Bloody Mary is the Monster of the Week! Matt Finley will look into three elements of the terrifying female specter today, Wednesday and Friday.

Venture into a darkened bathroom, stare into the mirror and chant “Bloody Mary” three times. Or 13 times. Or 100. Maybe spin around. Perhaps try again at exactly midnight. Alternately, you could light a candle and whisper the admission, “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby.”

The procedural variants of this popular courage-summoning, folklore-based sleepover game are outnumbered only by the staggering quantity of regionally differing supposed results, ranging from violent death at the hands of the invoked spirit to the opportunity to chat up a deceased loved one for precisely one minute. With indefinite origins lost at the far end of geometric growth and drowned out by the sounds of sleeping bag zippers, furtive match strikes and socks on tile, it’s impossible to form a clear picture of the gross tangle of history, hearsay, embellishment and fiction that are bound up like flesh and bone to form the legend’s jumbled anatomy. Bloody Mary as murderess, Bloody Mary as seer, Bloody Mary as vengeful victim and Bloody Mary as post-mortem switchboard operator – all spectral faces conjured up in the cold glass of a dark mirror.

The repurposing of the mirror into a spirit conduit, and Bloody Mary’s innocuous, psychic persona, which can tell a girl who she will marry, share links dating back to early gender-neutral, future-predicting Celtic divination rituals. These practices were slowly remolded and urbanized, resulting in the belief that a single woman can see a brief vision of her future husband if, on Halloween night, she looks at the room behind her in a mirror. As the patriarchal western media and culture became increasingly intent on grabbing young women by the training bra strap and slingshotting them into premature womanhood, pre-adolescent romantic soothsaying via soda can tabs, straw wrappers and cootie catchers became the new trend in pseudo-spiritualism. This future-foretelling version of the Bloody Mary legend marries an ancient rite to a modern narrative in order to generate an elaborate game that feeds equally off peer pressure-enforced courage and an eager impatience to encounter idealized love.
This is one of the few versions of the legend that offers a definitive reward – or even a goal – for summoning Bloody Mary. The others promise only the conduction of a cajones litmus test that demands patting the devil’s head while simultaneously rubbing the shadowy underbelly of local history.

Wednesday: Bloody Bloody Mary

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