Last Friday, I missed a call from my mother, and listened to an anxious voicemail from her wondering if I was OK.
Strange, I thought, and called her back asking what sparked her concern, while assuring her that I was fine.
The concern, it turned out, was that a picture of me had fallen down at my parents’ house without anything prompting the fall and she relayed that was one of her superstitions.
I had never heard of that superstition before so I didn’t realize why it freaked her out until after our phone call ended and I looked it up online.
According to various online sources, a picture falling from a wall without reason is usually a bad omen. Some variations of the superstition say it means the death of the subject in the photo. But it doesn’t always mean bad luck for the subject. Some legends say that bad luck will befall the family, or that a death will befall the family, according a website I found during a simple Google search called Lucky Symbols.
Other superstitions say a picture falling means somebody has already died, but the person who saw the picture fall just doesn’t know it yet. There’s also variations about what it means when glass breaks in the frame, even if the picture hasn’t fallen, which could signify a death in the family.
Despite how rational someone may be, a lot of us still have our superstitions. Often, they’re silly things we do to try to ensure a win for our sports teams, as if any of our actions can impact players who have never met us before and are nowhere near us.
For instance, one of my editors, a New England Patriots fan, said he has a “third down rug,” a Patriots doormat, that he stands on to watch the game at third downs until the down is done. Unfortunately, I neglected to ask him the success rate of that one.
Wade Boggs, a former Boston Red Sox player who I know from his time on the New York Yankees, came up during conversation in the newsroom a few weeks ago. He was known for his superstitions, eating chicken before every game, waking up at the same time every day and running sprints at 7:17 p.m., according to the ever reliable Wikipedia.
Ask anyone if they’ll open an umbrella inside or if they’ll walk under a ladder. Who doesn’t remember avoiding cracks on sidewalks as a kid to avoid breaking their mother’s back, as goes the old rhyme. There’s other superstitions connected to that one as well.
Superstition breeds fear. Some who believe in death omens — who else has read Harry Potter? My sources are great on these examples — may actually die from the fright of thinking they’ll come true. I guess one of the potential origins of the portrait superstition references a man who apparently was literally scared to death after seeing his portrait fall.
One of the more famous examples of that phenomenon is what drives so many people to nearby Salem during this time of the year. The Salem Witch Trials, and the belief of witchcraft in general in the mid- to late 1600s, was driven by superstition, paranoia and fear.
I’m no historian, but I’d hazard a guess that there probably weren’t any actual witches discovered during that time period.
Maybe I’m off the hook though (pun intended), as my picture fell, but it wasn’t hanging from a wall. It was placed on a table and the glass didn’t break. But I will admit, after reading the information online, I got a little spooked and I did find that out by checking on the circumstances of the fall with my mom.
