Superstitions and Old Wives' Tales
If you spill salt, it's bad luck.
If you immediately throw some salt over your left shoulder, it cancels the bad luck.
(In reality, you now have salt all over your floor.) π
I have a lot of good ones for tornadoes :D
Open up all the windows in your house before the tornado hits, and your house won't get sucked up.
Tornadoes "avoid" mountains and Indian burial mounds.
If you hide under an overpass, you're guaranteed not to get sucked up if the twister passes over.
The southwest corner of the basement is the safest area.
Tornadoes are "attracted" to trailer parks like magnets.
You can predict that a tornado will come using an old prairie Indian method of divining bear grease on transparent hide.
If a tornado sucks your home up with you in it, it will drop you off in Oz, just like it did Dorothy.
Tornadoes only hit the "Tornado Alley" part of the US.
I never heard the one about tornadoes avoiding mountains and Indian burial grounds.
The southwest corner of the basement area used to be considered wise advice, but that's obviously changed. Same thing with overpasses - not the best place to "hide." We were instructed to open a couple of windows opposite the tornado's origin direction due to the pressure difference. But again, that's old thinking.
Wouldn't we like to believe we're going to "Oz," right??
Hehe, it would be nice to go to Oz instead of another county, wouldn't it?
I do know some bizarre facts about tornadoes, some that would defy belief, and yet there is physical and historical evidence for all of it.
But this is about superstitions and old wive's tales, so perhaps we can save the "bizarre but true" stuff for another thread ;).