And no I’m not talking about the drink. :rolleyes:
The other day I’m at the pub with my wife and some friends and we got to talking about things that used to scare us as children; I told them the chant of “Bloody Marry” used to always scare the crap out of me. I said this thinking they would know what the hell I was talking about, None of them had a clue; Which was surprizing becuase I always thought this was a popular practice with young children.But apparently it was a local thing where I grew up (Tulsa OK.) According to the lost look I got from my wife and friends the other night. So I was just wondering has anybosy else heard of this?
And If your still lost here’s how it works:
You and a friend or friends get in a small room with a mirror; (Usually a bathroom) turn off all the lights; stair into the mirror and start to chant “Bloody Marry, Bloody Marry, Bloody Marry, ect,…” You do this untill the image of a little girl apears covered in blood with razor sharp fingertips. You then run like hell becuase this bitch is out for blood… YOUR BLOOD!:rolleyes:
Its not hard to see how this could scare children with overactive imaginations.
YES! I remember doing that in Kindergarten, but we all would run out before we got finished saying it for the third time. Who knew, maybe there was a scary bloody lady living in the mirror, we were 7 and there was a pretty damn good chance there was!
I remember reading about it in some horror type book intented for pre-teens. I myself have never done it, but have friends who say they have, and were pretty pissed no fuckin’ ghost showed up!
I remember it from growing up on Connecticut. Our story went, at midnight you had to say “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, please appear, please appear” 13 times. Supposedly, Bloody Mary was a witch who was unjustly killed untrue claims that she had killed some children. When you called her, she would curse you as revenge for her false conviction.
It also went a step further, with a grave at a cemetary in New Haven supposedly being hers. The lady whose grave it is was named Mary, but I’m guessing thats where the similarity to Bloody Mary ends.
As a kid, it was “Mary Worth” that was the name for this UL trick.
Here’s how I recall the version I was told as a kid:
You have to be home completely alone, at night, and turn off every light in the house. Then you stand in front of the mirror and stare at it, running the cold water, while chanting Mary Worth, 3 times, without breaking your stare into the mirror.
Instead of seeing “bloody Mary,” you were supposed to be possessed by Mary Worth’s ghost and it would make your eyes glow red in the dark.
This used to scare the living shit out of me when I was a kid. I never did try it. Even today, a part of me still gets the willies if I think about it, when I wake to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
I refuse to try it even now at 31. FTR, I have had too many unexplained phenomena in this house in my lifetime, the worst being “Spot.” I was not the only person to see “Spot” either. I aint taking chances on anything that will bring another bogeyman around.
I couldn’t bring myself to do it back then… and I can honestly say it would still get to me. I dunno… shit like that still freaks me out… I’m just selectively superstitious I guess, or just too open to all possibilities.
Just to make myself look even more stupid… I say I wouldn’t do it now and I live in a dorm with people all around me (well I could probably do it if people were out and about)… but I don’t think I could ever do it if I was living alone in my own house or even apartment.
When I was a kid (all of, what, eight years ago I think it was), my friends tried “Bloody Mary” at a slumber party. Well, all the other girls crowded into the bathroom. I and one other chicken sat in the living room waiting. We almost peed our pants when our friends started screaming and falling over each other to get out of the bathroom!
I asked them, after they’d calmed down, what was wrong. Apparently they were all spooked just by the idea to begin with, and then one girl got really nervous and started giggling, and then another thought her giggling was spooky, so they all just got nervouser and scareder and finally they just started screaming - and each of them thought the others had seen Bloody Mary…
My sisters told me a story about someone called Anabella Duff. Her parents had locked her in a room for being bad and left her there with nothing to eat so she eventually ate her fingers! :eek: She eventually died of starvation, so, if you said her name three times, she would appear, I never got past two.
Great. As I’m reading this thread, the local PBS radio station is airing the ad for “This American Life”: the one with the kids chanting “Bloody Mary”.
Yeah, I heard about “Bloody Mary” when I was a kid growing up in PA.
I just kind of assumed that saying “Bloody Mary” three times gave your eyes enough time to begin to adjust to the dark, and then you could just barely make out the outline of your own reflection in the mirror. Guess I was just a little Snopes Junior.
This practice is common throughout the English speaking world (belief in mirror spirits and demons of some sort is even older and more widespread). Some folklorists believe that the Bloody Mary/Hell Mary/Mary Worth ritual may be a seriously corrupted version of a divination spell that involved calling upon the Blessed Virgin Mary.
No… you people have it all wrong! You’re supposed to toss water on the mirror and then chant. Being alone doesn’t matter. My friends and I freaked ourselves out numerous times during childhood doing this. Nothing ever happened… you think that maybe Bloody Mary doesn’t exist??!
Sigh. Another memory from childhood shot all to hell.
Oh yeah. The way I learned it, you have to stand in front of the mirror and chant “Bloody Mary, come and shary all your death with me” thirty-nine times. (There was a story connected with it, too – something about a queen or princess who was chased into the Hall of Mirrors by her murderers and beheaded there.)
My brother and I tried it, but alas, nothing happened.
