Bloody Mary: A Slumber Party Classic Artwork

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Isn't it weird how often the horrors in our favourite scary stories tend to look a lot like, uh… ladies? Join me as I dig up the social and cultural contexts behind classic ghost stories and legends to challenge the often one-dimensional portrayal of women in horror.

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Bloody Mary: A Slumber Party Classic

February 05, 2024 • Steph Summar • Season 1 • Episode 3

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5.2.24
Paranormal Pajama Party
Bloody Mary | 3

If you've been a preteen at a slumber party, chances are you've heard the chilling tale of Bloody Mary. Today, we'll dissect the origins of Bloody Mary and the various interpretations surrounding her name.

Bloody Mary, the spectral figure said to appear in mirrors when her name is called 3-13 times (it's unclear and not a risk I'm willing to take), has been a staple of sleepovers and late-night dares. While some might dismiss it as a simple game, we're taking a closer look into the mirror tonight, and into the possible inspirations behind this eerie tale.

One theory ties the legend to Mary Tudor, Queen of England, whose tumultuous life and reign left a legacy of fear and brutality. Other contenders include an accused Salem witch and infamous Hungarian serial killer Countess Elizabeth Báthory.

Beyond Mary's identity, it's interesting to learn why this game is so appealing to the 10-13-year-old PJ-party crowd.

Is it a ritual for girls anxious about the transition into womanhood? Or might she represent a way for young girls to reclaim a sense of power in a world where they often feel powerless?

Key moments

3:29 Who is Bloody Mary?
11:02 Why do we play?
14:42 The history of the game

Sources

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View all my sources for each episode and read the episode transcript here.

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Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.

When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.

This episode mentions sexual harassment and violence against women. Please be advised.

[SCARY MUSIC THROUGHOUT]

Steph: Have you ever summoned a witch?

It’s easy. Any girl at a slumber party can do it.

You just go into a dark room with a mirror in it, like your bathroom. In a whisper, you start to chant,

[WHISPERS]

Steph: "Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary".

While you’re chanting, your voice should get louder and louder until you’re almost screaming. Keep staring into the mirror while you say it, and on the 13th time you say her name, she’ll appear – right behind you.

Then what? Well. I don’t know. I’ve never been brave enough to do it.

But a friend of mine said her sister tried it once. They heard her in there, chanting and chanting on and on, louder and louder. And then they heard her scream.

She ran out of the bathroom shaking and crying. My friend says her sister won’t talk about it. But everyone who was there that night remembers that when she ran out of the bathroom, her clenched fists were dripping blood.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Steph: Hi, I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.

Unroll your sleeping bag and settle in. Tonight, our pajama party is hosting a sleepover legend – Bloody Mary herself.

Full disclosure: I am a total chicken. I’m scared of, like… everything, which I think is why I like horror so much. At least I know what to be afraid of when I’m reading a scary story, unlike real life when I’m just generally nervous about… all of it.

And as a chicken I have never, ever, ever summoned Bloody Mary. Even now, in my late-early 30s, I have a hard time looking into mirrors in dark rooms just in case she’s hanging around casually.

Do I know that she’s an urban legend? Yes, yes I do. Am I still pretty sure she might appear and scratch my face off? Yes, yes I am. So please know that I am being very brave tonight.

I think I know how to defeat her, though. If you were foolish enough to summon her, and if you have any time at all between saying her name for the 13th time and the aforementioned face-scratching-off, you should ask her who she is, or who she was, anyway.

Because based on what I’ve been reading, I think she’d be like, “...huh.”

The “Mary” behind Bloody Mary is a real mystery. I, and, as it turns out, a squillion other people, thought that she was called Bloody Mary because she was Bloody Mary – as in, Queen Mary I of England, older sister of Queen Elizabeth I.

Sad story about a lady alert: Mary was King Henry VIII’s oldest daughter, from his first marriage.

He was mad at her mother, Catherine of Aragon, for not being able to produce a male heir, plus he had a little thing going on on the side with Anne Boleyn, so he tried to divorce her. The only problem is that they were Catholic, and that did not fly in the Pope’s eyes.

To make an extremely long story short, Henry banished Mary and her mother, de-Catholicised himself, invented the Church of England so that he could marry Anne.

And then he cut off Anne’s head so he could marry Jane Seymour. And then when she died, he married Anna of Cleves. And then he divorced her so he could marry Catherine Howard. And then he beheaded her so he could marry Catherine Parr. There’s a whole musical about it called Six!, it’s very catchy, check it out.

Not included in the musical: the 57,000 people he had executed during his reign, mostly because they were not as on board with his new church as he wanted them to be. Remember that: 57,000.

The point is: Mary was a child of divorce and she did not handle it well.

I’m skipping over a lot of courtly intrigue and a few more beheadings, but eventually, despite Henry’s best, murdery efforts to get a son on the throne, Mary became Queen in 1553. And the first thing she did was: try to convert everyone back to Catholicism. And the best idea she had was: to scare people into it! By burning them at the stake! More than 300 people were burned alive during her five-year reign.

After she died, which we’ll get to in a second, this was documented by a guy named John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs, which was extremely popular in its day and also almost definitely didn’t let actual facts get in the way of a good story. By the time everyone had passed around Book of Martyrs like it was The Davinci Code at your mom’s book club, Mary had been cemented in people’s minds as a bloodthirsty tyrant.

Now look. I’m just a girl. Math is so hard for me. But even I can tell you than 300 is somewhat less than 57,000. I’m not endorsing burning anyone at stake. I’m just saying… maybe we need to examine why the woman is remembered as a tyrant and the man is mostly just remembered as a zany serial monogamist.

The tyrant reputation is a big part of why a lot of people associate Bloody Mary in the mirror with the historical Bloody Mary. But there’s also a variation of the summoning ritual where you’re supposed to chant “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby!” over and over.

Side note: Just… imagine being the parent at a slumber party and walking in on a bathroom full of 10-year-old girls screaming that into a dark bathroom mirror. Parenthood must be so weird.

The baby thing is kind of interesting because if you wanted to provoke Mary Tudor’s ghost via mirror videophone, telling her you killed her baby would be a great way to do it. Mary I had not one but two false pregnancies while she was queen. She believed herself to be pregnant, appeared to be pregnant, and when her due date came around… no baby. Twice. It happened twice. This was apparently devastating to her already not-great mental health.

To wrap up Mary Tudor’s tale, she was perhaps once again betrayed by her own uterus and died in 1558, at age 42, of what we now think was uterine cancer. She requested to be buried beside her mother, but her request was dismissed and she now rests in Westminster Abbey beside her half-sister Elizabeth, a woman who then converted all of England back to the C of E, but who also put the yas in "Yas, Queen".

In conclusion: Suck it, Henry VIII.

But folklorists think that while Mary I’s bloodthirsty reputation and story may have contributed to the Bloody Mary myth, there are a few other contenders.

In one variation of the ritual, she’s called Mary Worth. This Mary’s been explained as either a New England woman who was found guilty in the Salem witch trials, or an anti-Underground Railroad worker – that is, she killed people trying to escape slavery in the American South instead of providing them with sanctuary.

As a witch, her backstory is that she had a horrifically scarred face that she used to hide to avoid being mocked by the town children. After she was burned at the stake, she appeared to those children in the mirror and scratched their faces so they’d experience the shame she’d gone through.

A little fact-checking shows that there were no Mary Worths killed in New England’s witch hunts, but I like this version anyway because it explains the mirror. She was mocked for her appearance and so of course she would travel through mirrors to slash vain victims.

In the other version, she’s just an old racist.

Incidentally, I just counted, and I’ve now said her name 12 times in this episode. Just gonna have to find some creative workarounds to avoid saying it again, I guess.

The final historical contender for you-know-who’s origin story is the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who was very real, and very Hungarian, and very a countess.

I’m not going to get too deep into Elizabeth because if we do a vampire story, I want to talk much more about her, but basically: Shortly after Mary Tudor got done with her Catholic vengeance, trouble started a-brewin' in Hungary. Girls and young women were disappearing in a big way, and Elizabeth Bathory was acting extremely shady.

She was eventually charged with the murder and torture of at least 80 people, although one witness said she kept a diary of all her victims and there were nearly 700 names in there.

Again. I am not justifying or endorsing this. I am just saying that 80, and even 700, are much smaller numbers than 57,000. HENRY.

What makes her such a good candidate for our mirror witch is that A) her victims were girls and young women – exactly the type of person most likely to be playing the game at a slumber party, and B) she was supposedly very, very vain. She supposedly killed young people to bathe in their blood, which would grant her their youthful essences.

Of note: Elizabeth was a widow, and her late husband was bankrolling the king for a long time. One really good way to get out of your debts? Accuse the lady you owe money to of torturing and murdering 80 to 700 girls.

The podcast Royal Blood has a good episode on Elizabeth Bathory if you want a deeper dive into the countess’ bathtub full of blood.

But really, there’s no specific inspiration for old BM. She may just be an amalgamation of the bad girls we just talked about.

So what’s going on with the game? Where did it come from? And why are Mary’s would-be victims usually preteen girls?

A few academics have taken a look at this myth over the years. In 1998, folklorist Alan Dundes analysed the legend from a Freudian point of view and posited that the reason that tweens are so susceptible to the game is that they’re… afraid of their periods.

Huh.

Lots of cultures have rituals for those of us leaving girlhood and entering womanhood, and Alan felt that this game was exactly that kind of ritual.

I read his article. I sort of see what he’s saying. I guess it makes sense, sort of.

Girls. In a bathroom. Looking at their puberty-drenched little faces in the mirror and thinking about all of society’s expectations of their bodies. Suddenly there’s blood and lots of feelings. Et voila – periods.

Cue the screaming.

[SCREAMING]

Steph: Look. I will be the first to admit that my period often does make me want to scream – and it has, usually in pain and/or rage.

But this game isn’t like a bat mitzvah or a quinceanera, Alan. And it’s definitely not like we left for sleepovers at our friends’ houses and came back the next morning having faced our fears and grown in our femininity, and our moms were like, “Ah. She’s a woman now.”

I had a lot of anxiety around that age, absolutely. Still do. I had a lot of ideas about what it meant to be a woman, or sexy, or at least what having boobs would be like. But I was not scared of my period. If anything, I couldn’t flippin’ wait.

And not to be a total sexist here, Alan, but in my experience… boys tend to be the ones who are afraid of our periods.

The reason we play the game in bathrooms has nothing to do with our lady bits. It’s just a room with a mirror that usually doesn’t have many windows, so it’s really easy to make it super dark.

[Sigh]

Steph: I just don’t buy it. Personally, I think Alan’s being a little too Freudian about the whole thing.

Another folklorist, Janet Langlois, wrote an essay on our gal Mary in the 1970s and revisited the story later when she was reflecting on her career. She heard it from a 12-year-old girl in Detroit named Gia, who told Janet that she and her friends summon her sometimes at school… just because they could.

She thought they did it because it was within their power to do it. And one thing I vividly remember about being 11 or 12-ish was that I didn’t have any power, especially as a girl. That was about the age I was when an adult man flashed me on the beach, and when I had to switch schools and leave my friends behind three times in two years, and when my friends and I were taller and more awkward than all the boys in our class. It was not a time that I was very self-confident.

And so I wasn’t afraid of my period, Alan, because getting it would mean I was almost an adult, and being an adult instead of a child might mean I had a little more say in shaping the world around me. A little more power. And if you can’t be a woman yet… maybe you can at least summon a witch.

[MUSIC]

I think it’s important to note that girls have been FaceTiming Mary via mirrors long before Alan got scared of menarche, and way before Janet hung out with Detroit schoolgirls. (By the way, Janet got the school to host supervised slumber parties so she could sit in the bathroom and record Gia and her friends playing the game. Janet seemed fun as hell).

Have you ever played MASH on the school bus? MASH stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House, and it’s basically a game that predicts who you’ll marry, where you’ll live and how many kids you’ll have. It’s a great way to annoy your friends by working out that they’ll have 15 half-alien babies with the kid who sits in the back of class and eats glue.

It should be noted that I didn’t end up marrying a single one of the guys that MASH foretold, and that, to this day, I haven’t lived in either a mansion or a shack. But maybe it would’ve been more accurate if we’d played MASH on Halloween.

In the UK and Ireland, All Hallow’s Eve was traditionally the day of the year where the veil between worlds was thinnest, and obviously that made it a great time for some casual occultism. Just fun stuff, like divining who your future husband would be.

There were a lot of ways you could use divination to see your future spouse. You could throw nuts in a fire. You could pare an apple into nine pieces. You could walk backwards up some stairs while holding a hand mirror and a lit candle and chant a certain someone’s name into the mirror until the face of your hubby-to-be appeared. That, or a skull or the Grim Reaper. And that meant you were going to die before marriage – possibly by falling backwards up the stairs while carrying an open flame.

See? Halloween fun!

Before the first wave of feminism – and, to be honest, even now – girls and young women were taught that their entire worth was first, in their physical beauty; second, in their beauty’s ability to land a husband; and finally, in their ability to bear that husband’s children to carry on his name.

Women had zero power or agency, and that’s how the system was designed.

So I can see how there’s magic in the idea that if you perform a ritual just right, using a mirror – the tool you’ve been given to make sure that you are a valuable beauty – you can foresee the man you’re supposed to be with. Besides being a pretty fun game, it gives you a little control over the next inevitable step in your life.

And the added horror of possibly seeing your own death foretold makes it all the more appealing. When else are you allowed to take risks?

And I can definitely see how, if you’re a younger sister, watching your older sister and her friends walk backwards up the stairs, chanting 13 times into a mirror to try to lift the veil to the other side would be very, very cool. You’d totally tell all your friends about it at your very next sleepover.

And that’s how the legend of Bloody Mary lives on.

Oh god. Oh no. I’ve said it 13 times.

[GLASS SHATTERS]

Steph: I’m just kidding. It’s just a story… probably.

Before we close out the tale of Bloody Mary, I want to mention one last thing from Janet, who died in 2021. She hunted down a number of urban legends during her career, and even published some work on the movie Candyman, another mirror-travelling monster.

When reflecting on her body of work, Janet wrote something I love and that speaks to (and please pardon the pun) the spirit of what we’re talking about at our paranormal pajama parties.

“I’ve told students that legends seem to blossom in the cracks of social systems,” she wrote, “highlighting the problems and the pain.”

[MUSIC]

Steph: It’s almost time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. To learn more about Bloody Mary and the women who may have inspired her, check out the sources linked in the show notes.

Follow ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episodes… or you can just go into the nearest darkened room with a mirror and chant “Bloody Mary” 13 times. I’m sure what you see there will be better than any old reel I could make.

I’ll see you next week for more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion… unless Mary finds you first.

If she doesn’t, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave Paranormal Pajama Party a rating and review on your favourite podcast app. Thanks!

Don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.

[MUSIC FADES OUT]