Bloody Mary | Ep. 116
This week, we dive into one of the most popular urban legends and teen-sleep-over-style games and dares ever – Bloody Mary.
You know how it goes, you walk into a dark bathroom alone with the lights off, only a candle in your hand. You peer into the dimly light mirror and say Bloody Mary three times.
What happens next? We discuss that, along with who Mary could have been, scientific explanations, and Bloody Mary encounters from across the web. Listen now!
The Legend of Bloody Mary
Have you ever found yourself alone in a dark bathroom staring into the mirror?
Could there be a cursed spirit lurking and waiting to hear their name called? Have you ever had the urge to chant the name “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary”?
What’s up, Bizarros? Today, we dive into the Urban Legend of Bloody Mary.
How To Play Bloody Mary?
There are many different ways to play Bloody Mary. Like, candles vs. no candles. How many times do you say her name, etc…
So, I’m just going to pick one way, and it’s going to be from WikiHow, which means someone on the WikiHow site was tasked with creating an article on how to play this game.
So, what is the objective of playing Bloody Mary? Either:
- To prove to your friends, that you’re not a scaredy cat
- To summon the terrifying and lethal ghost of Bloody Mary
If you take a moment to think about your friend group, I’m sure it’s clear to you which option you’re rooting for.
All you need is a bathroom mirror and, in most cases, a candle. And at least one friend because if you do it alone, that’s just kind of strange.
Step 1.
Figure out who is going to play first. This can be done by the who is oldest, who is youngest, a lengthy battle of rock paper scissors, or drawing straws. Or maybe someone might volunteer.
Step. 2
Go into the bathroom, shut the door behind you, and make sure to turn off the lights. That’s why the candle is important.
So it should just be you alone in the pitch black bathroom, with a small candle staring directly at the mirror.
Step. 3
Place the candle on the sink. Maybe in case it works, and you gotta give a ghost the right hook.
Look deeply into your own reflection.
Now is when you begin saying the name…Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. You say it 3 times.
Meanwhile, your friends outside are totally gossiping about you.
Step. 4
If you are not able to summon her by saying her name, spin around in a circle 3 times. This is another way you could potentially summon Bloody Mary.
If you do see her, she is said you look like an old horrifying witch who is reaching out for you.
I think I’d have the natural instinct to look behind me still.
Step. 5
If you didn’t see her, you lose, blow the candle out, and go join your friends.
Who Was Bloody Mary?
Bloody Queen Mary I of England (1516 – 1558)
Queen Mary I of England was the only daughter of King Henry the 8th and Catherine or Aragon to survive through childhood.
When she started ruling, she was quickly nicknamed “Bloody Mary” as the Blood Queen had over 280 people burned at the stake.
This was done to people who refused to renounce their Protestantism.
One of Mary’s most famous victims was Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Cranmer renounced his protestant faith and re-embraced Catholicism after being made to stand trial.
Unfortunately for him, Mary didn’t care about all that noise.
She had a personal grudge because apparently, Cranmer annulled her father’s marriage to her mother, which led King Henry to marry someone else.
Cranmer had also been a passionate promoter of Protestantism under Mary’s predecessor, Edward VI.
So, in 1556, Mary condemned Cranmer and had him burned, which completely went against the Doctrine of Repentance which should have saved him.
Even by the standards of the time, the burnings Mary oversaw were gratuitously nasty. They evoked hostility among the English population, further fanning the flames of anti-Catholic (and by extension, anti-Spanish) sentiment.
Mary died, aged 42, during an influenza epidemic in 1558. It wasn’t influenza that got “Bloody” Mary I, but ovarian cysts or uterine cancer.
Bloody Mary Queen of Scots (1542 – 1587)
As the daughter of King James V of Scotland and his French queen, Mary of Guise, Mary Queen of Scots had a legitimate claim to both the Scottish and English thrones.
Mary ended up in an unhappy second marriage to her cousin, Henry Stewart, the Earl of Darnley.
Stewart ended up being murdered in mysterious circumstances.
Mary was believed to have been involved because she went on to marry one of the main suspects, James Hepburn, the Earl of Boswell.
Hepburn was eventually arrested, and Mary was forced to abdicate the throne to her infant son, James. She raised an army and tried to take back power, but it was in vain. In 1568, Mary fled south to England, seeking sanctuary with her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
Rather than offer her hospitality, Elizabeth had Mary imprisoned for 18 years.
On February 8, 1586, the 44-year-old Mary was beheaded in Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire. Mary went to her death in a dignified, cheery manner, even making a joke about never having had such grooms disrobe her in public. However, her executioner completely botched the job.
He failed to kill her with his first axe swing, digging it deep into the back of her head as she lay stretched out before the block.
The second struck her neck but failed to sever her head. In the end, he was forced to slice away at the sinew, attaching what was left of her head to her body.
He then held her head aloft and cried, “God save the Queen.”
The Blood Countess Elizabeth Bathory
Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) was better known as the “Blood Countess” because she used to bathe in the blood of her victims.
She did this because she believed their blood would preserve her youthful appearance.
She was married to Ferenc Nádasdy, a Hungarian war hero who fought with distinction against the Ottomans and gifted her his family estate of Čachtice Castle for their wedding.
However, his death in 1604 gave way to six years of unabated killings. After exhausting the local village’s supply of adolescent peasant girls, she started searching further afield.
She began inviting the wealthy daughters of minor aristocrats to Čachtice to be instructed in the arts of court etiquette.
Rather than receive a courtly education, however, they were instead ritually slaughtered.
An investigation launched by the King of Hungary (but requested by concerned, recently daughterless aristocrats) found that she had been brutally killing these girls for years.
Some victims would be scalded with white-hot tongs before being dunked in freezing water.
Others would be covered in honey and slowly devoured by ants. Some would be burned, mutilated, and even cannibalized. The luckier ones would merely be beaten to death.
On December 30, 1610, Bathory was finally arrested along with four female accomplices. They were put on trial, during which dozens of witnesses came forward to testify.
Elizabeth’s accomplices were tortured and burned at the stake.
But it was decided that the countess shouldn’t be put to death; doing so would only be detrimental to the reputation of the nobility.
Instead, it was decided Elizabeth would be walled up in Čachtice Castle, consigned to solitary confinement in a windowless cell where she would live out her four remaining years.
Urban Legend: Where Did The Legend Of Bloody Mary Come From?
Mary lived deep in the forest in a tiny cottage and sold herbal remedies for a living.
Folks living in the town nearby called her Bloody Mary and said she was a witch. None dared cross the old crone for fear that their cows would go dry, their food stores rot away before winter, their children take sick of a fever, or any number of terrible things that an angry witch could do to her neighbors.
Then the little girls in the village began to disappear, one by one. No one could find out where they had gone.
Grief-stricken families searched the woods, the local buildings, and all the houses and barns, but there was no sign of the missing girls.
A few brave souls even went to Bloody Mary’s home in the woods to see if the witch had taken the girls, but she denied any knowledge of the disappearances.
Still, it was noted that her haggard appearance had changed. She looked younger, more attractive.
The neighbors were suspicious, but they could find no proof that the witch had taken their young ones.
Then came the night when the daughter of the miller rose from her bed and walked outside, following an enchanted sound no one else could hear.
The miller’s wife had a toothache and was sitting up in the kitchen treating the tooth with an herbal remedy when her daughter left the house.
She screamed for her husband and followed the girl out of the door. The miller came running in his nightshirt.
Together, they tried to restrain the girl, but she kept breaking away from them and heading out of town.
The desperate cries of the miller and his wife woke the neighbors. They came to assist the frantic couple.
Suddenly, a sharp-eyed farmer gave a shout and pointed towards a strange light at the edge of the woods.
A few townsmen followed him into the field and saw Bloody Mary standing beside a large oak tree, holding a magic wand pointed towards the miller’s house.
She was glowing with an unearthly light as she set her evil spell upon the miller’s daughter.
The townsmen grabbed their guns and their pitchforks and ran toward the witch. Bloody Mary broke off her spell when she heard the commotion and fled back into the woods.
The far-sighted farmer had loaded his gun with silver bullets in case the witch ever came after his daughter. Now he took aim and shot at her. The bullet hit Bloody Mary in the hip, and she fell to the ground.
The angry townsmen leaped upon her and carried her back into the field, where they built a huge bonfire and burned her at the stake.
As she burned, Bloody Mary screamed a curse at the villagers. If anyone mentioned her name aloud before a mirror, she would send her spirit to revenge herself upon them for her terrible death.
When she was dead, the villagers went to the house in the wood and found the unmarked graves of the little girls the evil witch had murdered. She had used their blood to make her young again.
From that day to this, anyone foolish enough to chant Bloody Mary’s name three times before a darkened mirror will summon the vengeful spirit of the witch.
It is said that she will tear their bodies to pieces and rip their souls from their mutilated bodies.
The souls of these unfortunate ones will burn in torment as Bloody Mary once was burned, and they will be trapped forever in the mirror.
What Are Some Scientific Explanations For Bloody Mary?
The Troxler Effect
The longer you stare in a mirror, the more likely you are to start seeing things that aren’t there—even if you haven’t been forewarned that something ghastly will appear.
This is partly due to a phenomenon called the Troxler effect.
The Troxler effect is an optical illusion that affects the way we see things. When you focus on a specific point for some time, say 2 minutes or more, any unchanging object or image around it will begin to fade away. In essence, the Troxler effect is the “blindness” of focus. When you focus your gaze on a spot, every other thing in your peripheral view will gradually fade out.
Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo conducted an experiment in 2010 in which people were asked to enter a dimly lit room and look at their reflection in the mirror for 10 minutes.
In his study, Caputo recreated a visual illusion that occurs when a person stares at their own face in the mirror in a room with poor lighting.
The researcher used “a relatively large mirror” of 0.5 x 0.5 meters, which he placed in a room lit by “a 25-Watt incandescent light,” although he notes that to recreate this experiment, the exact same conditions are not necessary.
Each volunteer sat 0.4 meters away from the mirror, and they had about 10 minutes to peer into it, though the illusion, Caputo says, usually manifested within about 1 minute.
At the end of the session, the participants wrote down what they had seen in the mirror, and their descriptions varied greatly. Out of a total of 50 participants:
• 66 percent reported seeing “huge deformations” of their own faces
• 18 percent saw “a parent’s face with traits changed,” with 10 percent of these seeing the faces of deceased parents and 8 percent those of parents who were still alive
• 28 percent saw “an unknown person
• another 28 percent reported seeing “an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor
• 18 percent saw the face of an animal
• 48 percent saw “fantastical and monstrous beings”
So, how does the Troxler Effect Work?
This phenomenon — which Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler discovered in 1804 — occurs when someone stares fixedly at a single point.
When it starts to happen, anything surrounding that point, particularly splashes of color, will begin to fade away.
As a result, it might seem as though we have temporarily lost our ability to perceive colors.
This likely happens as a result of “neural adaptationTrusted Source,” in which our nerve cells ignore stimuli that are not essential to perceiving the object of our focus.
Therefore, we end up seeing the one thing that we are fixing our gazes on and little or nothing else. This, however, is not the case with the faces in the mirror illusion, Caputo says.
“[This] explanation,” he writes, “would predict that face traits should fade away and eventually disappear, whereas the apparitions in the mirror consist of new faces having new traits.”
Instead, what may happen is that by staring continually at our own faces, the stimuli initially stop connecting in a meaningful way, so we are unable to “string together” the facial traits we perceive.
This may result in a spontaneous reassembly of these traits, so it may seem to us that our faces have become deformed or uncanny.
Experiences With Bloody Mary From Lineup
1. The Silent Scream
Marisa and her friend had just finished watching an eerie episode of Ghost Whisperer, and Marisa wanted to scare her friend, one of her favorite activities.
So, Marisa looked into her living room mirror and spun three times, saying, “Bloody Mary.” No ghost appeared, so she went to the bathroom to try again.
Against her friend’s warning, Marisa shut off the lights, closed the door, and repeated the chant.
When she looked into the mirror this time, there was still nothing. Disappointed, she was about to flip on the light when she caught a glimpse of something.
She looked closer—and discovered a black and white woman with her mouth open wide.
Marisa expected a scream from the apparition but found only dead, terrifying silence.
The woman in the mirror lifted her arms, and Marisa saw that her hands were bright red: not with polish, but with blood. Her fingernails had been torn off.
Hands reached out from behind Marisa and grabbed her shoulders. Marisa screamed, turned on the light, and ran from the bathroom.
2 The Cracked Mirror
A group of girls was spending the summer at a camp in the Pacific Northwest.
Sick of exploring the woods, they decided to collectively fake food poisoning.
They ran to a bathroom and shut themselves up in it, hoping to make the fakery convincing.
While they were there, one girl, Jessica, came up with the idea to play Bloody Mary. The rest of the group agreed, and they shut off the lights.
They said ‘Bloody Mary’ three times into the mirror and waited. At first, there was nothing.
Then–the mirror cracked. All the girls ran off screaming except for one.
The remaining camper was paralyzed with fear. She stared and saw a flash of movement behind the mirror as if someone was standing right behind her.
She turned and ran from the bathroom. The next morning, the girls laughed about the event, if only to hide how scared they had been.
3. She Won’t Say What Happened
One night, Kelsie’s friend had a slumber party. The girls dared one of their crew to try calling Bloody Mary in the bathroom.
The friend accepted, glibly confident that the supposed ghost could do her no harm.
Fifteen minutes passed as the other girls waited for something to happen. But there were no signs of Bloody Mary to be found.
Then, they heard the girl scream. She tried to get out of the bathroom and was stuck – even though the door didn’t have a lock on it.
When Kelsie and her friends finally got the Mary summoner out, she was crying and whimpering.
She showed the girls her arms: They were covered in scars that had never been there before.
To this day, Kelsie has not been able to get her friend to speak of what happened to her that night.
Personal Encounters With Bloody Mary
1. I think I saw Bloody Mary
This happened around 4 days ago at around midnight.
So I was just getting ready for bed as usual, and I walked into the bathroom, but before I walked fully into the room, I saw this face for a split second that looked like a woman, and I was actually terrified since I knew I played Bloody Mary before in the past and I’m still kind of a skeptic on this paranormal game.
As of today, I still don’t know what I saw or if it was just my mind playing tricks on me. I also feel like I’m being watched some days in my home, even when I’m home alone.
Interesting comment: Just because Bloody Mary is a made-up game doesn’t mean you didn’t conjure up a spirit. I had something similar happen that made me frightened as shit of mirrors to this day. No more games like that
2 The Legend Of Bloody Mary Personal Encounter
Years ago, I was friends with this girl, and we were both into all that fun paranoid stuff, and we were convinced her house was haunted.
One day we decided to play Bloody Mary with a lady that used to come over and “babysit” her and her siblings.
The three of us went into the bathroom and got towels to block light from getting in through the crack by the door.
The babysitter was holding a towel up vertically to cover the light. So you know, we do the whole Bloody Mary thing, and I start to feel really uneasy, and I said that I didn’t feel good.
The babysitter asked, “do you wanna stop?” I said yes, and I SHIT YOU NOT once we mentioned stopping, I saw something run behind me away from the door.
At first, I thought it was the towel she took it down but turns out the way that she brought it down would not have been behind me.
I also forgot to mention that we saw a figure next to me, and it would make perfect sense that once we mentioned stopping, it would run behind me in the direction it went in. So yeah, not super scary but pretty spooky.
3 Bloody Mary Encounter – Completely True
So I am only fourteen, and I have already had two encounters with Bloody Mary.
The first time that I saw Bloody Mary, I was in fourth grade, I had just turned nine.
The day started off just like any other. My friends and I were kinds of geeks, and we thought that the girl’s bathroom in our hallway was haunted.
We thought this because we would always hear random flushes in the stalls, and then the sinks would turn on.
But there was never anybody actually using the bathroom or anyone close enough to the sink so that the water would turn on. So my friends and I were talking about the “haunted” bathroom, and then one of my friends suggested that we play truth or dare, the “creepy version.”
One of the girls dared me to do the Bloody Mary ritual. I was hesitant, but I did it anyway.
It was probably the worst thing I have done yet in my life. So To make this clear, the bathroom is huge with a total of ten stalls, two of which are bigger than the others because they are for handicapped children.
There are no windows and only one door, which locks on the outside when it shuts.
So you can imagine that the bathroom is really dark when the lights are off, and the door is shut.
Also, the door is a three-inch thick wooden door with no window in the door. There is also a wall type of thing right in front of the door and only enough room for two people walking side by side to fit between the wall and the side of the bathroom.
So back to the ritual, the first thing that I did was turn on all of the sinks (six), then when they were all on, I had to turn off the lights.
Last, I had to shut the door. So I am not scared of the dark, but I am scared of being alone.
I don’t know why but being alone is really scary, I feel like being alone is probably my worst fear. So I was in the dark alone with the sinks on, I forgot to mention that I had to plug the sinks so the sinks were not draining as they should.
I went over to the mirrors (there is one in front of each sink) I stood in front of the first one (so that I could get to the door faster), and I said the “magic words” Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary thirteen times.
Well, at least I was going to say those words thirteen times, but I only to about five to seven times.
I had my eyes on the mirror the entire time. I had said Bloody Mary five to seven times when the mirror (I swear it) lit up, and a girl appeared.
I can’t say exactly what she looked like, but from what I remember, her skin was paper white, she was wearing a white nightgown, and her hair was jet black, and it fell in front of her face.
Her right arm was reaching towards me, with her neck pointing down. I only stayed still for like three seconds. I screamed, and my friends opened the door, I ran. I didn’t tell them anything except that I saw her.
I guess that they believed me because my face was white, I was extremely pale, and also I don’t lie. I didn’t get a scratch on me that day, but I admit I have not gone into a school bathroom by myself since then.
My second encounter with Bloody Mary wasn’t as scary as the first one. My second encounter with Bloody Mary was about four months ago.
I had to go to the bathroom. I was at school, so I begged my friend (let’s call her Sally), so I begged Sally to come with me to the bathroom.
Sally asked me why she needed to come, so I told her what happened in fourth grade.
She told me that she would come as long as I would tell Bloody Mary to leave me alone.
So I agreed. We were in gym class at the time, so we left class and went to the restroom.
The restroom isn’t really close to the gym, we had to exit the gym door, go down the right hallway, turn left, go down that hallway, and then turn left again, and the bathroom is right there.
This restroom is almost the exact opposite of the bathroom from fourth grade. This bathroom is really small with only two small stalls and one sink. There were two doors in this bathroom, one right by the sink and one on the other side of the room.
The one closest to the sink was locked on the other side. There still weren’t any windows.
This time I didn’t summon Bloody Mary, necessarily. I just stood in front of the mirror and said. “Bloody Mary, leave me alone.”
Then when nothing happened, I said. “That’s right, stupid little b***h.”
That was a mistake. Anyways nothing happened at first, and Sally and I really had to use the restroom, so we each took a stall (I took the farthest from the sink).
However, when I sat down on the toilet, I felt a sharp pain from my pointer finger to my elbow. I glanced at my arm and freaked out…I had a long scratch on my arm from my finger to my elbow!
I didn’t even scrape my arm against anything, though. Anyways, Sally and I finished, washed our hands, and left. When we were back in the gym, I showed Sally the scratch.
Nothing has happened to me since then.
Is The Legend Of Bloody Mary True?
What do you think, Bizarros?
Is the ghost of a long-dead, blood-thirsty queen waiting for you in your bathroom mirror?
Is there any truth to the Urban Legend of Bloody Mary?
Would you play Bloody Mary?