Short Stuff: Bloody Mary

who have done it as well. I have where you stand in the mirror, and there are variations we'll talk about. You look in the mirror, it's darkened room, Maybe you got a candle going. If you're lucky, and you say the words bloody Mary a certain amount of times, sometimes thirteen per region. Sometimes you turn in a circle thirteen times. I've never heard of that. I would fall over. That's

the Parma Ohio method. And then, depending on how skilled you are at your incan patians, Bloody Mary may kill you, may reach through the mirror and pull you into the other worlds, may claw your face and eyes out, or you may just die of fright or maybe nothing at all, or she may just be standing there glowering at you, really mad that you you brought her to this mirror, but you can't do anything about it, right, like the

ladies kids. Yeah, either way, you're gonna go running out of this bathroom and you're gonna be talking to your friends about what you saw and we'll talk about it later. But in a weird, a weird way, like they're correct when they say they saw something strange. Right, Uh, possibly, Okay, we'll go with yes. So what's the deal? Where did this thing come from? So that's the other thing about it.

It's not just a game, but there's there's because there's like a legend wrapped around it, and the legend is kind of evolving and changing regionally and over time. Like you were saying, it actually constitutes a piece of American folklore. They're pretty sure it's American, right, and they've atually been

studying it here they're like kind of sporadically. But the first person to actually put it pen to paper about it was a folklorist named Janet lang Law LANGLOI That's where I'm going with Langloy, great last name, look wise tough to say, you know what, I prefer lang La. You could say it like that. It's even harder to langla wa right, it almost looks like Shammy but with an owl. Oh man, Shammy confused me for the first thirties something years in my life. Why is everybody staying

it like that? I knew what a Shammy was, but I never put the two together. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. But this lady's last name is not Shammy. It's Langlois and florist. Like yeah, and I think she's sort of just I mean, it was around, but she was the first person to kind of start writing about it a little bit. And it turns out like, because it's regional, there are a bunch of different names besides Bloody Mary Hell Mary Is and Mary Worth is hysterical.

That's a full on comic strip. It is one of the weirdest comic strips ever. Yeah, what was the deal with that? It's like Mark Trail, I don't know. At least Park Trail was appealing to kids. Nothing about Mary Worth had any appeal to kids, Like they would just be like, what what is this? I don't understand any of this. It was a comic strip, a soap opera comic strip for grown ups. Very bizarre or was it

for grown ups? Totally? And then there was also I think Apartment three E was a very similar kind of comic strip that I might have the apartment number wrong, but it was like that, No, thank you, give me Garfield, to give me Beatle Bailey, give me a wizard of It. Don't forget high in Lois Bloom County. I could do this all day zits remembers It's did a comic featuring us. Oh yeah, of course that was awesome, But Bloody Mary has nothing to do with any of that. But we

should do it on comic strips. That's a great idea. I can't believe we haven't. I knew we did comic books, but not comic strips. We should definitely check that as a great idea. We'll wind it out here with a few more names that I like. Black Angus is another, and then black Actus, Varte Madame hit What does say black Angus, black Agnes You're right right, So they're different names for the same spirit that you can conjure from

the from your mirror if you do this right. Um, And there's a few of those names kind of stand out. A couple of them really. The first one Bloody Mary. That's the one I always heard. And if you read about Bloody Mary, a lot of the people who are writing about Bloody Mary trace her to Queen Mary, the first of England, who ruled from fifteen fifty five to fifty eight. And she was actually called Bloody Mary because

she was a Protestant killer. That's right. Uh, she ordered the death of many Protestants to be burned at the steak and other grizzly forms of death. But here's the thing, like, it's probably not on account of her that we say bloody Mary, because she wasn't doing the actual killing, and in the folklore, like it's really Bloody Mary doing the killing, and she like bathes in the blood of children and stuff like that. Right, So, um, that doesn't really jibe.

It more jibes with somebody else, a woman by a totally different name, Elizabeth Bathory, the Countess of Blood I think they call her, who actually is reputed to have killed many many peasant girls herself and actually did probably bathe in their their blood. And she may actually be

the most prolific serial killer in history. So there's like maybe we're talking we're looking at like a mishmash of different names traits characters, or it could just be totally coincidental, or they don't really know where this thing came from, is what I'm saying. Or it was based on Mary Worth the sup Upper Comics adult. Right, she's got really boring. As the comic strip went on, she's like, no, might as well start killing kids, right? Uh? Should we take

a break? I think so? All right, let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit more about some of the variations, and believe it or not, there's sort of a little real science to this one too. Okay, Chuck, you talked about variations. One thing you can do is spinning a circle thirteen times. Another one is you can chant her name a certain amount of times. Another variation is where you actually prick your finger and make it bleed and then you press fingers with the person you're

doing this with and chant, don't do that kids, it's hardcore. Yeah. Um. And then there's also uh saying I believe. I saw in a few variations that you say like Merry Worth, I believe, Mary Worth, I believe, and that's the chant and a a kind of matronly well dressed animated woman appears in your mirror and says, what's the bother? Uh? And you know this is kind of thing that's done

its slumber parties and sleepovers. Uh. The kids all, you know, think they see something, they get scared, their imagination takes over. But supposedly there was a little real science to this and that. In two thousand and ten, a researcher out of Italy name Giovanni Caputo did a little experiment where he had people star into a mirror in a dimly lit room for ten minutes and write down what they saw.

And out of the fifty test subjects very robust um, sixty of people said they saw huge deformations of their face, also saw fantastical and monstrous things. And other people said they saw the face of a parent, or the face of an animal, or an old woman or a child. Yeah.

And I was looking at why that might happen, and apparently one swing one explanation is that your brain becomes sensitized to the visual information it's getting and because it doesn't need it's already judged this image a non thread and it's not food or anything like that, it stops filling in the details and so visually a deformation occurs in your image of what you're seeing in them because

you're staring at it. Right. Yes, so there actually is science to this idea where you know, the chanting of bloody Mary doesn't necessarily do anything, although I don't know, maybe it puts you in something of a trance like state where this happens on a deeper level or something. But at the very least, we realize that the brain stops all in details, so a deformed version of like a face can see. And then you also add in our um innate need to fill in patterns or to

fine patterns and to see faces and things. So maybe we start inputting stuff in those missing areas and it comes out all monstrous or baby like. But wouldn't you need for this effect to take place, to do it for like ten minutes and not just say bloody Mary

three times? Yeah? I think you're I think that's part of the game, as you're supposed to stay in there for longer than just however long it takes to say bloody Mary three times, you know, like you maybe use chance bloody Mary three times and then you just stare until you just are scared and run out of the bathroom. You know what game is a lot more fun than that at a slumber party. How about that game where you go in a closet with someone and I don't know,

kiss in the dark? Sure, sure, or light as a feather, stiff as a board is pretty awesome. Yeah, but I was I was probably more scared of kissing a girl in a closet than I was incanting bloody mary. Um. There is this great article on this, well, a couple of them. I found some on Penn State Universities like folklore site. Mental floss had something good, and Snopes did too.

But in that mental Floss article they turned up um a possible providence of this game and linked it to a Robert Burns poem from I think sev six, where I think the poem is called Halloween and and Robert Burns is basically giving you party ideas that your next Halloween gathering in the eighteenth century, and one of them is what um girls can do to look in the

mirror to see who they'll marry. Right, And the idea for mental Floss and others is maybe just the word mary got kind of twisted up over the years, and

that's where that came from. That's part of it. And then another part is so you're looking in the mirror and you're combing your hair and or eating an apple at the same time, and then you'll see in the mirror over your shoulder the face of the person you're gonna marry, but you could all so see a skull, and that means you're going to die before you have a chance to marry. And so it's possible that that and the Mary kind of turned into bloody Mary because

of the skull. Uh, that's one explanation for where this came from. There's another one from that is super Yeah, that it might have something to do with, uh, some kind of ritual for when an adolescent girl enters her minsies, which is called what chuck right? That's right? Really stuck with me over the years, Yeah, I did. We both learned that one together, and it makes sense in a really kind of figurative way, like the whole game is really preoccupied with blood. That's one the age of the

girls who tend to play these games kind of alignes. Yeah, it's definitely considered a girls game, and like a late pubescent pre irish, say, late prepubescent, early adolescent age time frame, so that would be the right time for this game

to be played too. Yeah, and the last part of that one is, uh, something we talked a lot about on our episode about that many many years ago, was we're kind of like one of the only cultures that doesn't have some kind of ritual right of passage for girls entering that phase of their life, right, Yeah, and then this kind of suggests that like girls still need that anyway, even if they're there, they don't live in

a culture that has it. And this stands in in some really weird, roundabout way, which actually find fascinating, very interesting, very interesting indeed. So that's Bloody Marry everybody, and we're one step closer to Halloween, so be where in the meantime, short stuff is out like a bat in the night. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.