Tag Archives: Bloody Mary

The Origin of Bloody Mary

Backgrounds:

Ms. Z is an elementary school Maths and Chinese teacher in Shenyang, China. We were having dinner together when I mentioned my folklore collection project. She then shared some of the interesting folklores she’s learned of from the kids in her class or from her colleagues.

The Main Piece:

Z: I recall this ghost story about Bloody Mary going around among my students. So, basically, this Bloody Mary used to be a prostitute. She hated the way men treated her, so she wanted to revenge. Since then, every time when she was hired by a man, she would kill him and then drink his blood. And after she dies she becomes a ghost.

Me: So how do we call her out. I know other versions of this story, and they had their own ways of calling her to appear.

Z: If a boy walks into a dark bathroom, turn off all the lights and then say “Bloody Mary” three times facing the mirror, the ghost’s disfigured face will appear in the mirror, and she’ll scare the boy to death.

Analysis:

The Bloody Mary story might be one of the most famous ghost stories, this time not around America, but around the world, since the elementary school Z works in is in China. It is interesting to see that there are so many different versions of the orginin of Bloody Mary, how to summon the ghost, and the consequences of summoning her. Through all the different versions, we can see how a piece of folklore can have different variations in difference places. I know of classic origin stories of Bloody Mary that is linked to European history, or linked to religion (Virgin Mary). I guess for the reason why the ghost’s origin becomes a prostitute in the Chinese elementary school is this: the kids in the elementary school has little or no knowledge about western religion or western history, because they aren’t taught about them in elementary school. So, their cultural backgrounds and knowledge doesn’t allow for such origin stories. Therefore, the origin of the ghost might then turn into a more relatable story, prostitutes, which exist in almost all cultures, unlike religious or historical figures that are known only to a specific group of people that share the same culture.

For another version of the story, see Bloody Mary by Austen Le

Bloody Mary


Bloody Mary, but make it Jewish?

Main Piece:

How did you learn about Bloody Mary?

“When I was in Hebrew school, a teacher told me that Mary was related to Jewish history. She was a Jewish figure that would haunt you, and the teacher was trying to connect it to Jewish curriculum. I was like ‘why are you trying to ruin this story’, like yes, I was genuinely afraid but that was so stupid (laughs).” 

How do you play Bloody Mary?

“You get into a bathroom, close the door, turn off the lights, look into a mirror, say bloody Mary 3 times, she’s supposed to appear and do something bad.”

Context/Background: 

My informant is my roommate. She was raised in Conservative Judaism and attended Hebrew School from elementary school through high school. This story was collected when we were talking about Judaism during dinner. 

Analysis: 

Many young children are taught a version of Bloody Mary. Various accounts can be seen in Alan Dundes’ article “Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-Pubescent Anxiety.” In my own experiences, I’ve been told that Bloody Mary is a wife who got killed before her wedding or a woman who died in a bloody car crash. However, in the case of this specific account, the person teaching this game to my informant tried to alter the backstory so it would fit into her religious education. My informant’s Hebrew school teacher saw the value in this myth and its impact on children, so the teacher tried morph it to fit her agenda. My informant saw straight through this attempt, but still ended up fearing the figure, Bloody Mary.

Dundes, Alan. “Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-Pubescent Anxiety.” Western Folklore, vol. 57, no. 2/3, 1998, pp. 119–135. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1500216.

Bloody Mary

Informant: “So you go into the bathroom, turn off all the lights, look into the mirror and say, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” three times and by the third time, you turn on the light and there will be like a scratch on your face…and you’re haunted.”

Collector: “Cool. Is it only in the bathroom?”

Informant: “It needs, uh…. I’m pretty sure. I mean all I ever heard was the bathroom one, like going into the bathroom and it needs to be pitch black.” 

Background: The informant is my twenty-two year old sister. She learned this piece from friends while attending Catholic elementary school in San Diego, CA. She is an avid metal and alternative music fan with a love of body modifications including tattoos and piercings as well as horror films. 

Context: The piece was collected during a casual at-home interview. I asked the informant to share this piece because I have multiple childhood memories of her performing the ritual.

Analysis: This game/ritual is fairly common among young women and was very popular at our Catholic elementary school among both genders. While many folklore scholars have posited that this game is entrenched with female puberty and menstruation, I believe this piece was also integrated with our conceptions of the “Virgin Mary” as a human and yet divinely endowed, liminal character. Other variations and meta folklore suggest multiple different interpretations as to who “Bloody Mary” refers to. To both me and my sister in Catholic school, the only Mary we could conceive of was the Virgin Mary and the story became a sinister way to expose the contrast between the benevolence and kindness expressed within Catholicism with the strict, harsh realities of the institution we were a part of. My sister later added that the game never worked for her because she never completed it in total darkness, suggesting that although the ritual may not manifest in a supernatural encounter for everyone that participates, people still believe. 

Bloody Mary

Informant: Do you know Bloody Mary?

Me: We have Bloody Mary, but I don’t really know the backstory or anything. What was your version?

Informant: I don’t know the backstory either. It was basically just – you go to the mirror, and you say “Bloody Mary” three times and then she’ll appear. I don’t really know what happens after that, but I know it’s scary, and her eyes and face are all bloody. But also just looking in mirrors can be creepy if you’re there long enough without moving, so that can be enough sometimes. Especially at night. Oh! It has to be at night, I forgot. 

Me: Is it just any old mirror? At any point in the day? Because my Bloody Mary – we had to go into the bathroom, and turn the lights off, spin around three times, and you had to be by yourself… and spin around while saying her name, so every time you spun, you’d say her name, and you’d stumble around in the dark and find the sink, and once you were holding onto the sink, you’d try to find the lightswitch on the wall while still holding on, and once you turned on the lights again she’d appear in the mirror.

Informant: Haha! We never had that. We didn’t have a spinning thing. I also heard it from my sister, not at school or anything, so she may have toned it down for me so she didn’t want to scare me. It was supposed to be dark though, supposed to be at night. I don’t think it’s real, but like… why risk it?  

Background:
My informant is a 19-year-old college student at USC, who grew up in a small town in Arizona. She is the youngest of three sisters, who she thinks may have toned down the story elements of various legends or myths to avoid scaring her. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this piece was collected via an interview that took place over FaceTime. 

Thoughts:
I think everyone has their own version of Bloody Mary, which is why I really wanted to ask my informant about this. I grew up in Washington state, and she grew up in Arizona; I wanted to know what the differences were between my experiences with Bloody Mary and hers. For some reason, my experience with it growing up was a lot more specific, with a lot more rules to follow to make it work. Hers was really general. I wonder if that’s a reflection of the environments we grew up in: I attended an academically rigorous high school, and the elementary school systems were prepping us for that level of intense education since kindergarten. Her school systems functioned quite differently, were a lot looser, and put more value on effort than following all the rules to a letter. I wonder if that’s why my school’s version of Bloody Mary was so much stricter than hers.

Bloody Mary

Main Piece:

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the informant and the interviewer.

Interviewer: Have you heard about the legend of Bloody Mary?

Informant: Yeah man, that shit used to scare the hell outta me when we were kids. 

Interviewer: what exactly did you have to do to make her appear?

Informant: Well at my elementary school, I know there was only one bathroom that everyone said it would work in, which was the girls bathroom funnily enough. We’d have to get in there, turn off the lights, and stare at the mirror while saying Bloody Mary 3 times, I honestly never did it myself though because I was scared enough of the dark on its own hahaha.

Background:

My informant was born and raised in Southern California. He went through the public education system and has extremely liberal views. He now lives in Arizona for college. 

Context:

I spoke to my informant over a zoom facetime call during the 2020 Coronavirus Epidemic.

Thoughts:

It’s interesting how such a massive legend can have so many little details that change from place to place. Also, I was amused that the kids at my informants elementary school thought it would only work in the girls bathroom… so everyone who knew the legend must have gone to that bathroom to do it? Legends are definitely more believable through a child’s eyes, and that’s probably why some legends have been able to last for so long. A child learns it in their young age, and it sticks with them so much that they end up passing it along to the next generation.