Tag Archives: Bloody Mary

Bloody Mary

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Globe, Arizona
Performance Date: 4/29/20
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

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

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Arizona
Performance Date: 4 - 13 - 2020
Primary Language: English

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. 

Bloody Mary

Nationality: African-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/11/2019
Primary Language: English

Background: This informant is a young-adult college student who grew up in Northern California. The informant discusses a scary ritual that calls forth a vengeful ghost. This is a transcription of our conversation (The informant is “C”, another friend is “Friend” and I am labeled as “me”).

Piece:

Me: Did you ever do any like ghost ritual kind of things when you were a kid?

C: I mean at sleepovers we used to do Bloody Mary

Me: I feel like everyone has done Bloody Mary. How did you do it?

C: Go in a bathroom, turn lights off and say bloody mary three times.

Me: Where does she come from?

C: I think she comes out of the mirror.

Me: Did you ever try it?

C: No I was always too scared.

Context: This conversation occurred one evening while sitting in my dorm room with my two closest friends. We were discussing my folklore collection project and I told them that folklore included rituals and traditions and the like. When brainstorming rituals, the informant brought up Bloody Mary, a common supernatural legend mainly believed by young children.

Thoughts: Bloody Mary is such a common folk legend and I can honestly say that I have never heard of anyone actually conjuring Bloody Mary. When I “played” Bloody Mary growing up, a candle was required for the ritual and in the dark bathroom with only a small flame flickering, it felt incredibly eerie. I had always thought of Blood Mary to be the antithesis of the Virgin Mary, but upon researching it further I found that Bloody Mary is actually based on Queen Mary of England. Bloody Mary is associated with children and childbirth in particular as its based on Queen Mary’s mysterious phantom pregnancy- she appeared to be pregnant but never gave birth to a child.

For more information on Bloody Mary and her origins, see this 2016 article by Krissy Howard entitled “The True Story of Bloody Mary, The Woman Behind The Mirror” (All That’s Interesting):

https://allthatsinteresting.com/bloody-mary

 

 

Bloody Mary

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: EMT
Residence: Santa Rosa, California
Primary Language: English
Language: Italian

“In fourth grade, everyone knew about Bloody Mary showing up in bathrooms, and there were these creepy bathrooms down a super long hallway. The area was really shaded so they were pretty dark. We always were scared to go alone because they were so creepy. One day we were playing with the lights and turned them off and yelled “Bloody Mary” four times and then turned the lights back on. We saw a shadow staring behind us in the mirror. It was so, so scary. So we all ran out screaming and never went back in those bathrooms again. We always used the bathroom on the other side of campus.”

Context: The informant went to school in St. Helena, California, twenty minutes from Napa. She is female, and grew up in a small, close-knit community.

Interpretation: The Bloody Mary ghost story has been interpreted as a symbol of womanhood and menstruation, and this is an excellent example of how Bloody Mary is utilized as such. While the informant did not see the correlation, her story was exclusively prepubescent girls in a female bathroom. By facing the terrifying bathroom and summoning Bloody Mary, the informant and her friends symbolically opened the portal to female adulthood. Perhaps their avoidance of the aforementioned bathroom could further be seen as the fruitless attempt to avoid womanhood once the process of puberty has started. After seeing Bloody Mary, the participants are uncomfortable and scared, but also more knowledgable. The same can be said when a woman receives her first period. Furthermore, there is an obvious tie between the ‘bloody’ part of Bloody Mary and the blood tied to menstruation. For another interpretation of Bloody Mary, see the 2006 horror film directed by Richard Valentine.

 

Bloody Mary

Nationality: American
Age: 14
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Claremont
Performance Date: 4/16/2018
Primary Language: English

The following informant is an 8th grader. In this account she is explaining what Bloody Mary game is. This is a transcription of our conversation, she is identified as SA and I am identified as K:

SA: So it’s this girl, she was from like a large ship, and she got married there and then something happened to her and she died there… and she haunts the ship… and she can come into your house. So the game goes: If you go into your bathroom and then you close the door, you turn off the lights and you flush the toilet three times and you say Bloody Mary three times and she comes through the mirror and takes you

K: She just takes you, what happens?

SA: Well she takes you so I don’t know.

K: Have you ever played the game?

SA: No, I never tried it, some of my friends did, but when they screamed it freaked me out to much. This was a long time ago thought like 4 years, and I heard the story on YouTube.

K: Can I ask if you believed she would actually come through the mirror and take you.

SA: I think I did when I was younger, but now not so much, but I still don’t want to try it

Context: She told me this while at my house one weekend.

Thoughts:

This was the first time I had heard of a origin story for the Bloody Mary, so I was very interested. Adding the origin story to the scary game made me almost feel bad for the Blood Mary, which felt strange. But what was also interesting is that when I grew up, I heard about this game from my friends who heard it from their friends. But this informant heard about it on YouTube, it’s a different generation with a very different way of exchanging information. She did not need to be in the same place as the person telling her about the game to still experience it.