Bloody Mary

Also Known As: Mary Worth, Mary Whales, Mary Worthington, Mary Jane, Hell Mary
Region/Culture: Global
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: She answers to her own name repeated into a mirror in the dark, and she arrives in the glass rather than in the room.
Role in Mythos: She is the summonable dead of American childhood, a test of nerve that a group of children administers to itself.
Relation to Humans: Children call her on purpose, most often girls between about seven and twelve, in a school washroom with the lights off or a bathroom at a slumber party. What happens next depends on the telling: she screams, she scratches, she curses, she drags the caller into the glass, or she simply looks back wearing the caller’s own face with blood running down it.

Somebody’s hand finds the light switch and the room drops away. What is left is the smell of pink soap and wet tile, the drip of a tap that never quite closes, cold coming up through socks from the floor, and a rectangle of grey glass above the sink that a moment ago was just a mirror. Three girls are pressed into the space between the sink and the stall doors. One of them starts counting. The name goes into the glass slowly, because she has to be given time to come.

The instructions vary and the variation is the point. Say it three times. Say it five. Say it thirteen. The earliest version to make it into print, collected by Mary and Herbert Knapp in 1976, asks for forty-seven repetitions, softly but distinctly, and promises a woman with a knife in her hand and a wart on her nose. Turn around three times first, or five, with your eyes shut. Light red candles and set them in a triangle. Sprinkle water on the mirror. Run the hot tap at full blast until the glass fogs. Flush the toilet while you chant. In one Pennsylvania account collected in 1984, the callers prick their fingers with a pin, press the two beads of blood together, and say “We believe in Bloody Mary” ten times with their eyes closed before they look. That last detail matters more than any of the staging, because almost every version insists on it: you have to actually believe in her, or she will not come.

When she does come, the descriptions fall apart. A pale young girl with long hair and blood running down her face from a large cut in the forehead. A headless woman in a white gown, a bloody knife in one hand and her head held in the other, which some folklorists have connected to Mary, Queen of Scots, though nobody has ever explained how a nine-year-old in Louisiana would have arrived at her. A woman’s face simply covered in blood. Or the worst one, reported often enough to be standard: you see your own reflection, and then the mirror goes red until it looks like the blood is on you. In a three-night version from California, the first night gives a single spot of blood on the glass, the second a slightly larger one, and the third a face.

Her origin is a matter of record only from the 1970s onward, and that record is unusually clear about how little it knows. Folklorist Janet Langlois went into Holy Angels, an experimental Catholic elementary school for African-American children in northwest Indianapolis, and interviewed eighty pupils in 1973. About twenty of them knew what they called the Mary Whales thing, and roughly half of those had done it. Her essay on the material appeared in 1978 and is still the foundation of everything written since. Jan Brunvand, working through the same tradition under the name “I Believe in Mary Worth,” concluded that the origin simply could not be determined, and pointed out that the kindly newspaper advice-columnist of the comic strip has nothing whatsoever to do with any of it.

In Langlois’s Indianapolis texts, Mary Whales does something the bathroom ghost normally does not. She stands on a corner in the rain in a long white dress, and when a driver stops for her she gets into the back seat and is gone before the car has gone far. What she leaves behind is not the usual scarf or suitcase of the vanishing hitchhiker stories. It is a wet spot with blood on it.

The name attracts biographies the way a magnet attracts filings. Mary I of England, who had roughly three hundred Protestants burned during her reign and was called Bloody Mary by the survivors’ side, is the obvious candidate and almost certainly the wrong one. Local versions do better: a woman murdered in the woods behind a particular elementary school, a witch burned at the stake, a woman said to have killed people escaping north on the Underground Railroad. These stories are attached to her rather than inherited from her. The ritual came first and the history was fitted to it afterward, school by school, which is why she has a different murder in every town.

The mirror itself is much older than she is. In a note to his 1785 poem “Halloween,” Robert Burns set down the Scottish instructions plainly: take a candle, go alone to a looking glass, eat an apple in front of it, and comb your hair while you do, and the face of your future husband will appear in the glass as if peeping over your shoulder. Later versions had a young woman climb a darkened staircase backwards, candle in one hand and mirror in the other. The reward was a face. The risk was that the face would be a skull, which meant she would not live to marry at all. Take away the apple and the husband, keep the candle, the dark and the glass, and the machinery is identical. Only the question being asked has changed.

Alan Dundes, writing in 1998, argued that the question had changed less than it looked. He noted the age band of the participants, seven to twelve, sitting just below the average age of a first period; the fact that the rite is performed almost exclusively by girls, and almost exclusively in a bathroom; the insistence on blood appearing suddenly and without warning; the flushing of the toilet at the end; and the terror of a spot showing where other people can see it. He read the whole thing as a rehearsal for menarche, conducted by children who had been told very little and were working it out among themselves in the dark. The reading is an interpretation, not a fact, and plenty of people who played the game find it absurd. It also accounts for more of the details than anything else anyone has offered.

Her powers are modest and very specific. She cannot be met by accident. She has to be named, in the right place, the right number of times, by someone who means it, and she arrives only inside a reflective surface: a mirror, a fogged window, still water in a toilet bowl. Once there she can scratch, and the marks are said to show up later in the day on whoever has something to be ashamed of. She can scream, curse, strangle, take a soul, or follow the caller home and stay in the house. An eleven-year-old in San Jose reported the most undignified death in modern folklore, which is being pulled headfirst into the toilet and flushed. And she is genuinely effective, which is her most interesting property: the psychologist Giovanni Caputo showed in 2010 that staring at your own face in a dimly lit mirror for a few minutes reliably produces distorted faces, monstrous ones, dead relatives, animals, and a strong sense that the person in the glass is somebody else. The ritual is a set of instructions for triggering that, wrapped in a name.

Her limits are the same list read backwards. She cannot cross the glass. She cannot come into a lit room. She cannot be summoned by someone who does not believe in her, which conveniently makes every failure the caller’s fault rather than hers. She cannot start the thing herself. And she can be dismissed by a hand on a light switch, by running out of the door, or in several versions by the single flush of a toilet, which is a poor end for a spirit who has been credited with three hundred burnings and a beheading.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you summon Bloody Mary?

You go into a dark bathroom, face a mirror, and chant her name a set number of times, most commonly three. Variants add turning in place, lighting candles, sprinkling water on the glass, running the hot tap, or flushing the toilet, and the earliest printed version asks for the name forty-seven times. Nearly every telling insists that the caller has to genuinely believe in her or she will not appear.

Is Bloody Mary based on Mary I of England?

Probably not. Mary I was called Bloody Mary by her Protestant opponents after roughly three hundred of them were burned during her reign, but folklorists who have studied the children’s ritual have never found a real link, and the elementary-school children who perform it are unlikely to know who she was. The ritual appears to have acquired its historical explanations after the fact, which is why the story of who Mary was changes from town to town.

What does Bloody Mary look like?

Most often a pale woman with long dark hair and blood running from a cut high on her forehead. A smaller group of versions describes her headless, wearing a white gown, holding a knife in one hand and her own head in the other. In many accounts the caller sees no separate figure at all, only their own reflection turning bloody.

Where does the Bloody Mary ritual come from?

Its direct ancestor is a European mirror divination in which a young woman gazed into a looking glass by candlelight to see her future husband, recorded by Robert Burns in a note to his 1785 poem “Halloween.” The modern children’s version was first published in 1976 and first studied seriously by the folklorist Janet Langlois in 1978, based on fieldwork done in Indianapolis in 1973. Before that there is no firm record of it.

Does Bloody Mary have other names?

Yes. She is also called Mary Worth, Mary Whales, Mary Worthington, Mary Jane and Hell Mary, and the earliest recorded texts use Mary Worth rather than Bloody Mary. The Mary Worth of the newspaper comic strip is unrelated, a coincidence that has confused folklorists and children alike.