The new year has come, and people are gripping their seats in anticipation of what is to come. In fact, many things have kicked off the year with a shaky start, such as introducing a worldwide scare of World War 3 on the second day of the new year, and countries facing natural disasters. Compared to what’s happened so far, previous decades have been faced with far more deaths and diseases. With this comes many theories of what’s to come in 2020.

“I think something else will happen because we already started with the fires and the WW3 hashtag,” Jillian Keller (‘22) said.

On May 25, 1720 the Great Plague of Marseille arrived on a merchant ship called the Grand Saint Antoine, which had picked up infected passengers during a journey to the Middle East and reached Marseille, spreading Europe’s major bubonic plague outbreak. The plague ended up killing around 100,000 people.

During January of 1820, a large fire in Savannah, GA wiped out 463 buildings. The fire was spread by a high wind and the fire destroyed most of the downtown area. When the fire reached Ellis Square, it set off gunpowder, spreading the fire throughout the city. On March 3 and 4, the Missouri Compromise became law. According to the 1820 U.S. Census, the slave population at that time was over 1.5 million. From March 9 to 11, the Philippines navy chased out foreigners and about 125 died. The president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, ordered the navy to “chase out” the US and other foreign research vessels from a claimed area of ocean off the country’s north-east, allowing Chinese oceanographers to operate there.

On Sept 7, two newly purchased Savoia-Marchetti flying boats crashed in the Swiss Alps en route to Finland where they would serve with the ‘Suomen Ilmavoimat’, killing both crews. On Sept 16, 1920, a horse-drawn cart carrying massive, improvised explosives detonated on the busiest corner of Wall Street. Thirty-eight people were killed in the Wall Street Bombing, and hundreds were injured. It was, at the time, the worst terrorist attack in American history. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) happened in 1920 when the organization took a burning cross as its symbol and held rallies, parades, and marches around the country. At its peak in the 1920s, Klan membership exceeded 4 million people nationwide.

All in all, showing the unlucky things that happened back to back with the dates that end in ‘20 gives the people feeling something could occur this year as well. Although 2020 has started off on a rocky road, the superstitions could be proven wrong and break the chain of bad luck.