, but the idea of protecting a performance with a ritual certainly wasn’t.
Emma Watson brought lucky talismans to her Harry Potter audition
Emma Watson was still a child when she auditioned to play Hermione Granger, but she already understood the appeal of bringing something lucky with her.
Speaking to Jay Shetty in 2025, Watson remembered feeling unusually certain that the role mattered to her. She hadn’t acted professionally and was one of a group of pupils put forward by her school during the nationwide search for Harry, Ron and Hermione.
She arrived at the audition with several Beanie Babies and what she described as lucky talismans.
Watson discussed the memory herself during her conversation with Jay Shetty about growing up in the public eye. In the fuller interview, she recalled having around seven Beanie Babies with her as well as the other lucky objects.
There’s something particularly understandable about this one. She wasn’t yet an established actor protecting a long career. She was a child desperately hoping for a part in a story she already loved. Bringing along a few objects that felt lucky gave that enormous uncertainty something familiar to sit beside.
Jennifer Aniston had rules for getting onto a plane
For years, Jennifer Aniston didn’t just board an aircraft and find her seat. She touched the outside of the plane with her right palm and made sure her right foot was the first one to step aboard. The ritual was connected with her fear of flying and became something she repeated whenever she travelled.
Aniston herself described these as superstitions when talking about her efforts to manage that fear. In 2025 she explained that hypnosis had helped her stop relying on them, and People reported that she had finally dropped the right-hand and right-foot routine.
Once she found another way of dealing with the fear, the superstition became easier to leave behind.
Mick Fleetwood feared losing his lucky penny
Mick Fleetwood has admitted that Fleetwood Mac could become extremely superstitious on tour.
At one point, his walk to the stage included small objects deliberately left along the route. One was a penny that he would pick up from the same place and put in his pocket before performing. If somebody moved it or the coin disappeared, Fleetwood said he could immediately feel as though he had been cursed.
He described the rituals in a 2013 interview originally published by the Sunday Herald Sun and preserved by Fleetwood Mac News. His routines could become incredibly specific, right down to opening doors in a particular way and repeating an action if he realised he hadn’t done it correctly.
The object he was least willing to travel without had a more personal explanation. Fleetwood carried his father’s old flying scarf and said he wouldn’t get onto an aeroplane without it. His father had been a Royal Air Force pilot, so the scarf had become both a family keepsake and something Fleetwood wanted with him whenever he flew.
The penny also gives us a familiar superstition in a very different setting. Finding a coin has long been associated with good fortune, which is why we still have the belief behind finding a penny for good luck. Fleetwood took that ordinary lucky object and made it part of the route that carried him onto the stage.
Stephen King is genuinely afraid of 13
Considering what Stephen King has spent his career writing about, you might expect him to be the person telling everyone else not to worry about old superstitions.
Not quite.
King has openly described himself as superstitious and has a particular problem with the number 13. He avoids stopping his reading on pages whose digits add up to 13 and has described taking the final two steps of his back staircase together so that, in his mind at least, thirteen becomes twelve.
The Los Angeles Times reported King’s rules around the number 13 back in 1987, while an earlier Washington Post profile found that his superstitions went well beyond numbers. He wouldn’t walk under ladders and admitted that having to fly on a Friday the 13th had made him distinctly uncomfortable.
He has also spoken about refusing to stop writing when he reaches page 13 or a multiple of it, preferring to keep going until he reaches a number that feels safer.
It makes the man behind It, The Shining and Pet Sematary surprisingly relatable. He can invent horrors considerably worse than anything waiting beneath a ladder, but apparently that still isn’t a good enough reason to walk under one.
King’s dislike of 13 also gives a very personal version of the much wider fear behind Friday the 13th. He knows perfectly well that the number can’t control what happens next. He’d still rather not give it the opportunity.
Truman Capote had an exhausting number of rules
Truman Capote didn’t have one superstition. He had enough of them to make an ordinary day surprisingly complicated.
He added up numbers and avoided ones that produced an unlucky result. That could mean refusing a particular hotel room or even avoiding a phone call because he didn’t like what the telephone number added up to.
He wouldn’t begin or finish a piece of writing on a Friday. He disliked having three cigarette butts sitting in one ashtray, wouldn’t travel on an aeroplane with two nuns aboard and refused to have yellow roses around him despite admitting that they were his favourite flowers.
This isn’t a collection of rumours gathered after his death. Capote described the rules himself in a 1957 interview with The Paris Review. Penguin’s account of his writing habits also records his refusal to begin or finish work on a Friday and his obsession with unlucky numbers.
Capote knew how irrational it sounded. What mattered was that following the rules gave him a strange kind of comfort.
That might be one of the clearest explanations of why a superstition survives even when the person following it knows there’s no sensible reason for it. Breaking the rule feels worse than obeying it, so you obey it.
Charles Dickens wanted to sleep facing north
Charles Dickens apparently cared enough about the direction of his bed to check it with a compass.
He liked sleeping with his head pointing north and believed the position could help his creativity. Accounts of his sleeping habits describe him lying carefully in the middle of the bed with his body properly aligned rather than simply collapsing wherever the pillows happened to be.
A study of Dickens’ sleep, dreams and creativity published in Frontiers in Psychology records both the north-facing habit and his use of a compass to make sure he had the direction right.
The Paris Review also includes Dickens among famously superstitious writers, noting his belief that facing north could improve his writing.
Whether his bed pointed north obviously had nothing to do with the quality of Great Expectations or Oliver Twist. If Dickens felt more settled knowing the compass said he was facing the right way, though, the ritual had already found a reason to stay.
Why do famous people become attached to lucky objects?
Celebrity superstitions can look eccentric because the person following them is famous enough for somebody to notice. Strip away the fame and most of the reasoning is extremely ordinary.
You have an important audition and bring something lucky. A performance goes brilliantly while you’re carrying a particular object, so you carry it again. You notice the same number around several happy moments and begin feeling better whenever it appears. You’re frightened of flying and invent a small routine that makes boarding the plane easier.
Success can actually make the connection stronger. If Taylor Swift sees 13 around another career milestone, the number gets one more good memory attached to it. If a performer walks onstage carrying the same charm and has an extraordinary night, there’s no obvious incentive to leave the charm at home next time.
The failures don’t always weaken the superstition in the same way. The lucky object can stay lucky even when something goes wrong because it’s easy to decide the situation would have been worse without it.
Fame gives personal superstitions a much longer life
Most personal superstitions disappear with the person who followed them. Your grandfather might have had one particular chair he considered lucky, or your mother might refuse to put new shoes on a table, but unless somebody writes it down the belief probably stays inside the family.
Famous people have the opposite problem. Interviews, biographies, photographs and fans preserve tiny habits that would normally be forgotten. Eventually the superstition can become part of the person’s public image, which makes it difficult to tell where private reassurance ends and branding begins. A lucky number that once meant something personal can become an Easter egg, a design feature or something fans deliberately look for.
That doesn’t necessarily make the original belief fake. It means the superstition has acquired a second life once everybody else knows about it.
The strangest celebrity superstition is usually the one that worked once
A bent nail doesn’t help you hit a high note. Thirteen doesn’t make an album successful. A clover in your pocket can’t make critics love a fashion collection, and stepping onto an aeroplane with your right foot doesn’t alter anything happening in the cockpit.
But that isn’t really why these rituals survive.
They survive because something important happened while the object or action was there. Success gives an ordinary thing a story, and once it has that story, leaving it behind can feel needlessly risky.
Famous people just happen to have millions more witnesses when they decide they’d rather not take the chance.
You can find more lucky objects, strange warnings and beliefs people still follow in Weird Superstitions From Around the World and the wider Superstitions and Omens collection.