Neil used to be one of my best friends back in third grade. He supposedly owned every Transformers figure that had come out, including some that he made up, like Teletraan III, which turned into a jet or a motorcycle. His family had a full-size Frogger arcade cabinet in his living room. But on the one day he let me inside his house, I didn’t go to play with any of those. We were going to summon a ghost.
There were four or five kids at his house; I’m not sure if the others were his friends or family. We built crosses out of old Construx toys and crammed ourselves into his tiny guest bathroom. Makeshift crucifixes in hand, we closed the door and turned out the light. While spinning in circles, we all recited the incantation – “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” The moment we spoke the last refrain, one of the kids bumped into another one and screamed at the top of their lungs, making the rest of us do the same before we spilled out of the bathroom. We saw no ghost, no murderous apparition, just a bunch of scared kids who could have sworn something was in there with us.
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| Image via Paranormal Activity |
Bloody Mary was the folklore for elementary schools when I was a kid. Everyone talked on the playground about the ghost or spirit or whatever it was that you summon from a mirror by repeating her name thrice. Heck, we even told jokes about her – one ended with her talking to a baby that said, “You can keep your bloody bones, and I’ll keep my dirty diapers.” Six years before Candyman and two before Beetlejuice used the triple summon, it was all about Bloody Mary.
What happens after you summon her, though? Well, you’d die, of course. There were a few different ways to die – of fright, for instance, literally scared to death – but the one I remember most was that a cut would appear on your body, and over the next few days, the cut would grow until you died. I’m not quite sure how the cut would kill you, though. Did the cut finally encompass your body and split you in half? Who knows.
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| Image via Wikipedia |
Even though every kid in school knew her name and what she did, none of us actually knew who she was. Many believe the figure the folklore is based on is Queen Mary I in the 16th century. During her reign in England, as she tried to restore the Church to order, she burned nearly 300 dissenters at the stake, which earned her the nickname “Bloody Mary.” Another possible, yet more ambiguous, origin for Bloody Mary is Mary Worth, who either was responsible for killing escaped slaves from the American South or was a witch burned at the stake during the Salem Witch Trials. It’s interesting to me that two of the possible origins were connected to being burned at the stake, but the folklore itself doesn’t maintain that connection.
The earliest version of the folklore was way different than what I grew up with. While the stories I heard centered on a ghost or witch who would kill you if you uttered her name three times, the original folklore had more to do with asking questions in a mirror and learning your future, possibly seeing an image of the person you were supposed to fall in love with. The mirror may have also shown a portent of doom in the vision of a skull, but the spirit in the mirror wasn’t doing the killing. The story I knew first started showing up in the late 1960s, but there’s still no definitive source for that, or why it became so violent.
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| Image via Wikipedia |
Over the years, the character has only gotten more popular. Besides inspiring many characters, most famously Candyman, Bloody Mary herself has been the central antagonist in many films, television shows, and video games. In fact, I found over forty movies listed on IMDb.com with a version of Bloody Mary in the title, though many of them are shorts.
But what about the lasting impact it had on us kids who passed along those stories, who stood in front of a bathroom mirror, but ran out before repeating the final refrain of her name? Truthfully, I can’t even look in a mirror in a dark room, even after four decades. If my bathroom door isn’t shut when I go to bed, I’ll get up to close it. This isn’t something I’ve been conditioned to do; it’s a deliberate reminder each time. Bloody Mary will stay with me for the rest of my adult life, and I don’t believe I’m the only one.
Did you ever try calling her, or did you know any friends that did? If you’re still scared of this mirror-summoned apparition, let me know in the comments.
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