Bloody Mary
/Bloody Mary: A sleepover myth? Or something much deeper? We discuss the mirror rituals of the past, the women who might have inspired the myth, and how modern Bloody Mary might have been a way of fighting against the patriarchy!
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of child endangerment/death, illness, death, torture, execution, racism, car accidents, religious persecution, pregnancy, warfare, misogyny, and patriarchy.
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Cast & Crew
- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin
- Editor: Bren Frederick
- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod
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About Us
Spirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.
Transcript
[theme]
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda.
JULIA: And I'm Julia. And Amanda, it's like officially summer now. I promise this time, it's not about gardening. It's not about something related to nature this time, but this episode is in my mind, summer coded, you know?
AMANDA: Okay. Tell me why.
JULIA: Summer really always kind of reminds me of sleepovers for some reason. I think if you weren't a camp kid, a lot of people ended up having sleepovers during the summer, because I don't know, your parents wanted you out of the house in some way or another. I'm not entirely sure.
AMANDA: They needed a break. Yeah, I went to my grandparents' house a lot. I sometimes did sleepovers with my cousins, and a few times we would camp in the backyard, by which I mean sleep in a tent, but use the inside bathroom, which honestly, slay. That's a great idea.
JULIA: That was just budget glamping is what you just described.
AMANDA: You're exactly right.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. I didn't go to a lot of sleepovers as a kid, or at least, I don't remember going to a lot of sleepovers as a kid. I don't know about you.
AMANDA: Only a couple. We were both, like, relatively, you know, enjoyed our own company kids. But I do remember—
JULIA: We were not popular. Let's just put that out there into the universe.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: We weren't popular kids in elementary school.
AMANDA: No.
JULIA: No.
AMANDA: Which you could probably just guess from, like, my whole thing.
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: But also, I remember once saying to my dad, like, "Dad, I don't know what to talk to them about. Like, what do I talk about?" And he's like, "I don't know. Like, boys." And I was like, "Ew."
JULIA: Ew. Why?
AMANDA: [1:57] I was— what do I do? But no, only a couple sleepovers that I can remember, but enough that I feel like I have a reference point as to my particular late '90s suburban American sleepover tradition.
JULIA: Yeah. And I think in a lot of ways, for a lot of children, especially in the United States, sleepovers are an interesting rite of passage. You sort of do things that you otherwise wouldn't do if you were just, like, hanging out at another person's home. There's something very forbidden or mysterious about sleeping in a house that isn't your house.
AMANDA: And then not a bedroom too, right? Like, often it'll be—
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: —maybe it's in some, you know, the kid's room. But if there's a group of you, if it's like a sleepover party, then, you know, you're gonna be in the basement, the living room, the den. Somewhere that is just, you know, using a sleeping bag, like it's new.
JULIA: Yeah. And I think because of that sort of mysterious, unknown environment, you are, as a child, more willing to take risks or to do things like truth or dare, or, in my mind, perhaps the creepiest thing that seems like a sleepover tradition to me at least, Bloody Mary.
AMANDA: I remember. We did Bloody Mary in the basement of my parents' house, in my dad's basement bathroom. Nothing happened, but I was excited.
JULIA: Yeah, exactly. And I know that you had a particular haunted feeling about that basement, because you had stairs where they didn't have backs and you thought—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —something would grab you.
AMANDA: Yeah. The worst of all-time.
JULIA: Now, I was a little freaked, as we have talked about on the podcast before. I don't remember doing Bloody Mary with other people at a party or a sleepover or anything. I do remember doing it by myself in my home bathroom at night.
AMANDA: Great.
JULIA: Which is really weird, creepy child behavior.
AMANDA: I love it. And the creepier the child, the cooler the adult is kind of what I have to say.
JULIA: You know what? I hope so. I hope so.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: I hope that's the case. I think that's maybe the case 80% of the time.
AMANDA: Well, Julia, you are in the majority in this one.
JULIA: Thank you. Thank you. For those of you who are unfamiliar with who or what Bloody Mary is in the context that we are talking about right now, it is a, I'll say legend, that if you chant the name Bloody Mary into a mirror a certain amount of times, this ghost or spirit of this supposed woman, the Bloody Mary will appear. Extremely creepy, weird behavior for young girls specifically. I didn't find a lot of research about boys doing this when they were growing up. If you were, like, assigned male at birth and did Bloody Mary at, I guess, sleepovers or anything like that, let me know. But it seems for the majority, for the most part, to be particularly a thing that young girls do/did.
AMANDA: And I don't know if it's a particularly Catholic thing either, because when you brought up, Julia, the idea of doing Bloody Mary for an episode, my first thought was like, "Is there enough there?" Because I just sort of assumed it was related in some way to the Virgin Mary. And I don't know, where you just, like, look in the mirror and then suddenly, there's a lady behind you. Somehow it is like spectral and ghostly and ornate, and has a sense of tradition that strikes me as all of the most fascinating parts of Catholicism to me, as a girl raised in the Catholic Church, thinking to myself, "God, there's gotta be more than this."
JULIA: You know what, Amanda? That's really interesting. Hold on to Catholic Virgin Mary for me until we get towards the end of this episode, please. Because I didn't consider that really. I saw it in passing, and I was like, "That's a weird stretch." But I do kind of want to talk about it in the context of something else we'll discuss later in the episode.
AMANDA: Hell yeah.
JULIA: Now, the question that always strikes me whenever we think about these weird and sort of creepy childhood traditions is, why?
AMANDA: Why we do that?
JULIA: Why? Where did Bloody Mary come from? And because this is Spirits Podcast, we are of course, going to dig into the who, the why, and the how.
AMANDA: Let's do it, baby. Creepy kid style.
JULIA: First thing that we have to talk about is divination.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: As you know we've talked about various different forms of divination, and there are so many different ways to decipher the future. We have everything from reading the behavior of birds, which is augury. We have reading cards like tarot, which is Cartomancy. We have reading the sprouts of onions, which is Chronomancy.
AMANDA: Incredible.
JULIA: What we're going to talk about today, though, is catoptromancy or captromancy, which is divination using a mirror.
AMANDA: New drag king name unlocked.
JULIA: Ooh, okay. All right.
AMANDA: I love this. Like man, like M-A-N, you know? Mancy.
JULIA: Yeah. Like mancy. Yeah.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: I'm into that. I like that. So this divination practice dates back to several ancient societies. We go from Egypt to Greece and Rome, also in ancient China and ancient India as well. So for example, in Hinduism, mirrors are often referenced as having the ability to see into the past, the present, and the future, and are featured in the epic poem as doing such, which is the Mahabharata. In ancient China, it was believed that mirrors could be used to see into one's soul and also to predict the future of that person's soul.
AMANDA: Julia, can you imagine living your life and for the first time, seeing yourself in a mirror? That would be a divine experience, that would be shocking.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: I would be astonished to meet my own gaze with such clarity. And so it makes all the sense in the world, to me, that a mirror is an incredibly weird and singular and unique technology, that if there's too many of them, like, I get why a hall of mirrors was the sort of, like, most opulent display of wealth, power, and kind of like, "Why you do that?" Because that's too many, that's too many mirrors.
JULIA: Yeah, and we're— also, when we're talking about mirrors, we're kind of talking about, like, the glass mirror of somewhat modernity.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: A lot of the mirrors that we're talking about in these ancient civilizations and ancient cultures is like polished silver.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: You know what I mean? Like, it is a polished metal of some kind where you can see a reflection, but it's definitely not as clear as the mirrors that we think of today.
AMANDA: This is a total tangent, so forgive me. I went to England in high school and went to a tour of Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born. And I remember one thing the tour guide said was, you know, people ask all the time, "Oh, like, if Shakespeare were to, you know, be here in 2028, whatever it was, what would most, you know, astonish or startle him?" And the tour guide said, "Oh, the glass 100%, because, you know, you were lucky and rich if you had a glass about the size of your palm."
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Like, imagine those old timey windows, like in the little diamond shapes. They're imperfect and trans— and not very translucent and small. And so the idea of, like, a plate glass window, you know, the size of a storefront would just be like absolute fucking magic.
JULIA: Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So technology has changed, even things that we, like, somewhat take for granted. Like mirrors in homes and stuff like that, was not a super common thing back in the day, for sure. Now, in ancient Egypt, for example, mirrors were once again used as a tool that could see the future, more or less. Mirrors found in Egyptian burial tombs actually indicate that they were used for ceremonial funeral practices. And in the Book of the Dead, there are references made to a mirror-related ritual where a mirror was used to guide the recently deceased into the afterlife.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: Very interesting. We also know that the Egyptians used mirror technology to light tombs and everything like that. So I think there's something related to Sun.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Which we know is very important in ancient Egyptian culture, and the use of mirrors as sort of like a magical technology.
AMANDA: Yeah. To guide you where you gotta go.
JULIA: Yeah, exactly. In ancient Greece and Rome, mirrors were used in several religious practices related to defining the future, where Greek geographer Pausanias described seeing the practice at a temple to the Roman goddess Saris. So here's the quote from him, "Before the Temple of Saris at Patras, there was a fountain separated from the temple by a wall. And there was an Oracle, very truthful, not for all events, but for the sick only."
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: "The sick person let down a mirror, suspended by a thread till its base touched the surface of the water, having first prayed to the goddess and offered incense. Then looking into the mirror, he saw the presage of death or recovery, according as the face appeared fresh and healthy or of a ghastly aspect."
AMANDA: Wow.
JULIA: So depending on what he saw in his own face in the mirror when he looked at it, he was either definitely going to recover or he was going to die.
AMANDA: Would you want to know? I don't think I'd want to know.
JULIA: I mean, I guess so. If I know that I'm sick and I want to know whether or not I'm going to live or die, yeah. Because then I can get my affairs in order if I know I'm going to die.
AMANDA: Make your plans.
JULIA: Yeah, exactly.
AMANDA: Yeah. Yeah.
JULIA: Go see the world if I was a ancient Greek man.
AMANDA: Exactly. Like, three four days on horseback, you see something you've never seen before.
JULIA: I've seen the world.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: This is also like a very recurring theme, being able to see life or death in the mirror when using this divination practice. It's also— a very similar practice was used by Roman priests who were known as the speculare.
AMANDA: Great name.
JULIA: Very cool.
AMANDA: If we ever did a girl band like pop duo, Speculare, just putting it out there, that'd be great.
JULIA: Pretty cool. Pretty cool. So they would use metal mirrors to gain guidance from the gods, and, of course, look into the future. Now the thing is, Amanda, captromancy, as we're calling this divination by mirrors, was not exclusive to the ancient world. We have references to divinatory mirror uses in the Middle Ages, which is where we see the first real appearance of what would eventually, a couple of steps away from but will eventually become the Bloody Mary ritual.
AMANDA: Hell yeah.
JULIA: So the original historical ritual is this, a young woman would walk up a flight of stairs backwards while holding a candle and a hand mirror in a dark house.
AMANDA: Okay. I immediately have some concerns about tripping, but let's continue.
JULIA: Oh, yeah. It's not safe. What I'm describing, not safe.
AMANDA: There are no hands for a handrail, if a handrail even existed. Your skirts are long, probably touching the floor, because, God forbid, you see an ankle.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: What are you gonna do if you tripped? You're alone in a dark house. There's a candle, there's open flame.
JULIA: Yeah. It's not good.
AMANDA: I don't like this. I don't like this.
JULIA: The situation's not good. So they would look into the mirror, again as they're walking backwards up a stair.
AMANDA: Okay, great. Okay, so we're not looking where we're going either.
JULIA: Uh-huh. And in the mirror, they would supposedly see a glimpse of the face of their future husband.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: Now, a lot of divination practices are about seeing your future husband.
AMANDA: Which I gotta tell you, Julia, I completely understand. At the time, what major life event is there to think about as a woman, you know, who probably doesn't even have a say? Or if you do, it's kind of like a limited say in your own future. I, too, would want as much information as I could possibly get about the, you know, contract that would define the rest of my life.
JULIA: Yeah. And so keep that in mind, that a lot of these divination practices that would eventually lead to kind of, like, you know, funnel into what the Bloody Mary ritual and folklore would be.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Were done by women and were being done in order to see your future husband.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: Now, you could see your future husband in this mirror. However, there was a chance that you wouldn't see your future husband's face in the mirror, but rather you might see a skull, or in some cases, the face of the Grim Reaper himself in the mirror, which would indicate that you would die before you had the chance to marry. Or maybe simply like you just would never marry, or you would die young before you had the chance to marry.
AMANDA: Gotcha.
JULIA: The ritual is not super specific. It's basically just like, "Death will come before you have a husband."
AMANDA: Which, you know, tells you a little bit about the value system, AKA, it doesn't matter if you're— if you die at 75 or at, you know, 25, but you're not married and that's what matters.
JULIA: What is interesting now from here is we get a little bit of a gap, right? We have this sort of ritual that we know there's divination practices using mirrors in the Middle Ages. The practice that I describe is definitely a little bit later, because we're having, like, rich people who have hand mirrors, so that is definitely like—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —a little bit of a later invention, right? Enough so that we can be doing a ritual about it.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: We fast forward then to the late 1960s.
AMANDA: Oh, boy. That is a gap.
JULIA: Now, this is very interesting, because this is sort of where things get solidified for what we're going to be talking about today. Bloody Mary becomes a American based in the US urban legend. A lot of the reasons that we are focused kind of on this period of time is this is where we first sort of have early research into the Bloody Mary folktale. A lot of this is because of the work of a folklorist named Jane Langlois, who interviewed and recorded stories from Indiana children about what, at the time, was not called Bloody Mary, but instead was called Mary Whales.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: Now, not whales as in, I'm crying wails, but like the sea animal.
AMANDA: Got it.
JULIA: Plural, sea animals.
AMANDA: Interesting. I assumed the country.
JULIA: Oh, interesting. No, but interesting that you thought so. Potentially, we'll talk about it.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: So according to Langlois' research, the children, and again, primarily girls that she interviewed, believed that Mary had been a victim of a car accident, who had suffered a gash on her face when she died. And as such, she cuts the faces of children who summon her.
AMANDA: Oh, that's scary.
JULIA: I have one girl's accounting of the tale, which is particularly spooky, and also sounds a lot like my own experience, which I find funny.
AMANDA: Let's do it.
JULIA: Quote, "All by myself, I called her 100 times, and I was saying, 'I do believe in you'. And I was by the light switch, and she came, and her eyes started bleeding, and then I put on the light real fast. And then all that night, I had a dream about her, and I dreamed that she was right by my bed and she was about ready to touch me."
AMANDA: Wow, that's powerful. That's scary.
JULIA: It is scary. Imagine like an eight-year-old telling you that.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: Even worse, somehow.
AMANDA: I turned the light on real fast. Good for you.
JULIA: I would, I would. I also think it's really interesting, because this is, again, sort of sharing the fact that the details for everything about Bloody Mary really depends on who you ask, right?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: In some stories, you just have to chant Bloody Mary's name. In some, like in these Indiana children, you must chant, "I believe in Bloody Mary," or even, and this one is particularly dark, which is, "I killed your baby, Bloody Mary."
AMANDA: Oh, no.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Imagine a bunch of little girls chanting that together in a bathroom.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: No, no, no.
JULIA: The number changes as how many times you have to summon it, I think I always heard like three to five.
AMANDA: Three is what sticks out to me.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: For sure. Maybe that's also why I assumed it was like a Trinity Catholicism, you know, Mother Mary situation.
JULIA: Well, I think it's really interesting, because a lot of the, like, '60s and '70s references that I saw people— again, this was, like, people's own experiences, so it is, like, a little bit apocryphal, but a lot of the people who talked about experiencing this ritual in the '60s and '70s were like, "Yeah, you had to say it 100 times." I'm like, "Who had time for that? What eight-year-old was counting to 100?"
AMANDA: I mean, listen, some people do a novena. Like, some people, like, fully pray the rosary every single day. And again, I'm going in a Catholic direction, because that, to me, was, like, the repetition of ritual where, honestly, like you do get a little bit entranced. And I think that—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —dedicating yourself to doing something 100 times puts you in a state where, like, you are committed to it. And I think there's a lot of ritualistic value to just repetition.
JULIA: I also think it's one of those things too, where it's like after you said a word so many times, it starts to not feel real.
AMANDA: Yes, it's just noise.
JULIA: So I think maybe that has something to do with such a high number of repetition as well. But regardless of how the ritual is performed, it is said that if it is performed correctly, Bloody Mary will either simply appear in the mirror, staring at the participant. Sometimes she reaches out of the mirror, she scratches their face so that it resembles her own bloody one. Sometimes summoning her means that you have released her from the afterlife and now she's gonna haunt you until you're dead.
AMANDA: Oh, no. Don't do that.
JULIA: Don't do that one.
AMANDA: Uh-uh.
JULIA: That's not fun. Uh-uh. That's very, you know, The Ring-ish.
AMANDA: You're prompting me to reflect on like— I said reflect. That's a funny mirror pun. I sort of assumed that Mary lived in, like, some kind of interdimensional space accessible via mirrors, you know?
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: And that, like, by coming through the mirror, she was, like, making herself known. Not that you would release her or summon her, or that she was, like, coming newly, but that she's just, like, has the potential to live in any mirror.
JULIA: She lives in the mirror realm in your mind.
AMANDA: Exactly.
JULIA: Interesting. That's very cool. Okay. We're gonna talk a little bit about that later, but I think that is interesting. All of these various details about the ritual sort of beg the next question, and you've kind of led us into there beautifully, Amanda, which is, who is Mary and why are we summoning her? And why is she in some tales benevolent and some others malevolent, right? So let's dig into the potential Marys that became Bloody Mary, just as soon as we get back from our refill.
AMANDA: Let's go.
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JULIA: Amanda, we are back And, okay, yes, the obvious cocktail for this episode is the Bloody Mary, which, by the way, was probably invented in, like, the 1920s or '30s.
AMANDA: Really?
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: What was that invented after? Who was that Mary?
JULIA: Much like the fact that we don't know exactly when it was invented, we don't exactly know who it was invented or who it was named after. There's a couple of different claims. So the earliest bartender to claim the drink was a man named Fernand Petiot in 1921, or rather, that's when he claimed he invented it, was in 1921. He didn't actually make that claim until, like, a decade later.
AMANDA: He's back dating a little bit.
JULIA: Yes, exactly. He worked at a bar that was visited by a lot of expats in Paris. So, like, Ernest Hemingway would drink there a lot.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Like basically all the Americans who went to Paris during that time period—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —basically drank at this bar.
AMANDA: Could you imagine what the bathroom was like in that bar?
JULIA: I don't know.
AMANDA: It's in France. It's the late '20s, Ernest Hemingway is fucking that shit up regularly.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Not good.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Not good.
JULIA: Seems like a big shitter or something. All right, we got to continue. There are a couple of theories around where the cocktails name came from. So, like, Fernand Petiot came up with the recipe, but didn't necessarily call it the Bloody Mary.
AMANDA: Got it.
JULIA: One of the origin potentials is that it was said to have been named after the silent film era Hollywood star Mary Pickford.
AMANDA: Oh, a classic. I love this lady's face.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Others claim that it was named after the girlfriend of one of the patrons who had basically asked for a like Hair of the Dog style cocktail, right?
AMANDA: My dream, Julia. My dream is to have a cocktail named after me. Anybody out there who works in a bar or restaurant or as a mixologist, like Julia deserves it first, because of all her work here.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: And second, I would love a cocktail named after me.
JULIA: So apparently, the apocryphal story goes that the patron's girlfriend was named Mary. He met her at a cabaret that was called the Bucket of Blood.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: Thus, Bloody Mary.
AMANDA: Now, why was the cabaret named Bucket of Blood?
JULIA: Ah, who can say?
AMANDA: It was Paris. It was the '20s.
JULIA: Eh, it was Paris. It was the '20s. Some of these stories aren't exclusive to Paris, because a lot of the, like, New York and then Chicago bartenders started claiming that they made it as well.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: And so some of these apocryphal stories, I'm pretty sure, like, for example, the Bucket of Blood cabaret story is from Chicago, but I could be wrong.
AMANDA: I mean, feels right, meat packing.
JULIA: Personally, I like a Bloody Mary. I like a Bloody Maria better, which is where you sub the vodka and a Bloody Mary for tequila.
AMANDA: I cannot abide tomato juice, but if I must, I prefer the Bloody Maria by far.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Mostly what I prefer, Julia, is to get one of those Bloody Marys with a garnish so excessive that it's essentially an appetizer. So that's really what I'm here for.
JULIA: I do like a good chunky bacon on top of a Bloody Mary, for sure.
AMANDA: Hmm. Like a candied bacon.
JULIA: Super crispy, I'm gonna dip it in, and then nom, nom, nom, nom.
AMANDA: I would love to see a sort of, like mini chicken and waffle, or like a chicken tender, even with the like—
JULIA: I have seen those.
AMANDA: —celery and olive.
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: I don't love the sort of, like Instagram-y, you know, shake and dessert trend, where it's like a milkshake, but then there's a cake on it. But put alcohol in it and make it a chicken tender, and you got me.
JULIA: Those are very different things. Those are very different things, but I love it. I love that, and I love you. All right.
AMANDA: Thank you.
JULIA: Speaking of uncertain origins of the name Bloody Mary, let's talk about some of the Marys that might have inspired our Bloody Mary folktale. We're gonna skip your Virgin Mary for now,
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Because I do wanna talk about that in a later context. The first one that we are going to talk about is probably, like, the most well-known one/the most popular of the origins, in terms of, like, folktale scholars, right?
AMANDA: Yep.
JULIA: This is gonna be Mary Tudor, Mary I of England.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Born in— I love doing the history part of this now, here we go. So, born in 1516 to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. She was a beloved princess until her father attempted to divorce her mother and broke ties with the Catholic church because they would not grant him the divorce. You probably know the story of Henry VIII and all of the wives that he had, and he kept—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —killing them/imprisoning them.
AMANDA: You may have heard the musical Six.
JULIA: You might have heard of the musical Six. As a result of this divorce situation, Mary was declared illegitimate, was separated from her mother, was demoted to lady rather than princess.
AMANDA: Oh, rude.
JULIA: Was having a tough time. Eventually, she made her way back to court. It was only after her father had moved on to, like, wife number three. It was after the execution of Anne Boleyn.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: She ended up surviving her father, but her younger half-brother, Edward VI, inherited the throne.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: The two were, I would say, polar opposites, in that Edward was a Protestant reformer, while Mary was a devote Catholic.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Given the name, that makes sense.
AMANDA: Sure does.
JULIA: Now, when Edward died only six years after taking the throne, he attempted to leave the crown to his Protestant cousin Jane, rather than following the line of succession, which would have been Mary, and then Mary's half-sister, who is the future, Queen Elizabeth I.
AMANDA: I see. So we get into a war of the oranges, roses? Which one was this?
JULIA: I have no idea. It's one of the wars— basically, Mary rallied a bunch of support amongst Catholics who were still in England. Rode against her cousin Jane, alongside her half-sister Elizabeth, marched on London, and became queen. And she was the first English queen to wear the crown in her own right, not through marriage.
AMANDA: Very cool.
JULIA: This seems very cool, as you said, also well and good, but her five-year reign was marred by both religious reform and religious restrictions, all in the attempt to restore England to the Catholic church, right?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: This also led to the action that would earn her the name Bloody Mary, which was having 280 English Protestants burned at the stake for the crime of being heretics.
AMANDA: I take back when I said it was cool that she rode on London. I mean, it was, but also she's terrible and monarchy is bad.
JULIA: Yes, monarchy is bad. End of statement, really. So Mary I died only five years after she ascended the throne. Her legacy—
AMANDA: Maybe it was all the Protestant burning.
JULIA: It might have been the Protestant burning, yeah. Her leg— she died from what they think might have been like uterine cancer or some sort of, like, cyst or whatever. They're not entirely sure, because, yep, science back then, not great. Even though she only ruled for five years, her legacy remained a, quote-unquote, "bloody" one, which is somewhat ironic, I would say. Because none of the other Tudors, who probably killed just as many people were termed bloody.
AMANDA: Yeah. I think we want to vilify a woman.
JULIA: Yeah. Part of the reason was her being England's first queen.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: She was often called vindictive and fierce.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: In a not positive way. Fierce not in the way that we use it today, really. But also because she chose to marry a Spanish Prince for love, rather than, like, elevating and marrying politically, another English household. She was also considered weak-willed and easily controlled by her husband.
AMANDA: I mean, yeah, misogyny is gonna misogyny.
JULIA: And this was in comparison to Elizabeth, who took the throne after her, who was called the Virgin Queen, who never married, never had any heirs as a result, and England loved her.
AMANDA: Of course we're going to love a queen who can make the crown her husband and blah, blah, blah.
JULIA: So this is also frustrating from a historical perspective, certainly, and also in hindsight, it makes sense that she's still considered this like villain of history, right? Because Catholicism failed to take hold as England's ruling religion. Mary, therefore, is cast as this villain, you know, because history is written by the victors.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: But this myth of Bloody Mary as this vindictive and violent woman is how she remained viewed by greater society. It's like, basically how English children are taught about their own history, right?
AMANDA: Gotcha.
JULIA: And it's why she is often cited as being the inspiration for the spirit that haunts these mirrors enacting violence.
AMANDA: I mean, I could definitely see how it leads to be here. It's a completely plausible historical explanation, to me.
JULIA: And there's also— like, going back to that very extremely spooky thing that the Indiana children were talking about, the, like, "I killed your baby, Mary," there was a whole thing where Mary also did not have any heirs, but did have what they, I guess, have now sort of figured was a hysterical pregnancy.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: Where it was the assumption that she was showing all the signs of pregnancy—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —but then wasn't actually, you know, developing a fetus.
AMANDA: Wow.
JULIA: So I think that also somewhat ties to that belief in tradition.
AMANDA: Yeah. Not to even touch the, like, sort of collapsing of, like, womanhood, with fertility, with the providing of heirs, especially male heirs. Like, there are about 100 reasons why people probably viewed her in a uncharitable way, despite her terrible behavior.
JULIA: Yeah. Exactly, exactly. But, like, her behavior wasn't any worse than any of her English monarch at the time.
AMANDA: 100%.
JULIA: Like, if the Protestants had been in power and there was a rise in, like, Catholic movement, they also would have killed a bunch of Catholics in the terms of heresy.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: She married a Spanish prince, and so there's the like, "Oh, the Spanish inquisition is going to come to England," and that's somewhat inspired her legacy as well.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: There's a lot of complicated issues in there, but needless to say, she is still thought of, by the general public, as Bloody Mary.
AMANDA: Hmm.
JULIA: But she is not the only Mary who is cited as being the Mary of the mirror, which is odd, because the next Mary that I'm going to be telling you about is not a Mary.
AMANDA: What's her name?
JULIA: Her name was Elizabeth Báthory. She was a Hungarian noblewoman, alleged serial killer, and folkloric vampire.
AMANDA: Oh, tell me about her.
JULIA: So her story is an interesting mix of history and folktale, starting with her childhood. As a child, she had a series of seizures, which historians believe might have been caused by epilepsy.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: At the time, it was diagnosed as something called falling sickness, because you would fall to the ground.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: Which in the 1500s when Elizabeth was born, was treated by rubbing blood from a non-sufferer onto the lips of the person having the seizure.
AMANDA: Okay. In terms of historical medical treatments, could be way worse. I'm just gonna go ahead and say right now—
JULIA: Could be way worse.
AMANDA: —that sounds like one of the best historical medical treatments that I've heard of.
JULIA: I'm sure it didn't do much, but—
AMANDA: Didn't harm much either.
JULIA: Yeah, except you're bleeding someone in order to put blood on them.
AMANDA: Yeah, but they're doing that all the time.
JULIA: The vampire stuff is tied very early to her, right?
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: she married young, like quite young, to a Hungarian count who very early in their marriage, became a commander of Hungarian troops that were sent to war against the Ottomans, which basically left Elizabeth to manage the estates and the business affairs, and she became well-known for being the real person behind how the estate was run.
AMANDA: Sure.
JULIA: Her husband would eventually die, leaving Elizabeth like a widow, I want to say, in like her late '30s, '40s. And it's around this time that the rumors about her begin to spread. It was said that she had tortured and killed a lot of the local peasantry, whose disappearances were not likely to warrant an investigation by local law enforcement.
AMANDA: Oh, no.
JULIA: At the time, basically, nobility could do whatever they wanted to the lower classes without it actually breaking a law. It was just kind of, like, frowned upon, like, "Hey, treat your serfs better."
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: But you're not like, doing anything illegal, technically.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: But then around 1602, Elizabeth was said to have started escalating her crimes to not just the local peasantry, but the daughters of the lesser gentry in the area.
AMANDA: Ah.
JULIA: And that's when people in power actually started caring .
AMANDA: Like that one meme from community, "I can excuse murder of peasantry, but I draw the line at murder of lower gentry."
JULIA: Yeah, Amanda. Exactly. So these rumors start in 1602. They gain a lot more notoriety by 1604. Again, think about like how news sort of traveled across Europe during this time. And at this point also, Hungary was part of the Holy Roman Empire. So it takes a little bit for news to get to the court, right? So by 1610, so about eight years after these rumors start, the Holy Roman Empire, Matthias II sent someone to investigate what was going on. They collected a bunch of evidence, and by evidence, I mean like, you know, people making accounts about what might have happened. And by 1611, they collected over 300 witness statements against Elizabeth.
AMANDA: Holy shit.
JULIA: Now, there wasn't really any hard evidence against her, I would say. It's mainly rumors. It's 300 witnesses who are testifying against her, but none of them were any actual victims, nor were they eyewitnesses to the torture and murder that she was accused of. So it's all kind of hearsay.
AMANDA: Local person says, "That lady's creepy," story at 5:00.
JULIA: Exactly. And a lot of the stuff will be like, "I heard that she stole this girl and brought her to the—"
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: "—castle and killed her." But then, like, some of the 300 are like, "She stole my chickens." Okay, sure.
AMANDA: Yep, okay. Yep. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: So she's brought to trial along with four of her servants who are also put on trial as accomplices. The four servants are tried and executed. Elizabeth is tried, but essentially is put under house arrest until she dies in her sleep three years later.
AMANDA: Bummer.
JULIA: I think a lot of historians nowadays are of the mind that it might have been a little bit of a witch trial.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: It might have been like, "We're not happy with this current ruler, and the fact that she is a woman who is in charge of our estates."
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: "So let's get rid of her."
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: "As best we can." Now—
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: —she might have been an asshole. She might have done some of the things she was accused of, but she definitely didn't deserve, I would say, the folklore that came after the fact.
AMANDA: So how did her reputation kind of curdle and intensify in death?
JULIA: So in death, about, I would say, 100 years after her death, there was a story that was written by a Jesuit monk in 1729 about how she bathed in the blood of her victims in order to retain her youth.
AMANDA: I see.
JULIA: You've probably heard this before as a thing that people as a thing that people would do.
AMANDA: As a trope, for sure.
JULIA: Yes, exactly. The origin is said to be with Elizabeth. Whether or not she actually did that, it's probably not true. It is definitely like this guy heard through the grapevine, and like, the oral tradition of the Hungarian people from her area said, "Oh yeah. And, like, you know, those girls disappeared, and she was actually killing them. And then she was bathing in their blood so that she would stay young forever."
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Like it was definitely a game of telephone urban legend that sort of grew from her death on.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: A lot of people claim that she might have been something of an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. There's not a lot of connection there, but like some people do claim that he might have heard those stories. But a lot of this is probably untrue, but the stories of Elizabeth Báthory, who is sometimes known as, nowadays, the Bloody Countess, still persist to this day. Our final Bloody Mary, Amanda, is interesting because she is our American Mary.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: She goes typically by Mary Worth in a lot of the traditions that we're going to be talking about.
AMANDA: Excellent old-timey name.
JULIA: Yes, exactly. Mary Worth, a name that is used very often, but with a variety of different claims as to who she is or who she was. Now, this Mary was simultaneously said to be a woman who was persecuted and killed during the Salem witch trials, which kind of makes her a more sympathetic character.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: However, if you look at the official list of all of the accused witches from the Salem witch trials, there's no Mary Worth on that list.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: In other stories, she is said to have been a woman who hunted, and killed, and slaved people who were attempting to escape the south via the Underground Railroad.
AMANDA: Absolutely fucked that.
JULIA: Made her a malevolent figure from the start. Now, these are, I would say, much less specific than our other two, quote-unquote, "historical" Marys, Elizabeth and our other Bloody Mary, but they are very specific to the United States. And this is important, because the revival of the Bloody Mary ritual as we know it today, is itself very American.
AMANDA: Okay.
JULIA: Now, as I mentioned before, the folktale of Bloody Mary really began to solidify in the United States in the late 1960s. It became even more popularized in the 1970s and for, I would say, a very specific reason, because I want you to think about it for a second, the origins of the Bloody Mary ritual, right?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: We talked about this. It's the one with the candle, and you had the handheld mirror, and you're going backwards up those stairs. That ritual was done in the hopes of finding out who your husband would be, right?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Now, according to Bill Ellis in his work, The Table-Setting and Mirror-Gazing, quote, "The prevalence of mirrors in rituals intended to reveal the participant's future husband, likewise suggests a world like ours, but inverted in important ways to allow women significant power in the marriage game."
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Now, this is really cool, because it's like women are taking charge of who they're going to marry, which in the real world was really not the case, but they—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —could do this ritual and feel like they had some sort of power that the patriarchy was not providing them, right?
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: Now, let's think about the 1970s in America. We're seeing young girls trying to get more freedom. We are seeing societal upheavals around sexuality and women's rights, as well as civil rights at the time. And suddenly, young girls are the focus of who is being, quote-unquote, "hurt" by these social upheavals, right?
AMANDA: 100%. They are the sort of, like, blank slate upon which the white supremacist establishment is trying to fight back against civil rights and just the, you know, visibility of people of color in daily life and on, and on, and on when it comes to drugs and hippies and hair and, you know, anti-war establishments and everything else.
JULIA: Yes. And suddenly, people are getting concerned for girls, right?
AMANDA: Hmm. But, Julia, think of the children.
JULIA: Think of the children. Think of the young girls, Amanda. And so now, young girls are being held under even more scrutiny in terms of how they act, right?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And so as they are being held under more scrutiny, so too grows their desire to rebel, especially in spooky divinatory ways. And because rituals like these, these sort of divinatory games like Bloody Mary or Ouija boards were ways for girls to explore social behavior, you know? What was acceptable for them, what wasn't, and start to push those boundaries.
AMANDA: Especially, Julia, in a bathroom.
JULIA: Exactly. Especially in a bathroom.
AMANDA: Historically, a place where you can have privacy, some amount of bodily autonomy, where it's a homosocial space, right? Like, women can be together, girls can be together—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —from everything, from the, you know, social cues and tropes of, like, women going to the bathroom together, right? Like on a date or from— at the club, whatever.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: To just, like, literally having privacy. As a kid, like I had a great childhood, but also the bathroom was the one place where I could be alone and nobody was allowed to be there, and there was a door that locked. And so much like discovery and growing up and adolescence and exploration happens in bathrooms. And so I know it can be any mirror, but I think for most of us, the bathroom mirror is where you're most likely to have one, where it's most likely to be big, and where you can kind of gather with a couple of people if you have company there. And I'm just like— I'm kind of obsessed with the bathroom as a liminal social space.
JULIA: I love that, Amanda. That's so great. So we are seeing this movement, right, of Bloody Mary as a form of rebellion against oppressive gender roles.
AMANDA: Let's go.
JULIA: Incredible, right?
AMANDA: Let's go.
JULIA: Okay. And then we get the Satanic Panic of the '80s and '90s.
AMANDA: Of course.
JULIA: And we get a whole new wave of Bloody Mary ritual, right? So a lot of this comes from Violent Reflections: Bloody Mary in 1990s Pop Culture by Mac Godinez. It's a very good paper. It's a great read if you wanted to do a little bit more research. It's framed as like talking particularly also about Candyman and the episode of X-Files, where they explore the Bloody Mary story a little bit more.
AMANDA: Hell yeah.
JULIA: In particular, I really like it as talking about the sort of social upheaval and gender roles that women were press— women and particularly young girls, were pressing up against during this time period. So if we think about it, suddenly, the social upheavals that we were seeing from the '60s on in the minds of fundamental evangelical Christians. Finally, there is like an explanation for all of this. All of this change that we're all so scared of. It has to be Satan worship. It has to be Satan worship.
AMANDA: It must. It must, Julia. It can't be that we can't control our children and ultimately, we're going to die one day and society is going to move on without us. It simply can't be that.
JULIA: Yes. And so for these fundamentalist evangelical Christians, there is a widespread spiritual attack happening against Christians in the United States, but specifically, against Christian children.
AMANDA: Which, Julia, as we all know, are the property of their Christian parents, and then God.
JULIA: Exactly. So when you brought up the Virgin Mary, at first, I was like, "That doesn't make any sense." But I did see someone make a reference to Bloody Mary being the Virgin Mary, and it didn't click with me until I remembered the Satanic Panic. And we all know how evangelical Christians feel about Catholics. We are spooky fucking weirdos to them.
AMANDA: Yeah. And like, again, because I grew up in a town as did you, Julia, that was half-Jewish, half-Catholic, my sense of the majority of America being Protestant didn't come until I was an adult. So I think I consistently overestimate the impact of Catholicism on American pop culture, but also particularly, growing up when we did, the vestiges of the Satanic Panic, the sort of exorcist of it all, really does have a profound cultural influence.
JULIA: Yeah. It's so fascinating. I really love this. I want people to really think about this further. And what's really interesting, too, is these divinatory games, right? These rituals that children are engaging in is what we consider legend tripping, which is a new to me definition, which I was really excited to learn about, where people act out and situate themselves within a legend.
AMANDA: hmm.
JULIA: Usually, it's seen as like a secretive pilgrimage or a ritual surrounding a tragic or supernatural event or location. So for example, think of all the urban legends where it's like, "Drive your car to this road, turn the car off," and then you'll see the hand prints on the car, right?
AMANDA: Got it. You're LARPing an urban legend.
JULIA: Exactly. So that is a form of legend tripping, and so is the Bloody Mary ritual.
AMANDA: Cool.
JULIA: But this legend tripping, especially during the Satanic Panic, only seemed to raise paranoia further. And as a result, led to the popularity of Bloody Mary as younger generations acted out against this control from their parents and authority figures that they were trying to exert over them.
AMANDA: Very cool.
JULIA: So in Satanic Tourism: Adolescent Dabblers and Identity Work by Jeffrey Victor and Gary Alan Fine, they talk about how these rituals are done, quote, "with the goals of shocking adult sensibilities and testing adolescent anxieties about challenging adult authority."
AMANDA: Hmm. Let's go.
JULIA: So maybe it's not always done consciously. Like, I don't think a lot of eight-year-olds are being like, "I'm gonna fight the man by—"
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: "—by summoning Bloody Mary." But like, even subconsciously, that is what Bloody Mary was. It was allowing young girls to explore a world beyond the control of their fathers and their father figures and the patriarchy, right? They were in control of how and when Bloody Mary entered the world, even if they couldn't control what she did once she was there.
AMANDA: Hmm. Beautifully put, Julia.
JULIA: I'm just— I'm obsessed with this. We actually— a peek behind the curtain, we had to push this episode back a couple of days because I went down a rabbit hole into, like, Bloody Mary as fighting the patriarchy, and I'm so excited we got to talk about this,
AMANDA: Julia, I'll follow you down any rabbit hole, but particularly, one streaked with the blood of the hetero patriarchy, okay?
JULIA: Exactly. So even if we, Amanda, as girls of the '90s, didn't know the more like clinical reason as to why we felt compelled to summon the spirit of Bloody Mary, or why we wanted to tempt fate by using a Ouija board, why we played games that were designed to scare us in a safe way. We were really sort of enacting a ritual, an old, ancient ritual. Something that was challenging the patriarchy and tying us to generations of women of the past.
AMANDA: And if we're lucky, maybe one of those girls at the sleepover wanted a kiss. You know?
JULIA: That never happened for me.
AMANDA: Me, neither. Me, neither.
JULIA: Well, the next time you're looking in your bathroom mirror and you say, under your breath, "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary," stay creepy.
AMANDA: Stay cool.
JULIA: Later, satyrs.
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