Fact-checked · 9 October 2026
17 things repeated across astrology and folklore sites, checked against the oldest sources we could find, published research and our own calculations. 10 are false, 4 are misleading, and 3 have no evidence from their own time.
No source before the nineteenth century treats the date as unlucky. The earliest known reference is Henry Sutherland Edwards’s 1869 biography of Rossini, who died on Friday 13 November 1868; Thomas Lawson’s 1907 novel Friday, the Thirteenth made the idea popular.
Salarium is related to sal, salt, but no ancient text says soldiers were paid in it; salarium was a money allowance. The payment-in-salt story appears in modern dictionaries, not in Roman sources.
Gregory called for prayers and processions during the plague, but no record of the time mentions sneezing. Blessing a sneeze is far older: Pliny the Elder, in the first century, already asked why people do it.
The goddess Eostre is mentioned once, by Bede in the eighth century, with nothing about hares. “Ostara” is Jacob Grimm’s 1835 reconstruction, and the hare was attached to her by Adolf Holtzmann in 1874.
No record of any such decree exists. The legend that the kingdom falls if the ravens leave is first attested in the late nineteenth century.
They do not. The idea is literary — it appears in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Plato’s Phaedo — and was doubted even in antiquity.
Roman augurs faced south and counted the left as the lucky side; the Greeks, facing north, preferred the right. The unlucky sense of sinister came later.
“So we regard signs on the left as best — Greeks and barbarians, those on the right.” Cicero, De Divinatione II.82, translated by W. A. Falconer (1923)
In Hall and Van de Castle’s norms, people the dreamer knows personally are the largest group of dream characters — 31% in men’s dreams and 37% in women’s. Family members make up 9% and 15%.
In the largest survey of typical dreams, 18.8% had ever had it — 38th of 55 themes. Being chased (81.5%) and falling (73.8%) are far more common; the teeth dream is famous because it is memorable.
Mercury is retrograde on 19.2% of all days between 1900 and 2050 — 476 separate retrogrades, three or four every year.
Its cycle is about 780 days, so 62 of the 151 calendar years from 1900 to 2050 — 41% — have no Mars retrograde at all.
The Sun’s entry moves with the calendar. Between 1900 and 2050 it entered Aries on 19 March in 2 years, 20 March in 89 and 21 March in 60 (UTC) — every sign shifts the same way.
It changes at the lunar new year, between 21 January and 20 February. On average 35 of the 59 days of January and February still belong to the previous year’s animal.
It comes from Robert Graves’s 1948 book The White Goddess, which turned a medieval tree alphabet into a calendar. No ancient source describes such a zodiac.
Tarot appears in fifteenth-century northern Italy as a card game. The Egyptian origin was invented by Antoine Court de Gébelin in 1781, and fortune-telling with the cards spread from France afterwards.
It is Victorian. The rhyme is first printed in 1871 without “something old”, which appears in a version of 1876.
The first clear theatrical use is in Edna Ferber’s 1939 autobiography. The popular origin stories about Elizabethan audiences or bending the knee to bow are later inventions.
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Each claim was traced to the earliest source we could find — a classical text, the first printed record, the original survey — rather than to another website. Where a story has no evidence from its own time, we say so instead of guessing at its origin. The astronomical claims are checked against our open datasets, which you can download and test yourself.
This page grew out of a check of every dated, named or numbered statement on AstroHot — close to two thousand of them. The errors we found on our own pages were corrected; how we handle corrections is described on the methodology page. If you can show one of these verdicts is wrong, tell us with the source.