Short Stuff: Bloody Mary

In this edition of Short Stuff we may accidentally conjure a deadly spirt, so look out!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
and we're joined today by our resident ghost, Bloody Mary.
That's right, And we just did a weird thing and
recorded our ads first. So I just had the urge
to say, if you like Bloody Mary, you're gonna love
this Bloody Mary. Uh, you won't love Bloody Mary, because

(00:26):
that is a scary kid's game. It seems like a
lot of girls do this, but I know some boys
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

(00:47):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:32):
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

(01:52):
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

(02:13):
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

(02:34):
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

(02:57):
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

(03:18):
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,

(03:40):
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,

(04:00):
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

(04:22):
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

(04:43):
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

(05:04):
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

(05:25):
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,

(05:46):
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

(06:08):
of a little real science to this one too. Okay, Chuck,

(06:40):
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.

(07:02):
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?

(07:26):
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

(07:49):
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

(08:12):
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

(08:34):
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

(08:54):
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

(09:18):
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

(09:40):
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.

(10:02):
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

(10:24):
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

(10:44):
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

(11:06):
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

(11:30):
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,

(11:56):
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

(12:17):
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,

(12:38):
short stuff is out like a bat in the night.
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