Weird Superstitions From Around the World
A superstition can sound completely normal when you grow up with it and wonderfully strange when nobody has explained the rules.
You probably already know that breaking a mirror is supposed to bring seven years of bad luck and that walking under a ladder is best avoided. Travel a little further, though, and the warnings change. Bananas become dangerous at sea, a green hat can insult someone’s relationship and twelve grapes have to be eaten before a clock finishes striking midnight.
Some of these beliefs grew around dangerous jobs, religious customs or words that sound like something unpleasant. Others offer a small way to feel more prepared before a journey, performance or new year. Once you know what sits behind them, they stop looking like random rules and begin revealing the things people were trying to protect.
That doesn’t mean everyone in a country follows the same superstitions. Beliefs change between regions, families and generations, and plenty of people repeat a ritual for fun without expecting anything supernatural to happen. The examples below are traditions found within those cultures, not instructions followed by every person who lives there.
Don’t Bring Bananas on a Boat
Bananas have a terrible reputation among some sailors and people who fish. Taking them aboard is said to cause empty nets, mechanical trouble, dangerous weather or the loss of the vessel itself. The ban can stretch beyond the fruit to banana bread, banana-flavoured snacks and clothing covered in banana prints.
Nobody has found one confirmed event that started the warning. Possible explanations involve venomous spiders and other unwanted creatures hiding in old banana cargoes. Bananas also release ethylene, which causes nearby fruit to ripen faster, so a shipment could spoil other food being carried on the same voyage.
Another story says sailing ships carrying bananas had to travel quickly before the fruit spoiled. If people tried to fish during the journey, the vessel might have been moving too fast for them to catch much. The bananas became an easy explanation for an unsuccessful trip, even when speed was the real problem.
The New Zealand Maritime Museum’s collection of sailing superstitions includes the banana ban alongside warnings against whistling, trimming your nails, turning bread upside down and passing salt directly to another crew member.
Life at sea involved weather, illness and accidents that nobody could fully control. With so much depending on luck, it’s understandable that crews developed rules about what could come aboard and what had to stay on shore. Once one bad voyage became associated with bananas, few captains would have been eager to load another bunch just to test the theory.
Never Say “Macbeth” Inside a Theatre
Inside a theatre, Shakespeare’s Macbeth is often called “the Scottish Play.” Saying its proper title outside a rehearsal or performance is supposed to invite injuries, forgotten lines, damaged scenery and everything else that can go wrong in front of an audience.
If someone slips up, one version of the remedy tells them to leave the theatre, turn around three times, spit, curse and knock on the door before asking to come back inside. It’s an unusually public punishment for saying a single word, especially when the rest of the cast gets to watch from somewhere warm.
The stories surrounding the curse include the death of the first actor to play Lady Macbeth, real weapons being mistaken for stage props and generations of performers being injured during productions. Some of the oldest tales are difficult to verify, while other accidents really did occur and were later added to the play’s reputation.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s examination of the Scottish Play also offers a more practical reason for the fear. Macbeth could draw an audience, so a struggling theatre company might add it to the schedule when money was running out. Its sudden appearance could be a sign that jobs and the theatre itself were already in danger.
The play also contains fights, darkness, moving scenery and plenty of opportunities for a real accident. Once performers expect Macbeth to cause trouble, every missed cue and falling prop becomes another piece of evidence for the curse.
Four Can Be Much Worse Than Thirteen
In North America and parts of Europe, thirteen is the number buildings are most likely to skip. In several East Asian cultures, four carries the more uncomfortable association because its pronunciation can sound similar to the word for death.
The connection is especially well known in Chinese and Japanese. Hotels, apartment buildings and hospitals can avoid room or floor numbers containing four. Some buildings influenced by both Western and East Asian beliefs skip several numbers, leaving the elevator panel looking as though parts of the building have disappeared.
This kind of avoidance is sometimes called tetraphobia. It’s particularly noticeable in hospitals because the sound of death feels far less harmless when somebody is already frightened about their health.
The Smithsonian’s comparison of cross-cultural superstitions shows how language can give a number a meaning that doesn’t translate with it. Four isn’t naturally unlucky, just as thirteen wasn’t born carrying a curse. The meaning comes from the stories and associations people place around it.
You can compare these beliefs with the wider symbolic and numerological associations in our guide to number meanings.
Friday the 17th Is the Date to Watch in Italy
While much of the English-speaking world worries about Friday the 13th, the traditionally unlucky date in Italy is Friday the 17th.
The most familiar explanation begins with the Roman numerals for seventeen, XVII. Rearrange the letters and you get VIXI, a Latin word meaning “I have lived.” Because the sentence places life in the past, it can be read as a suggestion that the person is now dead.
This explanation is repeated widely, but it doesn’t give us a clear date when Italians first began treating seventeen as unlucky. It does give the belief a memorable link with ancient Rome and death, which helped it travel long after most people stopped using Roman numerals in daily life.
Some Italian hotels, aircraft and numbered rows avoid seventeen in the same way that buildings elsewhere avoid thirteen. An overview of Italian superstitions from The Local records the warning alongside beliefs about spilled olive oil, black cats and unlucky toasts.
Thirteen, meanwhile, has traditionally had a much better reputation in Italy. It’s a useful reminder that an unlucky number can lose its power as soon as you cross a border.
A Green Hat Can Send the Wrong Message in China
A green hat might look like an ordinary gift, but in China it can carry an embarrassing message. The expression “wearing a green hat” describes a man whose wife or partner has been unfaithful.
The hat itself isn’t believed to control the relationship or cause the betrayal. The problem comes from the meaning of the phrase, which turns the colour and item of clothing into a public insult. Giving a man a green hat can suggest something about his private life that you almost certainly didn’t mean to say.
This is closer to a cultural taboo than a superstition about luck, but the two often appear together because both come with rules that visitors can break without realizing it. A green scarf, shirt or pair of socks doesn’t usually carry the same meaning. It’s the hat that completes the expression.
It also shows why cultural context matters more than the object itself. Green can represent health, nature or good fortune in one setting and become a very personal joke in another.
Sit Down Before Leaving on a Journey in Russia
When someone is about to leave on a long journey in Russia, everyone in the house might sit quietly for a short time before heading out. The luggage is packed, coats are on and the taxi could already be waiting, but there’s still time for one last pause.
The custom is known as prisest na dorozhku, meaning to sit down before the journey. Older explanations connect it with the household spirit, or domovoi. Leaving too suddenly could disturb or confuse the spirit, while sitting for a moment allowed the traveller and the home to part properly.
The Moscow Times describes the pause as a traditional preparation for travel. Whether you believe in household spirits or not, it has an obvious practical benefit. Everyone becomes quiet long enough to remember the passport on the counter, the medication in the bathroom or the suitcase that never made it into the car.
This is one superstition that might improve your trip even if it has no influence over your luck. A minute spent checking that you have everything is much easier than turning around once you’re halfway to the airport.
Don’t Leave Your Chopsticks Standing in Rice in Japan
If you’re eating in Japan, don’t push your chopsticks upright into a bowl of rice when you’re finished with them. The arrangement resembles food offered to someone who has died, which makes it deeply out of place at an ordinary meal.
The Japan-America Society of Houston’s guide to chopstick etiquette explains that vertically placed chopsticks are associated with rituals honouring the dead. Recreating that presentation at the dinner table can make the food look like a funeral offering.
Passing food directly from one pair of chopsticks to another is also avoided. During a Japanese cremation ritual, relatives use chopsticks when transferring pieces of bone into an urn. Repeating a similar movement with food brings the funeral association into a setting where it doesn’t belong.
These rules are better understood as serious dining taboos than predictions that one misplaced chopstick will curse the evening. They still belong in a discussion of superstition because death, luck and ritual have become woven into the way the actions are understood.
New Year Can Involve Grapes, Pomegranates and Ocean Waves
The beginning of a new year creates the perfect conditions for superstition. The old year is finished, the next one is unknown and everyone would prefer to start it with luck already on their side.
That’s why New Year traditions often involve specific foods, colours and actions that are meant to influence the coming months. What you eat, wear or break at midnight can matter almost as much as who you celebrate with.
Eat Twelve Grapes at Midnight in Spain
In Spain, the challenge is to eat twelve grapes as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve. You eat one grape with each chime, with the twelve grapes representing the twelve months ahead.
If you finish them in time, tradition promises a year of prosperity and good luck. If you fall behind, the immediate consequence is usually less mysterious: a mouth full of grapes while everyone else is trying to wish you a happy new year.
Spain’s official tourism website describes the twelve lucky grapes as one of the country’s best-known New Year customs. The chimes from the clock at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol are broadcast across the country, allowing families and parties to attempt the ritual at the same time.
Break a Pomegranate at the Door in Greece
In a Greek New Year tradition, a pomegranate is broken against the threshold of the home. Its many red seeds scatter across the ground, representing abundance, fertility and the hope that good things will multiply during the year ahead.
The fruit already carried ideas about life, death and renewal in ancient Greek mythology, most famously through the story of Persephone. Those older meanings make it well suited to a ritual performed at the point where one year changes into another.
The Greek National Tourism Organisation’s history of the pomegranate records the custom of breaking one at the front-door threshold on New Year’s Day to attract good luck.
It does leave the person seeking prosperity with pomegranate juice and seeds across the entrance, but luck has never promised to clean up after itself.
Jump Seven Waves in Brazil
Many New Year celebrations in Brazil take place beside the ocean, where people dressed in white enter the water and jump seven waves. A wish can be made with each wave, asking for luck, strength or a fresh start in the coming year.
The custom is connected with Afro-Brazilian religious traditions and respect for Iemanjá, an orixá associated with the sea. Over time, parts of the ritual have also become familiar within wider public New Year celebrations, including the enormous gathering at Copacabana Beach.
Brazil’s official tourism website includes jumping seven waves and wearing white among the country’s New Year practices. Some versions add that you shouldn’t turn your back on the ocean until you’ve left the water.
This isn’t just a quirky beach challenge. For people who understand the religious meaning, the sea deserves respect, and the actions can carry far more weight than a casual wish made at midnight.
Eat Black-Eyed Peas in the American South
Across parts of the American South, eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day is meant to bring prosperity. They might be served in Hoppin’ John with rice, pork and greens, with the peas representing coins and the greens standing for paper money.
Black-eyed peas were carried to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade and became an important part of African American foodways. Their meaning involves far more than a convenient resemblance to money.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture explains that many West African cultures already regarded the pea as lucky. That association survived among enslaved people and their descendants, eventually becoming part of a widely shared Southern New Year meal.
Today, people can eat the dish because it connects them with family, history and home, whether or not they expect a bowl of peas to change their bank balance.
Why Are Some Superstitions So Specific?
The more precise a superstition sounds, the more it feels as though someone must have tested it. Don’t just avoid bananas; remove anything with the word written on it. Don’t just eat fruit at midnight; eat exactly twelve grapes in time with twelve separate chimes.
Those details make a belief easier to remember and pass along. They also give you something definite to do. “Try to have a lucky year” isn’t much of an instruction, but breaking a pomegranate or jumping seven waves turns that hope into an action you can complete.
Rules also grow while they travel. One family adds a particular hand, another insists something must be done three times and somebody else introduces a deadline before the bad luck becomes permanent. A few generations later, each version can sound as though it has always been the correct one.
This is why different explanations don’t necessarily cancel one another out. Superstitions aren’t controlled by an official rulebook. They survive through people remembering, changing and repeating them.
Do People Really Believe All of These?
Some do, some don’t and many sit somewhere in the middle. You can know that a number doesn’t control your future and still prefer a hotel room without it. You can laugh about a theatre curse and become irritated when someone says the forbidden name five minutes before opening night.
Following a superstition doesn’t always mean accepting every part of its explanation. The ritual might be tied to family, cultural identity or a memory of the person who taught it to you. Sometimes you carry on because the action is enjoyable, comforting or easier than dealing with the feeling that you’ve left something unfinished.
There’s also very little cost to many of these choices. Going around the ladder, avoiding row four or sitting quietly before a journey takes almost no effort. When the action is easy and the supposed consequence sounds unpleasant, plenty of people decide there’s no need to challenge it.
Strange to You, Completely Familiar to Someone Else
The weirdest superstition is usually the one nobody taught you. Once you grow up with a rule, it blends into ordinary life and stops needing an explanation. You only notice how unusual it sounds when somebody else asks why you’re touching wood, throwing salt or refusing to walk beneath an empty ladder.
That’s what makes superstitions from around the world so interesting. The details change, but the feelings behind them are familiar. People want safe journeys, successful work, healthy families, enough money and some reassurance when the future feels uncertain.
A banana, number or pomegranate can’t decide what happens next. It can still carry a story about the people who gave it meaning, and that story is often far more interesting than the threat of bad luck.