Bloody Mary

The legend of the Bloody Mary game derives from three possible sources. One source is Queen Mary I of England, or “Blood Mary.” She got that moniker the hard-won way, ordering hundreds of Protestants burned at the stake. At first, she was only trying to scare them. You know…a little “look what happens to the neighbors when you don’t practice Catholicism” sort of lesson. But the bloodshed only made Protestants ornerier and more determined to practice their religion. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, was later forced to clean up the mess and keep a tense peace.

Mary Tudor, 1554; Antonis Mor, Public Domain, Via Wikimedia Commons

Another possible source is the equally tragic Mary, Queen of Scots—cousin of Elizabeth I. Mary was foolish enough to lay claim to the English crown while it was still sitting firmly on Elizabeth’s head. Mary’s second husband, her cousin Henry Stewart, along with Protestant nobles, stabbed Mary’s Catholic secretary 56 times. Mary was then allegedly involved in Stewart’s murder. After Mary was forced to abdicate her throne to her infant son after being abducted by her next husband, James Hepburn, who was a suspect in Stewart’s murder, she fled to seek sanctuary with Elizabeth I. Elizabeth then had her arrested rather than offer her sanctuary. Elizabeth imprisoned her for 18 years. Mary got bored, plotted to overthrow and assassinate Elizabeth, and was executed for treason.

The third source might be the most probable since it was, according to local legend, directly tied to witchcraft. In the 1860s, Mary Worth led a reverse underground railroad north of Chicago. Mary would lure unsuspecting runaway enslaved people to her home under false pretenses and then collect her bounty once she sent them back to enslavement in the South. Rumors abounded that Mary was practicing the dark arts, and worse—using herbal medicines, sacrificing animals, and torturing and killing enslaved people for rituals. The townsfolk eventually grew tired of her machinations and lynched her. Other accounts claim she was burned alive. However, there’s not a single newspaper record of a woman burned alive as a witch during this time, and that is the kind of story that makes the local paper. But whether she’s Bloody Mary, Mary Worth, Mary Whales, or someone else, the real reason for the appearance of her spooky apparition isn’t due to spirits, but science—the Troxler effect.

The Troxler effect is an optical illusion in which fixating on one portion of an image for an extended time causes it to fade or distort. The phenomenon happens because our brains have adapted to filter out unnecessary information. In one study, researchers tested the Troxler effect by having participants stare into a mirror in dim lighting for 10 minutes. About 66 percent of participants saw their faces deform, 28 percent saw an unknown person, and 48 percent saw monsters in the mirror.

Those results would make any self-conscious teen think twice before taking another bathroom selfie.

Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board

This game begins with the cheery exercise of choosing someone to die. The chosen corpse lies on the floor, prone, encircled by each of her friends. Each girl then puts two fingers under the supposed dead girl and tries to lift her with only delicate fingers. Chanting helps. The one I remember goes like this:

“She’s looking pale.
She’s looking worse.
She’s dying.
She’s dead.
Light as a feather, stiff as a board.”

It’s a pretty morose game. Unsurprisingly, it has an equally dark past. In 1665, diarist Samuel Pepys witnessed the ritual enacted during a plague outbreak. He described one instance where four little girls each placed one finger under a boy pretending to be dead. The girls each whispered into each other’s ears and then levitated the boy with each of their four tiny fingers.

Still from The Craft depicting the game Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, 1996; Maximum Film/Alam

Of course, Pepys believed it was a parlor trick, but the real magic was in physics. If the person playing dead stayed still enough, their body weight would be evenly distributed between the people lifting. For example, with an 80-pound boy, the girls would only have to lift 20 pounds with each of their fingers—close to the weight of most childrens’ backpacks today.

Although young girls are not exactly known for their grip strength, fingers are stronger than they appear. Steve Keeler (U.K.) holds the world record for lifting with one finger—129.50 kg (285.49 lb). And strongman Louis Cyr could lift 500 pounds with one finger.

Physics aside, the game must have also assuaged fears during plague outbreaks. Although we have few records of how children responded to plague deaths, we can imagine that making a pretend dead person levitate off the ground must have felt empowering during such a powerless period. And who needs drugs or alcohol when you can levitate your friends?

Ouija Board

Communing with the dead didn’t die with spiritualism’s raps and knocking. It just took on a more utilitarian spin. No one wanted to sit around a table waiting for spirits to knock out a Morse code message. Even 19th-century people had better things to do. Seeing an untapped market for convening with the dead quicker, Charles Kennard started the Kennard Novelty Company with investor Elijah Bond, a local attorney, Col. Washington Bowie, and medium Helen Peters. Unfortunately, the crew ran into some snafus when trying to patent their new “talking board” invention.

Now, we have all been to that sleepover where everyone accuses the other person of moving the planchette—the pointer thingy that picks the letters. Well, Kennard had the same problem. To prove that the Ouija board worked, he had to demo it to the chief patent officer.

Legend has it that no one knew the chief patent officer’s name but the helpful spirit who spelled it out. And that was proof enough that their “toy or game” was the real deal.
On February 10, 1891, the Kennard Novelty Company was awarded a patent for the first Ouija board.

Vintage illustration depicting Ouija board players

For another century, the Ouija board was good, old-fashioned fun for the whole family. It provided comfort to those who had lost loved ones and a way for bored teens to turn
ghosts into pen pals. All that changed in 1973, however, with the movie release that would give teens nightmares during sleepovers for generations—The Exorcist.

In this movie, a young girl named Regan becomes possessed by a demon after innocently playing with her Ouija board. A lot of levitating and head spinning follows. Suddenly, this child’s toy was not so childish. The devil had come to collect and turn America’s toy into a talisman of evil.

Today, Ouija boards continue to terrify us because they work. But it’s not spirits making the planchette move. It’s the ideomotor effect—our unconscious, involuntary physical movements. When you ask the board questions, your hand moves the planchette to spell out the answers in words, numbers, yes, or no. (Or, if you have a grumpy spirit,
“goodbye.”) Your brain isn’t aware of these movements. In other words, when we think about an action, our hand follows that action.

These involuntary movements make the Ouija board work best for kids. When a subject believes the planchette is moving by itself, it is more moveable. Consequently, as the board begins to spell out the first letters of a word, our minds fill in the rest, and the hand follows. Our subconscious often gives the answer we most hope for or fear.

In essence, the Ouija board predicts our anxiety levels. And those levels are often high at your typical sleepover. But aside from anxiety levels, Ouija also taps into a part of our brains we often ignore—our intuition. In one study, blindfolded participants were asked trivia questions. In one round, they answered questions without help from their spirit guides. In the next round, the participants used Ouija to answer the questions. During the study, the blindfolded participants believed their teammate was moving the planchette with them when they were moving it themselves. The researchers found the participants got more questions right when using the Ouija board than when not.

So, when sleepless girls across America huddled around Ouija boards asking questions about their futures, the Ouija probably gave them better answers than their friends ever could. Or perhaps the board game gave them the answers friends could not speak out loud.

Top photo: Dialog Center Images, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I NEVER WANTED to meet Mary. Sure, I had heard about her. We had all heard about her. My teenage friends called her “Bloody Mary,” “Mary Worth,” or “the Witch Mary.” She passed through mirrors on mischievous nights when girlish giggles and flickering red candles tempted her out of the darkness. But during one childhood slumber party, my 11-year-old girlfriends and I took turns gazing into the bathroom mirror while chanting, “Mary Worth. Mary Worth. Mary Worth. I believe in you, Mary Worth.”

I really did not believe in Mary Worth, so I volunteered to go first. I was the most incredulous of our clan and the least likely to cower in a dimly lit bathroom with only a candle illuminating my craven reflection. Perhaps Mary sensed my fearlessness, too. Because after 10 minutes of chanting, spinning, sweating, and trying to sound badass, a murky image appeared in the mirror. When I narrowed my eyes, I saw her face, pale and turgid, with long dark hair and eyes blackened by malevolence. I screamed loud enough to shatter every mirror in the house. Hindsight bias might have distorted some of these memories, but I know what I saw. Something appeared in the mirror. But what I remember most about that terrifying moment was my girlfriends gathering around me and holding my shaking body. We laughed about it later. And we never played that damn devil’s game again.

Of course, young girls love to freak each other out. And chances are, you played Bloody Mary at your girlhood sleepover, too. Other popular and creepy games involved levitation (aka Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board), séances (or Ouija board), or MASH (“mansion, apartment, shack, house”). What may surprise you, however, is that your mother, grandmother, and possibly your great-grandmother likely played the same games at their sleepovers, passing them down from generation to generation like a distorted “telephone” game. But while slumber party music, etiquette, food, and sleepwear may change over the decades, the emotions do not.

Confronting fear—especially fear of the supernatural—is an adolescent rite of passage. Psychologists refer to these ages between 9 and 12 as the “Robinson ages”—the awkward liminal stage when children crave and fear danger. This testing period ripens our imagination with creative storytelling and risky dares that heighten a child’s sense of identity. And let’s face it, it’s far easier to stare at mirror ghosts while we have the support of our friends.

Unfortunately, at times, this sort of supernatural experimentation has had terrible consequences. In 1692, in Salem, MA, several young girls held nightly séances before laying their heads to rest. Those nightly séances led to over 200 people being accused of witchcraft, of which 20 were executed and 5 died in prison in what is known today as the Salem Witch Trials. Many scholars have posited that the girls’ claims of demonic possession were a way for disenfranchised teens to rebel. It makes sense. If you were a woman growing up in Salem, you wouldn’t have had any more rights than a milk cow. Sowing discord in a sleepy New England farm town would allow a young girl to plant roots in the patriarchy that starved her of light.

FOX SISTERS, PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A few centuries later, in 1848, 11- and 14-year-old sisters Kate and Maggie Fox convinced their family they could speak with spirits by rapping a Morse code with the great beyond. Their sleepless high jinks spawned a cult follow- ing of knockers communicating with the dead and also helped give rise to the Spiritualist movement. (After be- coming national celebrities, the sisters admitted that the entire spectacle was a hoax.) But while the Fox sisters may have brought the occult to the masses, kids have toyed with the supernatural for thousands of years. For example, folklorist Bill Ellis writes: “Traditions surrounding Stone Age monuments… repeatedly allude to customs involving trips by courageous youths to challenge the power of the supernatural. Thus, we can trace a lengthy history of occult play activities like Ouija boards and séance rituals.” 

The History of Slumber Parties

While sleeping in the same room might seem innocuous today, it has fallen in and out of fashion throughout history. In medieval times, necessity required people to huddle together on the floors of drafty castle halls, with only straw-stuffed sacks and neighboring bodies for warmth. By the 18th century, beds became more luxurious. It might seem improper today, but in the 18th century, a woman’s bedroom was the place to greet visitors and have long intellectual discussions while sipping tea. Then the Victorians made bedrooms private and killed all the sleepover fun (at least with aristocratic children).

As cholera and tuberculosis ran rampant through nurseries, doctors recommended children have separate bedrooms to contain diseases. To the Victorians, sleeping was serious business, and only the undead stayed awake. For this reason, young women infected with tuberculosis were believed to be victims of vampires who fed on their blood while they slept. But the real reason why you won’t find many accounts of sleepovers before the 19th century is that sleepovers led to the scariest Victorian bugaboo—masturbation. Nineteenth-century American physician William Whitty Hall warned parents that boys and girls learned how to masturbate by co-sleeping. As a result, Hall condemned sleepovers because they caused children to “waste away the vigor and flesh and strength of the body.”

We can partly thank Sigmund Freud for girls getting their sleepovers back. Freud taught that masturbation was a part of childhood development and only problematic if a child did not outgrow it. One of the earliest references to slumber—or “bunking”— parties the way we know them today can be found in 1896. “A slumber party was given Monday night by Misses Taylor and Hawkins and was highly enjoyed by a party of seven,” the Marietta Daily Leader noted in a “Personal and Local” news item. Another reference appears the following year. “One of the novelties of the social season was a slumber party by the Kappa Gamma girls to their friends Thursday evening,” the Indianapolis Journal reported in a column dedicated to goings on at DePauw University.

COURTESY OF THE CHRIS HAIN COLLECTION

But these reports were rare—before 1900, only a very few mentions of “slumber parties” appeared in U.S. newspapers. By 1905, however, slumber parties had been mentioned in society columns 74 times. At first, folks found the phenomenon baffling. “A friend of ours who is not in society very deep wants to know what a slumber party is,” read an article in Mississippi’s Okolona Messenger of 1905. “He seems to have gotten the idea that the guests sit up all night with the hostess, and they talk and yawn and nod and gab and stretch their arms, and so on.” The paper attempted to set the record straight. “Our understanding of it is that people conduct themselves pretty much like people always do at a party, until late bedtime, when they go to bed in beds or on lounges or on palettes on the floor…and the next morning, a little before noon, they get up and eat breakfast, and then go home.” 

In the ensuing years, slumber parties stopped being a trend and became a tradition. Between 1911 and 1920, over 2,000 of them made it into newspapers. What actually took place at these early events is difficult to ascertain, although a big part of the action seems to have been the “midnight feast”—at which delicious treats were served during the witching hour. But here and there, a hint of darker goings-on can be found. 

For example, Wyoming’s Rawlins Republican of 1908 mentions a slumber party given by Miss Irene Daley at which fortune telling was one of the attendees’ activities. And Colorado’s Salida Mail newspaper recounted a 1909 sleepover where attendees told “awful ghost stories stored away in the memory of each girl, and which it is said they carried out in pantomine [sic] with the effect of frightening even themselves.” By 1920, other mystical activities begin to slip into these accounts. “Miss Olive Kay Waggener entertained with a slumber party in Warrington last Friday,” re- ported Florida’s Pensacola Journal. “The earliest part of the evening was spent in playing [card games], and as the midnight hour began to approach, the Ouija board was brought forth.” Sipping tea was out. Reading tea leaves was in.

COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Slumber Parties and the Supernatural

While there is little hard evidence about what exactly happened at these earliest slumber parties (no TikTok or Insta!), folklorists have documented the fact that creepy games have been played at girls’ sleepovers for at least the past 50 years, and the phenomenon has been subject to a vast amount of research. For folklorists such as Elizabeth Tucker, these occult activities are more than mere games—they rise to the level of “ritual.” In discussing the levitation game Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, Tucker writes: “As in many rituals, the order of events must be faithfully maintained, the tone must be solemn, and the outcome is expected to be something al- most miraculous.” But rather than simply recording these rituals, folklorists have tried to answer the most puzzling question: Why do young girls so commonly engage in occult activities at slumber parties?

Life Magazine Cover, 1945

Folklore scholar Alina Mansfield believes that slumber parties are not just rites of passage— they serve as particularly feminine rites of passage, marking the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Slumber parties, Mansfield writes, are “reminiscent of certain cross-cultural and historic initiation ceremonies or rituals, which, often in the case of females…[consist] of some form of enforced seclusion.” She finds parallels in traditions of the Indigenous American Hupa tribe, where young girls approaching puberty are sent to live in a special “moon lodge” where they ask their spiritual helpers for guidance and gaze into a “shell filled with water.” Could this be similar to a slumber party, complete with a version of Bloody Mary?

Another important connection for Mansfield between slumber party games and traditional puberty rituals is their dependence on “rhythmic and collaborative actions that may transport a cohort of friends into a state of trance.” For example, both Bloody Mary and Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board require those words to be chanted repeatedly. Even “the rhythmic spiral drawing used to divine in MASH” may have a transformative effect on the players, writes Mansfield.

SKYLARS CLUB, COURTESY OF MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

And above all, of course, there is the element of fear. Fear of the future. Fear of adulthood. And most importantly, fear of their changing bodies. One such bodily fear surrounds menstruation. Taking a more literal approach, researcher Alan Dundes posits that the Bloody Mary game serves the same purpose among American girls as puberty traditions in other cultures. Dundes notes the obvious connections: These rituals occur around the age when a girl first menstruates. They happen in a bathroom. And, of course, there is blood. 

These days, however, Bloody Mary is not just an American ghost. Ethnologist Petr Janecek notes that, through globalization, the same scary lady has made her way into Czech children’s folklore and appears as Krvavá Máří. In Sweden, she is known as Bloody Black Madame, White Ma- dame, Dirty Madame, and Creepy Madame. In Spain, girls must beckon Verónica. In Germany, she answers to Heilige Blutige Maria (Holy Bloody Mary). And in Russia, she is “the Queen of Spades.”

The End of an Era?

A few years ago, my teenage daughter returned from a sleepover, claiming she would “never sleep again.” Her friends had shared hyperbolic urban legends until the morning hours. For days she was afraid someone would steal her kidney while she slept. I was wary of ever allowing her to attend a slumber party again. I am not alone. The sleepover monsters under the bed today are much hairier than a hundred years ago. Before agreeing to a sleepover, parents must question the host about firearm security, vaccination status, access to online pornography, etc. There’s so much worry that the hashtag #nosleepovers has gone viral.

@sharon.a.life Replying to @marley._.spam1 #momlife #motherhood #sleepover #nosleepovers #childhoodtrauma ♬ original sound – Sharon.a.life

But keeping children home doesn’t necessarily keep them safe in the era of social media. And while confronting fear has always been a part of growing up, social media seems to have upped the ante, with users egging each other on to eat “chicken Nyquil” or swallow gobs of cinnamon.

Plus, the difference between facing the unknown alone or with a group is vast. When ghosts appear at sleepovers, friends wipe our sweaty brows and hold us close. Now, mirror ghosts have been replaced with social media mirrors. And the latter is always watching. Personally, I would rather take my chances with Bloody Mary, and my girlfriends.

Top photo by Sue Allen.