Financial Nightmares: Friday the 13th's Worst Economic Disasters

Forget black cats, broken mirrors and unstoppable psychopaths in hockey masks -- on Friday the 13th, the biggest terrors sometimes hit our wallets. In fact, long before Jason started terrorizing Camp Crystal Lake, the dreaded date inspired a frightening fiscal tale.

In Thomas Lawson's novel Friday the Thirteenth, the villain eschews co-eds in favor of bigger game: He engineers a stock market crash. The book, which spawned a movie, highlighted the deep-seated economic worries that plagued the nation when it was published, 23 years before the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 made them a reality.

While that most-infamous Wall Street collapse didn't happen on a Friday the 13th, a fair number of financial disasters did. Here are a few of the biggest.

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Bruce Watson is a senior features writer for DailyFinance. You can reach him by e-mail at bruce.watson@teamaol.com, or follow him on Twitter at@bruce1971.