Bloody Mary

Mirrors have been considered dangerous for a very long time.

Not just mirrors specifically. Any reflective surface. Water. Polished bronze. A very still lake on a windless evening. The ancient Greeks called it catoptromancy, which is the practice of divination by mirror, and they took it seriously enough to give it a twelve-letter name.

The Romans did it too. You would gaze into the reflection and ask questions, and if you were properly trained you would see answers. The answers were usually about the harvest or about wars or about whether a specific person was going to die, because that is what people worried about in the ancient world and also in every subsequent world.

The idea behind all of it is consistent across cultures: the reflection is not quite you. It is a copy. A close copy, a very convincing copy, but it lives on the other side of the surface and it might, if certain conditions are met, show you things the world does not ordinarily show.

Medieval European traditions held that mirrors were windows. Not to other rooms. To other places. The kind of places you would rather stay on the correct side of.

There was a reason people covered mirrors in houses of mourning. It was not about vanity. It was about the soul of the newly dead, which was understood to be confused and mobile, and a mirror left uncovered was an invitation.

This is the tradition that eventually, through some number of centuries and a series of steps nobody fully traced, ended up at your friend's slumber party in 1987 with a birthday candle and a bathroom that smelled like raspberry shampoo.

One theory about Bloody Mary is that she is Mary I of England. Queen Mary. Daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

Mary Tudor was given the nickname Bloody Mary by her Protestant enemies after her death, because during her five-year reign she executed approximately 280 Protestants for heresy. This was considered, even by the standards of sixteenth century European monarchy, a notable number.

She also suffered multiple phantom pregnancies, which are exactly what they sound like: the body performing the experience of pregnancy, in full, with no baby at the end. It happened to Mary at least twice. The first time, she told her court she was pregnant, and there was celebration, and she waited, and no child came. The second time was the same.

This is a thing that happened to her body while she was trying to run a country and manage a husband who kept leaving and execute heretics and generally keep England from falling apart. She was doing a lot.

Mary died in 1558, probably of influenza or cancer, possibly of both, at age forty-two. She is not remembered kindly. She is remembered as Bloody Mary.

Whether this particular Mary is the one in the mirror: unclear. The name appeared in connection with the mirror ritual at some point and stuck, but the historical Mary I was not associated with mirrors in any documented tradition from her era. She just had the right name and a grim enough history to inherit the legend.

This is how folklore works. It finds the available name and moves in.

There is a second candidate.

Mary Worth. Sometimes called Mary Whales, or Mary Johnson, or simply 'the witch.' She does not have a documented historical identity the way Queen Mary I does. She is more like a shape that the story made to hold itself together.

In some versions of the legend, Mary Worth was a witch who was killed, often burned, often in the colonial American era. Her spirit is angry. She lives in mirrors because mirrors are liminal, which is a word that means in-between, and the in-between is where angry dead witches prefer to live.

In other versions, she was a woman who practiced the mirror-gazing ritual herself and looked too long and saw something she could not unsee, and now she is on the other side looking back at whoever is looking in.

In the most elaborate versions, she is both: a woman who knew too much, was punished for it, and now has an eternity to make the acquaintance of children who think it would be fun to say her name three times.

None of this is documented. There is no historical Mary Worth who fits the description. Researchers have looked. What they found instead is a pattern: every culture that has a mirror divination tradition also develops a specific entity associated with the mirror. A dangerous one. A named one.

The name changes. The entity does not.

This tells you something either about mirrors or about human beings or possibly about both.

There is a scientific explanation for what happens when you stare into a mirror in the dark.

It is called Troxler's fading, and also facial distortion effect in dim lighting, and what it means is: your brain gets bored.

Your brain is very good at filtering out things that stay the same. If something does not change, your brain gradually stops paying attention to it and fills in the blanks with its best guess. In normal lighting, there is enough information coming in to keep this from being a problem. In very dim lighting, with a candle, staring at your own face, which is staying the same, and which your brain has been looking at your whole life and is somewhat tired of: the filtering kicks in.

Your features start to look different. They shift. They blur at the edges. Your nose moves. Your eyes go strange. If you are in a group of people, which you usually are when playing this game because doing it alone would be extremely silly, the other faces sometimes merge with yours in the reflection.

Some people see monsters. Some see old people. Some see strangers.

This is your own face. Your brain is just rendering it incorrectly because you have been staring for too long.

The reason this explanation does not actually make people feel better: it means the terrifying face in the mirror is you. The thing looking back is you. A wrong version, a different version, a version your brain assembled from the parts it had on hand.

Somehow that is worse than the ghost.

The Bloody Mary game has been documented at American slumber parties since at least the early 1970s. It spread through children the way things spread through children: by word of mouth, slightly wrong, to the next kid in line.

Researchers who study folklore have found versions of it in every region of the United States and throughout Europe. The rules are slightly different everywhere. The name varies. The expected outcome varies. What does not vary is the basic structure: go somewhere dark, face the mirror, say the name, see what happens.

Children play it for the same reason people have always stared into mirrors in the dark. Not because they believe something is there. Not exactly. More because there is a line between the world you can explain and the world you cannot, and the mirror in the dark is right on that line, and something in the brain likes to stand at the edge and look over.

You probably played this game. Or you were invited to play it and you did not, which means you stood outside the bathroom door and listened, and you watched the candle flicker under the gap, and you waited.

That waiting is part of it. The game does not require a ghost. The game requires the possibility of a ghost, which is a different and more durable thing.

Possibility does not fade. Possibility does not require explanation. Possibility just sits in the dark with the candle and waits for you to come back.

So.

Shall we find a bathroom?