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Monday's child is fair of face,

Tuesday's child is full of grace,

Wednesday's child is full of woe,

Thursday's child has far to go,

Friday's child is loving and giving,

Saturday's child works hard hunts vampires for a living

and the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe and good and gay -

Saturday The last day of the week, and thus the end of a cycle, is both lucky and unlucky in superstition and folklore; some unlucky beliefs pertain to the supernatural.

It is a widespread belief that persons born on a Saturday can see Ghosts. In Eastern European lore, such persons are believed to be able to see vampires. In Greek lore as late as the 19th century, Saturday was held to be the proper day for killing Vampires, for it was the only time during the week that vampires slept in their graves or tombs. The body would be taken out and burned.

GHOST SEERS

European folklore belief maintains that persons born at a particular time of the day have the power to see ghosts. For example, British folklorist T. F. Thiselton Dyer in The Ghost World (1893), observes:

"Thus it is said in Lancashire that children born during twilight are supposed to have this peculiarity, and to know who of their acquaintance will next die. Some say that this property belongs also to those who happen to be born exactly at twelve o'clock at night, or, as the peasantry say in Somersetshire, 'a child born in chime-hours will have the power to see spirits.' The same belief prevails in Yorkshire, where it is commonly supposed that children born during the hour after midnight have the privilege through life of seeing the spirits of the departed. Mr. Henderson [T. F. Henderson, Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties, 1866] says that a Yorkshire lady informed him she was very near being thus distinguished, but the clock had not struck twelve when she was born. When a child she mentioned this circumstance to an old servant, adding that 'Mamma was sure her birthday was the 23rd, not the 24th, for she had inquired at the time.' 'Ay, Ay,' said the old woman, turning to the child's nurse, 'mistress would be very anxious about that, for bairns born after midnight see more things than other folk.'&43"

This idea, part of a much larger belief in the significance of various days in explaining little-understood phenomena such as luck, prevailed on the Continent. In Denmark, children born on Sunday had prerogatives far from enviable. The antiquarian Benjamin Thorpe tells how:

"… in Fryer there was a woman who was born on a Sunday, and, like other Sunday children had the faculty of seeing much that was hidden from others. But, because of this property, she could not pass by a church at night without seeing a hearse or a spectre. The gift became a perfect burden to her; she therefore sought the advice of a man skilled in such matters, who directed her, whenever she saw a spectre to say, 'Go to Heaven!' but when she met a hearse, 'Hang on!' Happening sometime after to meet a hearse, she, through lapse of memory cried out, 'Go to Heaven!' and straightway the hearse rose in the air and vanished. Afterwards, meeting a spectre she said to it, 'Hang on!' when the spectre clung round her neck, hung on her back, and drove her down into the earth before it. For three days her shrieks were heard before the spectre would put an end to her wretched life."

It used to be a popular belief in Scotland that those who were born on Christmas Day or Good Friday had the power to see spirits and even command them, a superstition to which Sir Walter Scott alludes in his poem "Marmion" (stanza 22). The Spaniards attributed the haggard and downcast looks of their Philip II to the disagreeable visions to which this privilege subjected him.