Episode 18 - Bloody Mary

You are all going to take a turn. That’s what your gathered friends all say.

You just happened to draw the short stick. You just have to go first.

You’ve been in this hallway a hundred times. Staring down the length at the bathroom has never been cause for concern before.

But this time, even with the small group of your friends behind you, the bathroom looks dark and terrible.

Go on, they urge you in whispered voices, do it.

You take a deep breath and step toward the room. It’s just a stupid mirror, right?

Another step, and another. Your grip tightens on the thin, white candle and lighter bundled in your fist.

Your friends have not followed you, they are waiting halfway down the hall, huddled together, all nervous giggles.

You swing the door shut behind you, for a moment it’s pitch black until your eyes adjust to the dark. You light the candle with a shaky hand, letting the small light fill the space, glimmering off the mirror, you make eye contact with your reflection.

“Bloody Mary,” you whisper in the dark.

“Bloody Mary,” you say again, the conjuring nearly complete.

“Bloody Mary.”

One of the most ubiquitous urban legends of the Western world, with variants found across the globe, is the story of Bloody Mary.

Whispered in hushed tones at schools, and homes, the legend of Bloody Mary has many versions, each less pleasant than the last.

Stereotypically, Bloody Mary is conjured by groups of young girls by peering into a mirror lit only by candles and chanting her name. Sometimes it is three times, sometimes it is thirteen. Her apparition has many forms. Sometimes she is benign - if not friendly. More often she is violent in appearance or action.

She is known by Bloody Mary, or Hell Mary or Mary Worth. She is one woman and she is many women from across history with tales ripe of violence and sadness and death.

She is a ghost, or a witch, or a demon. Or perhaps she is all three.

The Origins of Bloody Mary are varied, and there is not one right answer for who she may have been in life.

However, all the versions, for all their differences share one quality. They are not happy stories.

Bloody Mary is a ghost story that has survived decades and spawned global variations. It combines so many objects that already hold such superstitious power: candles and mirrors and the power of names, it only makes sense that it would make for a powerful tale.

I am Andrew Eagle, and I am excited to invite you to follow me as we explore one of the most well-known of all modern folk lore. So, join me, and pass Through the Veil.

You didn’t know what to expect when she appeared. Maybe the mirror would bleed, or the faucet would run red with blood from no visible source.

Maybe you would see her visage behind you: pale, ghastly, and covered in blood. Maybe she would simply stand there. Maybe more.

You knew some of the stories said that if she appeared you could not look at her directly, only in the mirror.

If you looked directly at her, she would take your eyes. And while you tried to be brave, and knew they were just silly ghost stories, you were not fool enough to tempt fate.

Some of them said you might see nothing, but when you left the bathroom you’d be covered in vicious red scratch marks, left behind by the ghost’s anger.

Some of your friends said she would strangle, or drown, those who disturbed her slumber, but they were probably exaggerating. You knew that the story about her stealing your soul was over-the-top and only meant to scare you.

To be fair to your friends, it had worked, you were scared. Some of the stories you had been told said you could taunt her to make her appear, but the truth was, you were more than happy if she did not appear.

You were there, in the bathroom and deep in thought, when something snagged at the corner of your eye. A flicker of motion over your shoulder. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, a product of the shuddering flame… But maybe, just maybe, you weren’t alone in this room. Maybe Bloody Mary had arrived.

One of the most common theories as to the identity of the woman who gave rise to the Bloody Mary lore suggests that she was once a Queen of England.

Born Mary Tudor in 1516, her life was not a happy one. Mary was the only child of Catherine of Aragon and King Henry VIII. The king was desperate for a male heir, which after seventeen years drove him to annul his marriage to Catherine. At the time, this was quite the scandal, and Mary was totally separated from her mother, unable to visit her ever again.

Later on, the king married Anne Boleyn and together they had another daughter. Anne was worried that Mary would stand in the way of her daughter’s succession to the throne, and so she convinced Parliament to denounce Mary’s claim.

Despite that, and although it took a long time, Mary did eventually ascend to the throne. She never accomplished her goal of conceiving an heir with her own husband, Philip of Spain. She believed throughout her life that her failure to produce an heir was punishment from God for failing in a mission to unite the people of England under one church.

At the time, the people were greatly divided between the Protestants and the Catholics. Mary set out to try to unite them under Catholicism, which she claimed as the one true religion.

Her proclamation resulted in the Marian Persecutions, a series of trials wherein roughly 300 men and women were tried, sentenced and burned at the stake as Protestants. This series of events earned her the nickname Bloody Mary.

The most common rituals for conjuring Bloody Mary involve little more than a lit candle, a mirror, and a dark room. Beyond that, there are nearly countless variations.

Some suggest that you must say her name three times, others say five. Some versions require you to spin slowly in a circle three or thirteen times before chanting her name.

Still other versions have you blow out the candle after such practices to conjure her in the dark.

Some, more recent versions also suggest taunting Bloody Mary to get her to appear. Although the method of taunting changes depending on who the legend is meant to conjure.

Another possible identity for the inspiration of the Bloody Mary conjured by mirror and candle is Mary Worth.

Mary Worth has a long and storied history, much of it lost in fiction and time. One version of the story places her near Chicago during the American Civil War. There, she kept a barn and a small homestead. Her humble home sat near a village, and although she provided the people of the village with poultices and herbs, she was feared as a witch.

This didn’t stir up too much trouble until, as the story goes, young girls began to go missing from the village. A group of villagers went to Mary Worth to question her, but she denied all knowledge of their fate, and they found no evidence of their missing girls.

This continued for some time, until a fateful night. The town’s miller had a daughter, around the same age as the girls who had been going missing.

As the sun set, the girl found herself fascinated by a sound that seemingly only she could hear. Her mother however, saw her leaving, and calling for her husband, had him follow their daughter.

As the story goes, the miller found his daughter walking straight toward Mary Worth’s cabin, which was lit by a ghastly light. As the miller approached, rushing ahead of the entranced girl, Mary knew she was caught out as a witch and attempted to escape.

The miller raised his rifle and shot the witch. Then she was brought before the town and sentenced to hang or burn depending on the version of the story.

The story goes that after her execution, the townspeople found rows of unmarked graves behind Mary’s house, their missing girls had been killed by the witch as part of some dark magic.

In Japanese urban legend, Bloody Mary is not a popular feature, but her parallel is clear and popular. Hanako-san is the ghost of a girl that is known to haunt school bathrooms. The origins of Hanako are flexible, but the most common stories claim that she is the ghost of a girl killed during an air raid in World War Two, or she was the victim of a murder by a violent stranger.

In most versions of the story, she works alongside Aka Manto, who haunts and kills people who answer his questions incorrectly. She serves as one that drags people who answer incorrectly into the underworld.

In the versions of the story where she is an independent spirit, not bound to Aka Manto, she tends to be more benign, often manifesting as a small girl in a red skirt, occasionally with bloody hands.

There have been some efforts made to explain the Bloody Mary legends scientifically. Most people dismiss out of hand the idea of a witch’s ghost coming back to haunt bathroom mirrors, so there must be some explanation for the popularity of the story.

One possible explanation is that the illusions of Bloody Mary are attributed to the perceptual effects of Troxler’s fading. Troxler’s fading, or the Troxler effect, is an optical illusion that occurs when one fixates on a single point for a length of time. When this occurs, stimuli surrounding the focal point will fade, shift and disappear.

Another theory was proposed by Giovanni Caputo of the University of Urbino. He described a phenomena or type of hallucination that occurs due to staring into a mirror in a dimly-lit setting for a prolonged period. He called this type of hallucination the “Strange-face illusion” and associates this illusion with a dissociative identity effect. The result is that our brain’s facial-recognition behavior misfires in a number of ways. These misfires manifest as facial features that appear to melt or distort, or even cause us to recognize our own reflection as a stranger’s face.

One of the oldest, modern folk stories, Bloody Mary holds a special place as one of the first urban legends.

Its origins are rooted in folk belief surrounding mirrors, and the fear of a witch’s wrath. So, while it seems unlikely that a witch’s ghost is waiting around to harass anyone foolish enough to summon her, or to drag them off to hell; there is something to it.

Maybe it is rooted only in superstition, or maybe our brains are just bad enough at analyzing reflections in the dim light that we do see something, even if it is only a hallucinated version of our own face.

Either way, it has not only proliferated throughout western society, but its parallels appear across the world and throughout pop-culture.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Through the Veil. I hope you enjoyed. I encourage you to subscribe to receive new episodes weekly wherever you listen as we continue our exploration of folklore and urban legend.

If you are enjoying the show, and have subjects you would like to hear covered, please email me at throughtheveilpodcast@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter, you can find me @ThroughVeil.

As always, thank you, for listening.