“The worst punishment God can devise for this sinner,” wrote Harper Lee—who loved casino gambling—in a 1990 letter, “is to make her spirit reside eternally at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City.”

It’s considered bad luck in parts of Mississippi for mourners to call a coffin pretty.

In July 2003 details leaked of a new venture from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: an online market for financial speculation on possible terrorist attacks, assassinations, and coups. “Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results,” the Defense Department argued. “They are often better than expert opinions.” DARPA—already under fire for its proposed Total Information Awareness program—was forced to abandon the idea.

A young nobleman in ancient Athens fell in love with a statue of Agathe Tyche, goddess of good fortune. He hugged and kissed it, then offered the local council a large sum of money to purchase it. When his request was denied, he decorated the statue extravagantly with crowns and garlands, offered a sacrifice, uttered a lengthy lamentation, and killed himself.

Legend regarding the horseshoe as a lucky symbol holds that in the tenth century, while St. Dunstan was working in England as a farrier, the devil entered the forge and demanded his hooves be reshod. During the process, the future saint caused as much pain as he could, and the devil begged him to stop. Dunstan agreed—on the condition that Satan never enter a house where a horseshoe is on display.

“The die,” wrote geographer Pausanias circa 150, “is the plaything of youths and maidens, who have nothing of the ugliness of old age.” 

On Friday, January 13, 1882, thirteen men met in New York City as the Thirteen Club; they walked under a ladder, ate lobster salad sculpted into the shape of a coffin, and sat beneath a banner reading morituri te salutamus (“we who are about to die salute you”). The following year, the club’s newsletter gleefully reported that “not a single member is dead.” 

In November 1934 a team of American baseball stars, including Babe Ruth, toured Japan. When they arrived for a game in the town of Narashino, each man was presented with a horseshoe-shaped flower wreath. Ruth detested the gift; he later told a Japanese baseball magazine that he considered such wreaths bad luck and had never hit a home run after receiving one.

According to Pliny, after an oracle predicted Aeschylus would die from being hit by a falling house, the poet began “trusting himself only under the canopy of the heavens.” His precaution was futile; he was killed that day when hit by a tortoise dropped from the sky by a hungry eagle eager to crack open its shell.

The Cincinnati Commercial complained in 1871 about the game of fly loo, a “detestable canker that destroys men’s souls.” Players selected sugar lumps and bet on which would attract a fly first. “Every afternoon from twenty to thirty of the very flower of our mercantile population retire to a private room and under locks and bolts give themselves up to this satanic game,” the article noted, “while the deserted ladies are languishing for a little male conversation below.”

“The contempt of risk and the presumptuous hope of success are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions,” wrote Adam Smith in 1776. “How little the fear of misfortune is then capable of balancing the hope of good luck.”

Sailors’ fear of bananas may extend back to seventeenth-century Spanish ships trading in the Caribbean. Crew members would often purchase wooden crates of the fruit, and when their vessels sailed north to pick up the Gulf Stream in the Straits of Florida, hazards of the passage shipwrecked many, leaving behind stray clumps of bananas floating ominously on the water’s surface for later ships to see.

When Apple released its Shuffle feature for iPods, users were deceived by the true randomness of its playback; songs from the same album or artist were often grouped by chance. Complaints led Steve Jobs to alter the device’s programming and begin offering Smart Shuffle, which allowed users to adjust the likelihood of hearing similar songs in a row. “We’re making it less random,” he said, “to make it feel more random.”

Thomas Jefferson never wrote or said, “I’m a great believer in luck. The harder I work the more I seem to have.” The quip was crafted by San Francisco humorist Coleman Cox for a 1922 collection titled Listen to This.

Archaeologists found in a Utah cave as many as seventeen thousand carved sticks, canes, and bone pieces—gambling items used in the thirteenth century by ancestors of the Apache and Navajo. “Seventy to eighty percent of dice games were for women only,” one researcher said about the find, which may have been America’s first casino. “So what do we have here? Women who knew the games of other women.”