urban legends

bloody mary

Also known as "Mary Worth"...

As best anyone can tell, the legend of Bloody Mary and its comparably gory variants ("Hell Mary," "I Believe in Mary Worth," "I Believe in Mary Whales," etc.) first emerged during the early 1960s as an adolescent party game — albeit a very dark and creepy party game. Like so many folk rituals and urban legends, the exact time and place of its origin is impossible to pin down. Folklorists didn't begin recording examples of it until the 1970s. That said, there's a body of folklore and superstition attributing magical and/or divinatory properties to mirrors dating back to ancient times. The most familiar of these lingering into modernity is the centuries-old superstition that breaking a mirror brings bad luck. The idea that one can foretell the future by peering into a mirror is even older, described in the Bible (I Corinthians 13) as "see[ing] through a glass, darkly." There are mentions of looking-glass divination in Chaucer's Squire's Tale (c. 1390), Spenser's The Faerie Queen (1590), and Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606), among other early literary sources.


Summoning visions

A particular form of divination associated with Halloween in the British Isles entailed gazing into a mirror and performing a nonverbal ritual to summon a vision of one's future betrothed. This example is from the Poems of Robert Burns, published in 1787:

The poem:
Take a candle, and go alone to a looking glass; eat an apple before it, and some traditions say, you should comb your hair all the time; the face of your conjugal companion, to be, will be seen in the glass, as if peeping over your shoulder.