When a boy, one of my aunts who lived in Newcastle-on-Tyne used to tell me of a certain girl that she knew who was very vain and fond of standing before the looking glass admiring herself. One night as she stood gasing, lo! all of her ringlets were covered with dripping sulphur, and the devil appeared peeping over her shoulder.
Apparitions
A superstition that lingered from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth held that mirrors must be covered or turned to face the wall in the presence of a dead person. Some said this was to signify "an end to all vanity." Others took it to be a demonstration of respect for the dead. Still others believed an uncovered mirror was an open invitation for ghostly apparitions to appear.
"It is not good for a corpse to be reflected in a glass or mirror . . . because the dead will not rest," wrote Marie Trevalyan in Folklore and Folk-Stories of Wales (1909). The possible consequences of failing to act accordingly are made plain in this excerpt from a 1924 issue of Notes & Queries:
Nearly seventy years since, in Durham, I remember seeing my grandmother when laid out. Mirror and pictures were covered with white sheets. I was told then, or later, that this was done lest persons seeing themselves reflected, the corpse should also be seen looking over their shoulders, and give them a fright.What connects this old superstition to the Bloody Mary legend is the central motif of "the apparition in the looking glass" -- the only difference being that in the former the ghost appears because someone forgot to cover a mirror; in the latter, the ghost is purposely summoned.
The incantation
Make no mistake, when a group of adolescents stands in front of a mirror chanting "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary," or "I believe in Mary Worth, I believe in Mary Worth," they are uttering what they believe to be -- or hope to be, or fear to be -- a magic spell to conjure up the presence of a ghost. The notion that ritual incantations can be used to achieve supernatural ends derives not only from folklore and fairly tales, wherein remnants of so many age-old myths and superstitions are retained, but also from the childhood mindset itself, which is subject to a variety of forms of magical thinking. Among those is a phenomenon identified by developmental pscychologist Jean Piaget as "nominal realism," which, simply put, is the tendency to confuse objects with their names, resulting in the belief that words and thoughts can influence real-world events.
Of the many ways "Bloody Mary" can be interpreted, the most obvious and literal is as a cautionary tale demonstrating the perils of playing with magic. But it is also a ghost story.
The ghost story
The malevolent spirit called up by the Bloody Mary ritual is always said to be a female -- in particular, a female whose face was disfigured as the result of a violent death, usually in an automobile accident. Often, as in the second "Bloody Mary" variant reproduced above, she is said to have been a very beautiful woman in life who was proud of her beauty to the point of self-obsession (hence her ghostly ire at being summoned to appear in a mirror). In some variants she is said to have been a hitchhiker whose spirit has also been seen haunting roadsides and being picked up by unsuspecting drivers before vanishing inexplicably (cf. "The Vanishing Hitchhiker"). In other tellings the character is reminiscent of La Llorona, the "Weeping Woman" of Hispanic folklore who is said to have killed her own children and wanders eternally in penance.
In most versions there is no evident connection between the Bloody Mary whose ghost haunts bathroom mirrors and the historical figure of the same name (though exceptions have been recorded). Her name just happens to be Mary, and she's bloody because she died in a terrible accident.
Likewise, there is no apparent connection between the Mary Worth of the legend and the Mary Worth of comic strip fame. Essentially a soap opera about the hardships of family life, the comic strip holds up its prim and proper protagonist as the ideal of American motherhood -- a far cry from the menacing hag blamed for so many pajama party freak-outs.
Bloody Mary in popular culture
Like so many horror legends and traditional ghost stories, "Bloody Mary" has proven a natural for adaptation into popular novels, stories, comic books, movies, and even dolls. Released straight to DVD in 2005, Urban Legends: Bloody Mary was the third film in the execrable series that commenced with Urban Legend in 1998. As you might expect, the plot takes great liberties with the traditional tale.
More notably, horror writer Clive Barker essentially constructed a pseudo-urban legend by appropriating the chanting ritual for a 1992 film entitled Candyman. Various characters in the film summon the ghost of a black slave brutally lynched in the 1800s by repeating the name "Candyman" five times in front of a mirror. Some viewers come away with the misapprehension that Candyman was based on actual folklore, but apart from the borrowed incantation it was mostly a product of Barker's fertile imagination.
A Bloody Mary Plush Toy available for purchase on the Internet boasts the following "product features":
- Black hair
- Red blood on face and hands
- Terror of beauty lost
