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The Face in the Mirror Looking at Bloody Mary, Mary Worth and Other Variants of a Modern Legend
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The Banshee
Looking through various cultures' legends and mythology for stories about creatures who are forced to answer questions when captured reveals that it is a not uncommon concept. Some of the better known examples include forcing the Irish leprechaun to reveal the location of his pot of gold, compelling genies or djinn to do as you wish when they are released from their imprisonment, and, in Homer's Odyssey, capturing the shape-changing sea god Proteus to learn the fate of fellow Greeks after the Trojan War.
One such creature who bears a direct resemblance to Bloody Mary is the Bean Si, more commonly referred to as a banshee, which is known by a huge variety of names in the British Isles. There are a dizzying amount of different stories concerning this figure. Some tales describe the creatures as fairies, ancestral ghosts, demons or old hags. A completely separate article would be needed to cover them in any detail.
What concerns us here is that a banshee, aside from being
a powerful female spirit whose physical appearance often corresponds
to how Bloody Mary is typically described, usually foretells
the future in some fashion or another. The common banshee tale
has one show up to warn of a death or injury in the family, but
once in a while, such as with the story of the bean nighe, someone
could capture them or otherwise trick them into revealing specific
information about the future. This could be the link that ties
the ghost of a woman to the mirror enchantments, the two main
aspects of our Bloody Mary legend. There are a couple other pieces
of evidence that point to this idea.
In some tales, Bloody Mary dies and is mutilated by a carriage accident. There is a ghost in England called Pearlin Jean who dies in the exact same manner, showing up to haunt the family involved in her death with her face and shoulders drenched in blood. And in many similar tales a woman wronged by a male member of a certain family returns as a ghost periodically to warn of a impending death, or, as some say, to cause one.
Also, there are some modern Bloody Mary-type stories that give her a name that is either very similar to or exactly the same as some banshee figures. These include Black Aggie, Black Agnes, Aunt Aggie, and Black Abby. I am sure there must be others as well. One of the more famous witch-hag figures that either descended from or helped create the banshee legends, depending upon who you ask, is the Black Annis (who is actually called by some of the names mentioned above in some variations). She was a giant blue-skinned woman who liked to eat children and others who wandered too close to her cave. She was also related to a whole line of bogey spirits who were used to scare young children away from dangerous areas. Jenny Greenteeth lived in shallow pools of water, Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones snatched up those who wandered alone in the dark, and even the Wailing Woman of Mexico, mentioned earlier, was sometimes thought to frequent shallow irrigation ditches to drown lost children.
The two problems with the Black Aggie connection are that it is such a small percentage of the Bloody Mary tales and that those versions are usually thought to have been confused with a completely separate line of stories.
In this other set of tales, Black Aggie is the name of a statue in a graveyard that supposedly has glowing red eyes and has been known to kill kids who enter the cemetery late at night, usually as an initiation ceremony for a sorority or fraternity. In a sense, we are still sort of talking about the same story. Young children or teens get to together to test their courage doing something that violates superstitious taboos.
But as much as I'd like to believe the Black Aggie statue stories are an offshoot of a Bloody Mary tale that links the legend to the Bean Si myth, there is an additional piece of evidence which would indicate that the statue story arose primarily by itself. The gravemarker which has been identified as the one where the tale was originally created is for a man named Felix Agnus, a Civil War general for the Union side. The name Agnus very easily could become Aggie. This is most likely where the name of the statue came from.
The most logical link between Bloody Mary and old banshee
tales has most likely been explained away, but the rest of the
evidence is still quite strong. There is an additional theory,
though, that could explain the transformation of stories concerning
mirror enchantments into a killer ghost woman. Depending upon
whether you believe the banshee connection is valid or not, this
could either be the primary or a contributing cause of the current
legends.
Speak of the Devil and He Shall Appear
Toward the beginning of this article it was mentioned that the third most common figure mentioned as appearing in the mirror when summoned was Satan, or the Devil. There is much to the modern tale that can be seen as a religious warning to scare children away from black magic. If so it doesn't appear to be working, judging by the number of kids trying strange things in front of a mirror these days.
Some of the rituals to call up the devil include calling upon him by name, saying the Lord's Prayer backwards or, most interestingly, chanting the words "Hell Mary."
"Hell Mary" is clearly a corruption of the famous "Hail Mary..." used in the Catholic church to call upon the Virgin Mary for assistance or guidance. We obviously have some sort of confusing interaction going on here between modern religious beliefs and the mirror ritual. As further proof, some people, leaving off the part about physical attacks or danger, say the individual you are calling in the mirror when you say "Bloody Mary" is actually the Virgin Mary.
Could all of this have been the result of some Catholic priests warning people away from calling upon Mary's support with an unapproved ritual? Or perhaps even reactions from Protestant religious leaders against the idea that you should be calling upon Mary for help instead of Jesus? Could it be that strict parents considered any attempted spells with a mirror to be reaching out to Satan himself? Or are all of these theories dead ends?
Obviously it is impossible to answer those kinds of questions,
as we do not have the kind of written records we would need to
come to a definitive conclusion. All we can do is weigh the evidence
and decide for ourselves which seems the most reasonable. But,
before you decide to link either the Virgin Mary and/or the mythical
banshee as an essential part of the explanation of the Blood
Mary legend, there is yet another theory to consider.
Don't Trust What You See
Assuming that you believe the Bloody Mary story originated with parents or the church trying to scare kids away from calling up ghosts or the image of their future spouse by linking the practice to satanism, how do we account for there being a female in the mirror? After all, the Devil is typically thought to be a male, any husband-to-be would most likely be a man, and there isn't much reason to believe that boys looking for wives in the mirror were of any significance to the development of the folklore.
Even more importantly, what about the girls who claim to have actually seen a woman looking back at them?
Most of the people who say they saw someone in the mirror are probably just trying to frighten other kids, or trying to sound like they have something special to say, but there are people who honestly think they saw something. We can chalk a lot of that up to the combination of fear and confusion one experiences in a darkened room while attempting to call up the spirit of a dead person, which is unsettling to most people. Certainly the versions that include spinning around in circles and rubbing your eyes are intended to increase the level of disorientation.
But, when all is said and done, the primary reason someone would see a red-colored distorted female face is that there is one or more girls holding flickering candles in the dark in front of a mirror.
What else would you expect to see?
Products mentioned in the article:
The Mexican Pet by Jan Brunvand. Buy new at Amazon.com or search for used copies at Abebooks.
Indiana Folklore: A Reader edited by Linda Degh. Buy new at Amazon.com or search for used copies at Abebooks.
Candyman on DVD or VHS from Amazon.com
In the Flesh by Clive Barker. Buy new at Amazon.com or search for used copies at Abebooks.
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