As a child, you may have played the game Bloody Mary, wherein you go into a dark bathroom, chant “Bloody Mary” a bunch of times while spinning in a circle until finally you stop and look in the mirror and a woman appears.

There are actually many variations of this. Bloody Mary has gone by many other names, including: Bloody Bones, Hell Mary, Mary Worth, Mary Worthington, Mary Whales, Mary Johnson, Mary Lou, Mary Jane, Sally, Kathy, Agnes, Black Agnes, Aggie, and Svarte Madame.

The legend was furthered by the movie “Urban Legend” where two co-eds try to summon Bloody Mary. The legend has also appeared in the 1992 film “Candyman” as well as the TV show “The X-Files.”

Although it isn’t known when this urban legend came about, it was wildly popular at girls sleepovers in the 1970’s and even published by folklorist Janet Langlois in an essay in 1978.

Mary is said to be a witch who was executed a hundred years ago for plying the black arts, or a woman of more modern times who died in a local car accident in which her face was hideously mutilated.

Some confuse the mirror witch with Mary I of England, whom history remembers as “Bloody Mary.” An expanded version of that confusion has it that this murdering British queen killed young girls so she could bathe in their blood to preserve her youthful appearance. This is actually untrue, and the only connection is the name similarity.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Urban. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.