LEGEND: Bloody Mary

If you say her name three times into a mirror in a dark room—legend says Bloody Mary will appear and haunt you forever. But have you ever wondered where the sleepover game came from? History suggests the game is more than just an urban legend and might be rooted in terrifying truths…

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  The year is 1999. Your walls are covered with posters of NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. Blink-182 is blasting from the stereo as you and three of your closest friends try and outlast each other over a bag of Warhead candies. That night, you play a few board games, make a prank phone call to your crush, but then it starts to get late. You say, "Let's order a pizza before everything closes." But your friend has a better idea. Why not play Bloody Mary? Immediately, you feel your face go red. Your heart starts pounding in your ears, and you try to make a few excuses. You should probably call it a night soon, maybe a movie instead.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  But the rest of your friends egg you on. Come on, you're not afraid, are you? Your parents are already asleep. You can't chicken out and wake them up. You have no choice but to surrender and pray to God that nothing happens. So you go into the bathroom, turn out the lights, hold hands, and say it all at once while looking in the mirror. Bloody Mary. You take a deep breath and say it a second time. Bloody Mary. And then you grip each other's hands tighter than before. You're all clammy and nervous, but you say it one final time. Bloody Mary.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  If this sounds like something you did back in the day, then I'm sorry if this was triggering. But even now that I'm older, I still think about this stuff all the time. Where do these spooky rituals come from? And could they actually be rooted in something supernatural? I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is So Supernatural.

• 2:20Rasha Pecoraro?

  A warning before we begin. This episode contains discussions of miscarriage and the death of a child. Please, listen with care.

• 2:31Yvette Gentile?

  All right, with that being said, y'all, let's just dive in. I'm Yvette Gentile.

• 2:38Rasha Pecoraro?

  And I'm her sister, Rasha Pecoraro. Today, we're talking about a classic sleepover game that may be based on something very real, very dark, and very bewitching: Bloody Mary.

• 2:54Yvette Gentile?

  Now, I can't even begin to cover this topic without thinking about my own experiences as a teenager, because there was nothing like spending the night over at a friend's house, or having friends over at my house for a slumber party. I remember mom would order pizza for us, we'd slurp down Coca Colas, we'd make homemade brownies, we'd give ourselves a sugar rush for days on end, then we'd watch movies until way past our bedtime. And of course, there were the games. You know the ones I'm talking about: Truth or Dare, and yes, I played Bloody Mary.

• 3:30Rasha Pecoraro?

  Ooh, not me.

• 3:31Yvette Gentile?

  Yeah, no, I know it was definitely not you. It was, but the thing is, it was never me initiating it. But there was always that one friend, we all have that one friend, that says, "Come on, come on, let's do it, let's play Bloody Mary." Which definitely caused me some anxiety when I was younger. But looking back now, I realize I loved the thrill of being scared, but you know, I gotta say, not so much anymore.

• 3:59Rasha Pecoraro?

  Well, we know that's definitely not me. Like, I like roller coaster scary, but Bloody Mary scary, uh, nope, not so much. Well, regardless of how I feel about it, Bloody Mary has been a classic for decades. The first written accounts of the game are from the 1970s, but the rules might be much older than that. So if you don't know how to play, here's a quick rundown. You go into a room that has a mirror in it. People usually play in the bathroom, but there's no rules that say it has to be a bathroom. If you have a mirror in your bedroom or anywhere else, that can work too.

• 4:42Rasha Pecoraro?

  Once you're there, turn off all the lights. It should be dark, but you can light a candle if you need just a little something. Then, look into the mirror and say the words, "Bloody Mary." Some people say you have to repeat the phrase three times. Others say it has to be five times, 13, or even 100 times. A few people also say that you need to end the chant with this quote. "I have your baby." Some accounts say the ritual only works at midnight, and others say you can do it at any time of day. But once you've done it right, a woman is supposed to appear in the dark mirror in front of you.

• 5:27Rasha Pecoraro?

  Most references say she's in a worn-out white dress. Beyond that, there isn't much consistency about what she actually looks like. Some say she has a bloody injury on her face, and others insist she doesn't look human at all. But instead, appears to be a demon or a monster. She might have a baby in her arms, or she'll show up in the mirror alone, and then immediately start looking for an infant that's missing. One thing that's often mentioned, she is frickin' angry. Like angry enough to hurt you.

• 6:05Rasha Pecoraro?

  Some accounts say that once you summon Bloody Mary, she's trapped in your mirror forever. You won't be able to go into that room again without seeing her terrifying face. The scarier legends say that Mary actually climbs out and attacks the person who summoned her. That poor unfortunate soul is doomed to be badly hurt or killed. I even read somewhere that she'll make the summoner hold her baby. If they can keep the child calm and comfortable, they get to live. But if the baby starts crying, Mary will kill them. Or she might steal their soul.

• 6:47Rasha Pecoraro?

  So when they eventually pass away, they'll also be doomed to roam the earth as an angry spirit.

• 6:55Yvette Gentile?

  All to say, no one entirely agrees on how the Bloody Mary game works, or what the lore behind it really is. There's a lot of inconsistency from one account to the next, and there's just as much variation when it comes to who she was.

• 7:13Rasha Pecoraro?

  Some believe Bloody Mary is the ghost of a woman named Elizabeth Bathory. Now, I don't know how you go from being known as Elizabeth to Bloody Mary, but I do know that Elizabeth was a real wealthy noblewoman who lived in Hungary in the late 1500s and early 1600s. And she reportedly had a very sadistic streak. Reports say that she liked to pretend she cared about the poor and the unhoused. She'd go find young women who didn't have families or friends, and she'd offer them jobs in her home as servants or cooks. But then, instead of giving them a safe and stable workplace,

• 7:55Rasha Pecoraro?

  Elizabeth reportedly tortured these women to death just because she enjoyed seeing them suffer. It's said that she kept them in cages when she wasn't tormenting them. Other accounts say she burned her prisoners with hot irons, and they couldn't even scream because she sewed their mouths shut after capturing them. And since these women were vulnerable and socially isolated, no one ever noticed when they disappeared without a trace. There are even rumors that Elizabeth used parts of their bodies in dark magic rituals and bathed in their blood after they were dead.

• 8:38Rasha Pecoraro?

  Apparently, she believed this would help her remain young and beautiful for as long as possible.

• 8:45Yvette Gentile?

  Well, a lot of historians think those stories are exaggerated or completely made up by one of Elizabeth's very powerful enemies, particularly the King of Hungary. Apparently, her husband was very generous with his money and loaned it to some really important people, including the King. After Elizabeth's husband died, the King didn't want to pay her back, so he began spreading these nasty rumors about her to justify leaving her high and dry. In other words, Elizabeth was totally innocent. She didn't do anything wrong, but the King destroyed her reputation anyway.

• 9:28Yvette Gentile?

  And in a pretty sexist way, if you think about it, by telling people she weaponized her power, which was rare for a woman to have at this time anyway, and using it to gain an advantage with something as trivial as her beauty? Even worse, people took these allegations very seriously, enough that they actually arrested her in 1610. She was charged with 600 different murders. Damn. Right? Her family agreed to cancel the King's debt if it could spare her execution. Instead, she died imprisoned in a room in her castle in 1614 at the age of 54.

• 10:11Yvette Gentile?

  So depending on who you believe, Elizabeth might have been a heartless serial killer, or she could have been an innocent woman who spent the last years of her life falsely imprisoned. And if Elizabeth is a victim in this story, she probably had nothing to do with the Bloody Mary legend, which is why others say the legend may come from a completely different woman by the name of Mary Worth.

• 10:41Rasha Pecoraro?

  The problem with Mary Worth's story is that we know almost nothing about her. Some think she was a witch who lived during the Puritan era, which lasted in England from the 1550s until the late 1600s, and in New England into the 1700s. Now, I know, that's a long period of time. And unfortunately, I don't know exactly when, in that window, Mary was born or when she died. I'm also not sure where she lived, other than it was somewhere in the American colonies. But, the legend went something like this. She supposedly lured children to her home in the woods, then killed them when they arrived. Like, a real-life version of the witch from Hansel and Gretel.

• 11:27Rasha Pecoraro?

  Or, Baba Yaga, who we did a deep dive on in an earlier episode. It's one of my favorites. It's definitely worth giving it a listen if you haven't already.

• 11:38Rasha Pecoraro?

  Like Elizabeth, there are also stories that Mary bathed in the children's blood. Eventually, the local villagers figured out what she was doing. So they allegedly arrested her, convicted her of witchcraft and murder, and burned her at the stake. There's one detail about this story that just gives me pause. Because throughout American history, it was really rare to burn people at the stake. Even during the Salem witch trials, it was actually illegal to execute people that way in the colonies. Execution by burning was allowed in Spanish territory, though. But there's no definitive record of it ever happening in a case of witchcraft.

• 12:23Rasha Pecoraro?

  At least, not in the region that eventually became the United States. That may be why there's a very different version of the Mary Worth story. This one still says she was a witch, and very wicked. But almost every other detail is different. In this account, Mary was reportedly part of the reverse underground railroad, which was basically a network of people who lived in northern states before and during the Civil War, and who were pro-slavery.

• 12:57Yvette Gentile?

  I mean, y'all, this is a really difficult part of the story to tell, so just bear with me. They kidnapped people who were trying to escape from slavery and then send them back to the South. The version of the story says Mary lived in Wadsworth, Illinois. She pretended that she cared about abolition and freedom, which, obviously, she did not. But it was all to trick runaway enslaved people into coming into her home. And once they arrived, she'd hold them hostage and sell them back to their original captors. Or, if the price wasn't high enough,

• 13:40Yvette Gentile?

  she herself would torture them to death in a black magic ritual. Eventually, Mary's friends and neighbors realized what she was up to, so they broke into her house one night, and they killed her to punish her for what she had done. Now, again, two wrongs don't make a right, but what this woman was doing was pure evil.

• 14:04Rasha Pecoraro?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's so, so gross what she did. The problem is that there's no historical record of a Mary Worth in Wadsworth, Illinois. At least, no one with that name who lived there during the Civil War and died by mob justice. There's also no record of a Mary Worth being convicted or executed for witchcraft during the Puritan era, which means a lot of historians are doubtful about whether she existed at all. Instead, this anecdote might be more of a reflection on the times, sort of a commentary on the racial dynamics and injustices of that era,

• 14:48Rasha Pecoraro?

  a metaphor that evolved as the centuries passed. And if there was no Mary Worth, that also means she couldn't possibly be Bloody Mary.

• 15:00Yvette Gentile?

  But there's one historical figure who stands out from all the rest. Someone whose life and sins are very well documented. And a lot of people think there's a very strong and obvious connection between her and the Bloody Mary ritual. The very first true queen of England, Mary Tudor the First.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  And I'm Britt. And if you're on the edge of your seat, listening to this show, Crime Junkie needs to be your next listen.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Every Monday, I dive into a new true crime case that our reporting team has been on the ground looking into. From lesser-known disappearances to the most chilling cases hitting the headlines. And I'm gonna walk you through it the way I tell my best friend, because that's what I'm doing.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's me. And I'm right there with you as we listen together, react to every wild detail, and of course, I ask all the questions.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  And I'm gonna have the answers, because we have case files, we're talking to detectives and family members, and we're gonna stay focused on the facts.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  So if you're not already listening to Crime Junkie, what are you waiting for? There are over 300 episodes available right now.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  And you can listen to new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:26Yvette Gentile?

  According to an old legend turned sleepover game, an evil spirit named Bloody Mary will appear in your mirror if you recite a certain spell. Nobody's entirely sure where this game comes from, but some people think it might have something to do with England's Queen Mary Tudor the First. Mary's born in the year 1516, and she's the oldest surviving child of King Henry VIII.

• 16:54Rasha Pecoraro?

  The problem is that England has very sexist laws during her lifetime. So when her father dies, Mary's younger half-brother Edward VI inherits the throne, just because he's a man and she isn't. But then Edward VI dies in 1553 when Mary is 37 years old. He doesn't have any children, so by now there are no other male heirs. The late Edward VI had named his cousin Lady Jane Grey to become queen. He only named her that because she was Protestant, whereas his half-sister Mary was Catholic.

• 17:33Rasha Pecoraro?

  But when Lady Jane Grey is proclaimed queen, many of the people support Mary instead. And Mary rides triumphantly into London and takes power. She becomes the first queen to ever rule England on her own. I mean, sure, there were other queens before Mary, but they were all married to kings or advising their sons who were already kings. Mary's the first woman to wear the crown alone, without a husband or without a son to give her legitimacy. As you can imagine, this makes Mary very controversial. Lots of people in the 1500s believe that women aren't cut out for politics.

• 18:17Rasha Pecoraro?

  So she's under immense pressure to be the best queen she can possibly be. Which means that right off the bat, she tries to identify big problems that she can solve to basically make herself look good, like a religious crisis that's currently raging throughout England. When Mary was born, the country's official religion was Catholicism. But now in 1553, a ton of English people have converted to Protestantism. It's getting to a point where Protestants almost outnumber Catholics. Mary figures that if she can stop that from happening and unite the nation under the Catholic Church again,

• 19:01Rasha Pecoraro?

  she'll be doing God's work. I mean, this is her first goal. Second, she needs to get married and give birth to a son who'll inherit the throne after she's long gone. Which might be trickier than it sounds. Keep in mind, Mary is 37, unmarried, and childless. For some people, it can be difficult to get pregnant in your late 30s today. Think how much harder it was before hormone therapy, ovulation trackers, or a strong medical understanding of reproductive health. So, Mary doesn't waste any time. Just one year after she becomes queen in July of 1554,

• 19:44Rasha Pecoraro?

  Mary walks down the aisle with a man named Philip of Spain. He's the oldest son of the King of Spain and next in line for that throne once his father dies. Mary only met Philip two days before her wedding, and he's a lot younger than her. He's in his late 20s while she's now 38. Even though Mary doesn't really know this guy, she falls for him, and she falls for him hard. As far as anyone can tell, Philip doesn't exactly feel the same way about his new bride. But, he knows that he does have a duty to uphold. So he and Mary get to work on trying to have a baby. In the meantime, she focuses on her other goal:

• 20:27Rasha Pecoraro?

  making England a Catholic nation. She sends out orders for roughly 300 Protestants to be arrested and publicly executed. And we're not just talking about any kind of execution. They're publicly burned alive at the stake. But, that's by design. Mary wants to basically scare the surviving Protestants into converting. So in her mind, the more sickening that these deaths are, the more likely it is that people will return to the Catholic Church.

• 21:02Yvette Gentile?

  That's just horrible. It's so gross.

• 21:05Rasha Pecoraro?

  You know, when I was researching this story, I came across the account of one particular execution. And this, I just gotta say, left me speechless. And I've got to warn you guys, this... This is so gruesome and shocking, and sadly, it is 100% true. And I think it's worth covering just to show how brutal these deaths are. But if you're disturbed by stories of violence, including violence against children, you might want to skip ahead about one minute.

• 21:36Yvette Gentile?

  So, one of Mary's condemned victims is a woman who's nine months pregnant, but the executioners aren't willing to wait and let her give birth. They are all too willing to kill both her and her unborn child. But once the woman's standing at the stake, with all of this wood piled up beneath her feet, the stress of the situation makes her go into labor. Even then, the guards don't wait. They still light the platform on fire. And supposedly, the baby is born in the flames, dying right beside its mother.

• 22:19Rasha Pecoraro?

  That story absolutely breaks my heart, and I'm not the only one. Because once everyone hears what Mary did, her plan backfires. The more people hear about her reign of terror, the more they hate her. Instead of scaring people into converting to Catholicism, Mary makes herself public enemy number one. People give her the nickname of Bloody Mary. And she already had to stop an uprising of the Protestant Rebellion after she announced her plans to marry a Catholic. Now, Mary knows there's only one way for her to save her reputation and avoid an overthrow. She has to get pregnant.

• 23:03Rasha Pecoraro?

  If she can give birth to a son and a future king, it might buy her some time. Because her enemies will know that a man will take over as soon as she's out of the way. And her harshest critics might view her more positively if they know she has given them an heir. But this isn't a totally new idea. Mary has been trying to get pregnant for quite some time now. In fact, just two months after her wedding, Mary made a public announcement saying she was pregnant.

• 23:38Rasha Pecoraro?

  Here's what's interesting. In 1554, it's actually considered inappropriate for a doctor to give a queen a gynecological exam. So it's just more of that sexist thinking. The idea is that there's something dirty or sinful about reproductive health. And queens are held to especially high standards. So they in particular shouldn't let anyone see what's going on down there between their legs, not even medical professionals. But frankly, even if Mary were to go to a doctor, they wouldn't be able to tell her much. Because reliable pregnancy tests don't exist in the 16th century.

• 24:22Rasha Pecoraro?

  The point being is that nobody's 100% sure if Mary's really pregnant or not. And the evidence in support of her claim is at best flimsy. Either that, or she wants a baby so bad she's imagining her symptoms. But Mary still insists it's real. And in late March of 1555, when she's now 39 years old, she announces that she's not going to appear in public anymore. From then on, she spends all day, every day, shut in her bedroom with just a few trusted female hands. She says she'll come out again once the child is born. Supposedly, Mary's about seven and a half

• 25:06Rasha Pecoraro?

  months along at this point. But her baby bump isn't that big, so that's kind of hard to believe. Sure enough, her due date arrives on May 9th, but Mary doesn't go into labor. There's no baby. She tells everyone that she must have just gotten her dates mixed up. Maybe the child was conceived a month later than she originally thought, which would put her due date in early June. Which, okay. I can see how it can be tricky to nail down a timeline when you don't have a trained medical professional involved.

• 25:40Rasha Pecoraro?

  Except all of June goes by with no royal heir. Then all of July goes by.

• 25:48Yvette Gentile?

  So you can imagine rumors are really flying. Some people claim that Mary had a miscarriage or a stillbirth, and now she's trying to cover it up. Others say she was never pregnant to begin with. There are even claims that she might try to kidnap someone else's baby, then try to pass it off as her own. So in August, Mary finally comes out of her bedroom and agrees to regularly go out in public again. Still, she doesn't have a baby, and she doesn't even try to explain its absence. Nobody ever says whether the child was born, if the pregnancy was real, nada.

• 26:31Yvette Gentile?

  It's like the royal family hopes that if they just avoid talking about the situation, everyone will forget about it.

• 26:39Rasha Pecoraro?

  Except by now, one thing is clear. Mary is more desperate than ever to get pregnant. She needs to prove she's not a liar, a faker, or a con artist. Two years later, in 1557, she announces that she's expecting again. This time, she's extra sure of it because she's experiencing other symptoms too. We don't know exactly what they are because once again, these sorts of things are considered unmentionable in 16th century England. So they're not very clearly documented. But sadly, it's like history is repeating itself because once again, Mary's not really pregnant.

• 27:21Rasha Pecoraro?

  Instead, she's gone into menopause at the age of 41. It takes her a while to accept this fact, but by October of 1558, Mary realizes it's not going to happen for her. She's not going to get pregnant. She's heartbroken and enraged that she failed to produce an heir. Some reports say she's so angry that she marches through the palace, breaking every single mirror so she doesn't have to look at herself anymore.

• 27:54Yvette Gentile?

  And sadly, that's one of the last things she ever does. Mary dies the following month of unconfirmed causes. Perhaps it was the influenza epidemic that was raging through London at the time. She's 42 years old, only five of which were spent on the throne as queen.

• 28:15Rasha Pecoraro?

  So you can probably see why people connect the story of Mary the First and Bloody Mary. Some people think Queen Mary wanted to be a mother so badly that her ghost can be summoned by saying, "I have your baby." She literally comes to your mirror to look for the child she never had. And maybe the blood on her clothes is the blood of all of the innocent people she had executed. And the mirror connection makes total sense, too, because she supposedly destroyed a ton of mirrors shortly before her death.

• 28:55Rasha Pecoraro?

  And now, ironically, she's doomed to spend her afterlife inside of them.

• 29:02Yvette Gentile?

  Legend says that she might be cursed because of the violent way she lived her life. And it sounds like Bloody Mary is still angry and aggressive to this day. In fact, there are a few people who say they have successfully summoned her. And that, my friends, is how legends are born.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  And I'm Britt. And if you're on the edge of your seat listening to this show, Crime Junkie needs to be your next listen.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Every Monday, I dive into a new true crime case that our reporting team has been on the ground looking into. From lesser-known disappearances to the most chilling cases hitting the headlines. And I'm going to walk you through it the way-

• 29:49Rasha Pecoraro?

  I tell my best friend because that's what I'm doing.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's me. And I'm right there with you as we listen together, react to every wild detail, and of course, I ask all the questions.

• 29:59Rasha Pecoraro?

  And I'm gonna have the answers because we have case files. We're talking to detectives and family members, and we're gonna stay focused on the facts.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  So if you're not already listening to Crime Junkie, what are you waiting for? There are over 300 episodes available right now.

• 30:13Rasha Pecoraro?

  And you can listen to new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:24Rasha Pecoraro?

  According to legend, you can summon the spirit of Queen Mary Tudor I in your mirror by simply repeating the words, Bloody Mary, a certain amount of times. But I've gotta say, lots of people have followed the ritual perfectly, only for nothing to happen. Or they'll think that they saw something in the mirror, but it's hard to say for sure if it's real or if it's all in their head. I mean, it's totally easy to assume that Bloody Mary is nothing more than just a paranormal ritual type of game. Except there's one account I found online that sounds pretty damn convincing. As in, I don't think this person imagined it or dreamed about their encounter.

• 31:09Rasha Pecoraro?

  And of course, I know, people can make all kinds of claims up online with no evidence to back them up. But I still think this is worth covering. The story comes from someone named Carmen. But I don't know much about her identity beyond her first name and that this happened when she was just nine years old. Like a lot of other young girls, Carmen hears the story of Bloody Mary, and she wants to prove that she's not afraid of urban legends. So whenever she has friends over or if she's at their houses, Carmen shows off just how brave she is by going into the bathroom alone and playing Bloody Mary. And nothing ever happens. The spirit doesn't appear.

• 31:54Rasha Pecoraro?

  No one tries to hurt Carmen, nothing. So naturally, she decides that the game is just all make believe. There's no such thing as Bloody Mary, and there's nothing to be scared of at all. At least, not until one particular night, when she gets this impulse to play Bloody Mary at home, alone.

• 32:17Rasha Pecoraro?

  Like usual, she stands in front of the mirror. Then she says Bloody Mary over and over again. Now Carmen doesn't stick around very long to see if anything appears. Instead, she just heads off to bed. Fast forward to a few hours later, at about 4:00 AM. By this point, Carmen is fast asleep, until a noise wakes her up. It's the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Carmen doesn't immediately connect the noise with the Bloody Mary game she just played. Remember, she doesn't believe that Bloody Mary is real. Instead, she figures that it's just one of her parents.

• 33:00Rasha Pecoraro?

  They've gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom or get a drink of water. Carmen listens as the sounds from whoever it is get closer and closer, almost to the second-floor landing. Then, before the person makes it to the top of the stairs, they turn around and head back down again. They almost get to the bottom of the stairs, and then, once more, they head back up. Carmen cannot make sense of it. She eventually climbs out of bed, creeps into the hallway, and makes her way to her parents' bedroom. When she pushes the door open, she sees her mom and dad are both fast asleep.

• 33:44Rasha Pecoraro?

  So neither of them are the ones making the noises. So Carmen's next move is to check the house out and see if anyone's there. I don't know if I would be that brave. I have to imagine that her heart is racing as she gets closer and closer to the steps. But finally, she's at the top of the stairwell, peering down it. And there's nothing. That's when Carmen goes back into her room, climbs into bed, and tries to go back to sleep. Except, the moment her light shuts off, she hears it again. The footsteps are back.

• 34:25Rasha Pecoraro?

  They've made it up the stairs now, and they're headed toward her room. At this point, Carmen knows she's definitely not dreaming. She is wide awake. She's also way too scared to get out of bed and investigate a second time. Instead, she pulls the blankets up over her head and prays that whatever it is doesn't come into her room. Unfortunately, her prayers go unanswered. Because while Carmen is still in bed, terrified out of her mind, she feels a hand grabbing her. The hand takes her arm and presses it against the wall.

• 35:10Rasha Pecoraro?

  And Carmen can't shake it off or run away. Because in that moment, her entire body is paralyzed. Carmen seemingly shakes off that sensation and somehow falls back to sleep that night, maybe thinking it was all just a dream. But the next morning, when she wakes up, she notices a dent in her wall. It's in the exact same spot where her hand hit it the night before. And Carmen can't help but think that when she did the ritual in the bathroom, she must have invited the spirit

• 35:53Rasha Pecoraro?

  of Bloody Mary into her home.

• 35:57Yvette Gentile?

  Regardless of whether or not it was the spirit of Bloody Mary, Carmen's story is definitely, I gotta say, entertaining and hard to explain if it's true. Though, I will say, there might be some, I don't know, let's just say, scientific explanation behind what others see when they play the game. Because it turns out a bunch of researchers were able to summon Bloody Mary in controlled laboratory conditions. I mean, sort of. And unlike Carmen's account, it's all documented and backed up by evidence.

• 36:36Yvette Gentile?

  Around 2009 or so, an Italian psychological researcher named Giovanni Caputo gets 50 test subjects together. Then, one by one, each of them goes into a dark room and has to sit there for 10 minutes. They don't actually say Bloody Mary, or "I have your baby," or anything like that. The only requirement is that they spend those 10 minutes staring at the mirror with the lights off. But even though they're not actually summoning the spirit, 24 of those test subjects come out of the bathroom, and they say they saw a monster appear in the mirror. On top of that, 33 of them, or 2/3 of the study participants,

• 37:21Yvette Gentile?

  say at first, they saw their own reflection. But as the minutes ticked by, their features became warped and distorted, like they were watching themselves turn into someone new. Some people even swore up and down that an old woman appeared. Except Giovanni and other scientists don't see this as proof that evil spirits exist. Instead, they believe Bloody Mary might be a psychological phenomenon. Here's how it works. Your brain is constantly processing the information it gets from your eyes. It needs to figure out what you're looking at, and what's actually important,

• 38:05Yvette Gentile?

  and what's worth focusing on. If you don't get a very good look at something, your subconscious mind will try to fill in the gaps. So here's an example. Imagine you're walking through an apple orchard in the late fall, and you see a flash of something red in a tree. You don't know exactly what you saw, but your brain automatically goes to, "Apples are red, so it's an apple tree. Therefore, it was an apple." And you become utterly convinced that you definitely saw a ripe Honeycrisp apple. Sometimes, the system works exactly how it's supposed to. If you pause for a second and look,

• 38:47Yvette Gentile?

  you might find a juicy red apple in the tree, right where you thought it would be. But if it ends up being a red balloon that's caught in the branches, you could think, "How did I ever mistake this for a fruit?"

• 39:02Yvette Gentile?

  I mean, the same thing might happen if you're looking in a mirror in a dark room for a long period of time. You just see well enough to know you're staring at a face. But if your subconscious brain doesn't realize it's your face, it might trick you into thinking you're seeing someone else. Add a little dose of fear because you're doing a scary ritual late at night in a dark bathroom, and the face may become something really frightening, like a monster or even Bloody Mary.

• 39:40Rasha Pecoraro?

  Now, I can see that. I totally get that theory. But the problem is, so many Bloody Mary stories say she appears with a baby in her arms. That seems like a very specific detail for people to hallucinate. Not to mention, Bloody Mary has been said to attack or even kill the people who summon her. I mean, if there are any survivors of Bloody Mary assaults out there, it would be hard to explain that away as an optical illusion, right? And BTW, if you have been attacked by Bloody Mary or had what you think is a very real encounter with her,

• 40:21Rasha Pecoraro?

  please, please, please, please, reach out to us on social media @SoSupernaturalPod. We need to hear your stories.

• 40:30Yvette Gentile?

  All that to say, I do believe there are forces in this world that can't be explained away through science. And who knows? Maybe the legend of Bloody Mary is one of them. Well, some people believe that the modern day ritual is based on a different but very real magic spell, one that people used to cast back in the 1700s. As far as anyone can tell, the spell worked, sort of like this. A young unmarried woman must light a candle after dark. She holds it in one hand and a mirror in the other. She then walks up a staircase backward while looking at her reflection.

• 41:15Yvette Gentile?

  As she goes, she'll see a second face appear in the mirror beside her own. Eventually, it will become recognizable as her future husband. And she'll know who she's destined to marry. But if the woman is never going to get married, a skull will form instead, signaling that she will die before ever walking down the aisle. And I know, that sounds very different from the Bloody Mary ritual. There's no chanting, no shuddering yourself in a bathroom, and no attacks from evil spirits. But lots of people believe that over the course of centuries,

• 41:58Yvette Gentile?

  this spell got misremembered and misinterpreted, basically like a game of telephone. And eventually, it became the sleepover game we all know about today.

• 42:10Rasha Pecoraro?

  I think it is very possible that Bloody Mary is based on something old, powerful, and difficult to understand. She could be all that remains of a forgotten bit of witchcraft. She could be the angry spirit of a violent queen who executed her own pregnant citizens to cement her power. Or she could be this metaphor for sexism and how people used to see women, especially those who wielded power as a threat to society. But what's fascinating to me is how that legend has evolved. Because today, she almost represents something more primal,

• 42:54Rasha Pecoraro?

  like our instinctive fear of transformation.

• 42:59Yvette Gentile?

  A lot of experts think the Bloody Mary game is really popular among teenage girls because it functions as a metaphor for puberty, for an entryway into womanhood.

• 43:13Yvette Gentile?

  She appears in the mirror because that's where girls are constantly taught to look and judge themselves. We all know this. We all did it. We all still do it. She's covered in blood to represent their menstrual cycle. And sometimes she shows up with the baby to represent the potential and fear of motherhood. A lot of people look at this game as a rite of passage. Think about it. A girl or a group of girls daring to face the unknown, even when it's terrifying. Saying her name out loud becomes a ritual of bravery, of defiance. It's a way for girls to confront their fears about growing up,

• 43:57Yvette Gentile?

  the changes their bodies are going through, and about how the world sees them. It's a way to take back control. So maybe Bloody Mary is more than just a legend. Maybe she's a symbol of what it means to grow into your own power.

• 44:30Yvette Gentile?

  This is So Supernatural, an AudioChuck original, produced by Crime House. You can connect with us on Instagram at So Supernatural Pod and visit our website at sosupernaturalpodcast.com. Join Yvette and me next Friday for an all-new episode.

• 44:50Yvette Gentile?

  I think Chuck would approve.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  When the nights grow longer, the shadows start to stir, and that can only mean one thing: Full Body Chills is back. This season, step inside original tales where every doorway leads somewhere darker, every stranger carries a secret, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Each story takes you somewhere new, but be careful. You never know what might follow you home. So gather around, listen close, and stream Full Body Chills wherever you get your podcasts.