I saw the signs

Well, there IS no pattern. The thing is that someone would take one coincidence (tripping and falling soon after walking under a ladder, for example) and extrapolate it to think walking under a ladder will cause something bad to happen to you. The laws of nature are always in effect, it's just that stuff like the above gets spread around through word or mouth or however else, and then you end up with a whole lot of people avoiding ladders for no good reason. The whole process is primitive because it orginated in primitive people who did not have the ability to perceive two correlated (in this case, meaning happening soon after each other, or at the same time) events without assuming that one caused the other. In other words, the inability to realize that just because you stumbled just after walking under that ladder, it doesn't mean that there is some malicious force (it's also primitive to consider things like these in terms of positive or negative forces which obviously do not exist) that punishes you for walking under a ladder. In other words, the inability to recognize simple coincidences. Modern humans have developed the ability to keep from jumping to these kinds of conclusions, but sadly, many people still do. You'll find someone considering a certain piece of clothing "lucky" because something good happened to them while s/he wore it, and other things like that, fairly often. That is that primitive line of thinking at work. Anyone who sincerely tells you "I don't believe in coincidences" or "everything happens for a reason" is a person still using that primitive ideology that has no business interfering with the logic and reason of 21st-century human beings. Conspiracy theorists are a group especially notorious for that kind of 'nothing-is-a-coincidence' thinking. This mindset is damaging overall, because it causes people to jump to conclusions about a lot of things for no good reason. And when you jump to a conclusion, you remove the opportunity to reach a more reasoned conclusion about the same thing, because you've already 'made up your mind' about it. You can imagine how much that inhibits learning.

When I was 23 I had a pair of running - shoes which got me through 3-Marathons , before throwing them out. I believe it is possible that we are all Superstitious on some level. I am not afraid of Superstition. I think it's a wonderful part of Culture and History. If we don't respect History....It's bound to repeat. Having said that....I also Believe that the primitive Cultures were Far more advanced , then what we Credit them for. Perhaps they Knew something we don't ( even to this Day )