Bloody Mary

Almost every American child hears about Bloody Mary sooner or later, usually at a sleepover or in a school restroom. The rules vary, but the core is always the same: turn off the lights, face a mirror – perhaps with a single candle – and chant her name, three times or thirteen or more. If you hold your nerve, a woman’s face will appear in the glass, bloody or disfigured, and she may scream, scratch you, or drag you into the mirror. Most children run for the light switch before finding out.

Who Mary is depends on who is telling it. She may be a witch executed long ago, a young woman killed in a car crash, a mother whose baby was taken, or a beauty disfigured by an accident; in some versions she is Queen Mary I of England, whose burning of around 300 Protestants earned her the nickname “Bloody Mary” from her enemies. Names shift too – Mary Worth, Mary Whales, Mary Worthington – and the ritual has relatives in many countries. None of the back-stories is tied to a real, documented person.

Folklorists have taken the game seriously for decades. Janet Langlois’s 1978 article in Indiana Folklore, “Mary Whales, I Believe in You”, was based on interviews with Indiana children and found the ritual was performed mostly by young girls, often in groups. In 1998 the Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes, in Western Folklore, read the bathroom-and-blood imagery as a ritual way for girls on the edge of puberty to confront anxieties about growing up. Printed examples of the modern chant appear in collections of children’s folklore from the 1970s.

Its roots run deeper, into mirror divination. In a footnote to his 1786 poem “Halloween”, Robert Burns described the custom of standing alone before a looking-glass on Halloween night in the hope of glimpsing a future husband over one’s shoulder. Victorian and Edwardian Halloween cards showed young women gazing into mirrors by candlelight, and darker variants warned that a girl fated to die unmarried would see a skull or the Grim Reaper instead. The modern game keeps the mirror, the candle and the dark – and swaps the sweetheart for a ghost.

There is also a perceptual reason the ritual works. In 2010 the Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo reported in the journal Perception that when 50 volunteers stared at their own reflections in a dimly lit room for ten minutes, most began within a minute to see their faces distort; many saw the face of a stranger, an animal or a “monstrous being”. Add darkness, a candle, a group of nervous friends and a scary story, and a frightening face in the mirror is very likely to appear.

A woman’s face or figure appearing in a darkened mirror, often bloody, scarred or with black or missing eyes; screaming; scratches on the person who summoned her; in some versions the summoner disappearing or being pulled into the glass.

Bathroom mirrors at home and at school, at sleepovers and on Halloween night, always in darkness or by candlelight.

The ritual has inspired horror films from the Candyman series, whose villain is summoned the same way, to Urban Legends: Bloody Mary (2005), and appears in TV shows such as Supernatural. It remains one of the most widely played childhood dares in the English-speaking world.