Bloody Mary game at school

A game called ‘Bloody Mary’ is moving through the year 3-5 students at the moment which has been addressed by teachers but may cause some discussion at home. It is a frightening and highly inappropriate game which is seeing hoards of students in the toilets chanting ‘Bloody Mary’ to the mirror.  The game is outlined below;

Game: Bloody Mary

Risk Level: High

Additional Warnings: Fire

Objective: Summon Bloody Mary

Reward: Proof of your bravery

HOW TO PLAY:

1. Choose your playing space. You may play this game in virtually any indoor setting; the only requirement is that your playing space be capable of total blackout conditions, with no light bleeding in from the outside. An interior room without windows, such as a bathroom, is ideal. If the only options available to you have windows, be sure to block them fully.
2. Gather your supplies. You will need a candle, matches or a lighter, and a mirror.
3. Wait until nightfall, then bring your supplies to the playing space and enter it alone. If you haven’t already, prepare the room: block the windows, set up the mirror if necessary, turn out the lights, light the candle, and place it in front of the mirror.
4. Face the mirror. Make eye contact with yourself. Be brave; be fearless. Take a deep breath. And when you are ready, begin repeating the name “Bloody Mary.” Say it aloud, beginning softly, but adding volume with each repetition. Repeat it once, twice, three times—all the way up to thirteen repetitions. Thirteen is the magic number. Speak the thirteenth repetition with finality. Then, stop.

5. Look in the mirror. Look harder. What do you see? Is it just yourself? Are you sure? Look again—but stand back. Do not place yourself within arms’ reach of the mirror. She might scream at you, but you can handle screaming. If she’s able to grab you, though? There’s no coming back from that.

6. If you survive the experience, extinguish the candle, turn on the lights, and leave the room.

   The roots of the mirror game known as Bloody Mary stretch back to a folk tradition practiced by young people in the 19th century. It was said that if you walked backward up a staircase in a darkened house at night, passing a mirror as you went, you would see reflected in the mirror one of two things: the face of the person you were destined to marry, or a skull. If the skull appeared, it meant that you were destined to die before you got the chance to marry anyone.

   Bloody Mary itself, meanwhile, appears to have come along somewhat later, although exactly when is a little hazy. We do know that the legend was firmly established in the United States by the 1970s: Folklorist Janet Langlois’s essay, “Mary Whales, I Believe in You,” published in Indiana Folklore: A Reader in 1976, features several versions of the legend which Langlois had gathered throughout the early ’70s.

   And as for who Bloody Mary is? Well, that changes depending on who you’re talking to. To some, she’s Mary Worth, who may have been either a Puritan woman who was tried and executed for witchcraft, or a woman who was killed in a car crash more recently. To others, she’s Mary Whales, who might be the aforementioned car crash victim or a vanishing hitchhiker-type spirit. Some say she’s the vengeful spirit of a mother who lost her child. Still others say she’s Mary Tudor, the Queen of England who reigned from 1553 to 1558 and became known as “Bloody Mary” for the executions she carried out against Protestants in an effort to restore Catholicism to England.

   For what it’s worth, some have suggested a scientific explanation for the spirit’s appearance: It’s said that staring into a mirror in low-light conditions for lengthy amounts of time causes our perception of what we’re seeing to distort and become monstrous. Perhaps the true monsters are simply reflections of ourselves. No matter what you believe, though, one thing is absolutely clear: If you try to summon Bloody Mary, you do it purely for the challenge of surviving the encounter.