Mirror, Mirror: The Science of The Bloody Mary Legend

Why do we see faces in the mirror that aren’t our own? Have you ever played the game “Bloody Mary,” based on the urban legends, and then seen Mary herself? There is a very scientific reason behind what you saw. In today’s episode, we explore why our brains make us see the strange things we do, what it means to see faces where faces don’t exist, and what it’s like to be face-blind.

Then, we talk about how mirrors are actually probably pan-dimensional portals that cause spirits to get trapped. Because that’s how we roll.

Listen now, and learn about how our brains manifest and reveal the monster within, today, on The H-files, brought to you by Homespun Haints!

The H Files

Welcome to The H Files: a limited-run miniseries where we delve deep into the folklore and science behind ghostly sightings and urban legends. This series began September 1, 2020, and ran every other Tuesday until November, 2020. If you would like to discuss anything you hear on the episode, please reach out to us in our Facebook Group or through Instagram. And, as always, if you have something you’d like to contribute to the show, you can always email us at info@HomespunHaints.com.

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary

Nobody really seems to know where the name Bloody Mary first came from. There’s some accounts that her full name is Mary Worth. In the first official published scholarly account, however, the folklorist refers to her as Mary Whales. This article suggests that she has many different names. These include, at the oddest, Hell Mary, Black Agnes, and Svarte Madame.

The Legend of Bloody Mary

We aren’t sure exactly where or when Bloody Mary urban legends came from, and we’re not sure if it was based on a real person. The point of the Bloody Mary spirit’s existence seems to be exclusively to scare, kidnap, and/or murder children. This is probably out of vengeance for her own baby, taken from her in some versions of the legend.

Bloody Mary, the Game

It’s a ritual game, practiced at slumber parties and secret treehouse meetings. The game is played with the brave kid/future victim alone in the bathroom. They stare into the dark bathroom mirror, with only enough light to see their own face. Then, they recite one of several various ritual chants. The most common chant among our friends was simply repeating “Bloody Mary” as many times as one is brave enough to do so. Then, Mary appears in the mirror. She reaches one cold arm out towards the victim, and either kills them, strikes them with an axe, or drags them into the mirror universe.

Why would anyone choose to play a game where the only goal is to summon an evil spirit and potentially get killed? Most kids start to play this game as an early experiment in flirting with danger. Think of it as an intermediate step between children doing dumb, dangerous things because they don’t know better, and teenagers doing dumb, dangerous things although they should know better. The game makes you feel both scared and brave at the same time when it’s your turn. Why not impress your friends by “bravely” doing something “dangerous,” when there’s no real risk, because Bloody Mary is just a bluff…right?

Oh, and the adolescent urge to flirt with danger is a ubiquitous phenomenon, with a name. Be sure to check out this episode’s sister article on The Robinson Age.

Mirror Gazing and Seeing Things

Mirror gazing is a divination technique in both modern witchcraft and psychic activity, and in older folklore divination games. Perhaps this is because mirrors are a portal. Or, perhaps this is because mirror gazing can trigger optical illusions, especially in the dark.

The Troxler Effect

The illusion occurs due to the Troxler effect, a phenomenon where the brain adapts to constant stimuli. First, you fix your gaze on a single point for an extended period. Over time, your neurons stop responding to the unchanging input, causing the image to appear blurry, faded, or distorted until you blink or shift your focus.

The most common Troxler effect people see during mirror gazing is that of a face. Usually, the gazer will see their own face in the correct spot, but mutated into a face they don’t recognize after a while. This specific Troxler effect phenomenon doesn’t have an official name, but some authors refer to it as strange-face-in-the-mirror-illusion. Like these authors, who discovered during one mirror-gazing study that depressed subjects experience the phenomenon far less significantly, compared to content controls.

What is Pareidolia?

When one sees a foreign face in the mirror in addition to their own face, that might be a slightly different phenomenon occurring. The fusiform gyrus in the human brain is hardwired to recognize faces. Even newborns show more interest in properly arranged face-like features than they do in scrambled ones. This face-detection system is so sensitive that it often finds faces where none exist, driven by our brain’s need to create meaning from disordered sensory input. When you focus very hard on one spot, the Troxler effect causes the rest of the image to blur, which might hilight the basic shapes within the blurred background, some of which are likely to form the vague shape of a face, because that’s what the brain wants to see.

It’s also good to know that there are some things computers still don’t understand, that are uniquely human. Want an example? Ask your favorite AI to generate an optical illusion like pareidolia, and you’ll see what I mean.

What is Prosopagnosia, or Being Face-Blind?

Are you one of those people who says “I may not remember your name, but I never forget a face!”? Well, good for you. Diana’s the opposite. Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, is a neurological disorder that impairs face recognition, affecting about 2% of the population. Most cases are developmental, often running in families and linked to genetic factors. Less commonly, it results from brain damage due to stroke, injury, or disease. Those affected rely on cues like hair, outfit, scars, voice, or movement patterns to identify others. In rare cases, faces can appear to be non-face objects, creating a reverse pareidolia effect.

Diana has had prosopagnosia since childhood, so don’t feel insulted if she doesn’t recognize you at a chance meeting. She didn’t realize she couldn’t recall faces until she got glasses at age 10. She always used clothing to recognize people short-term, and the sound of someone’s gait and voice to recognize them later on (after they’ve changed clothes). This, of course, made it nearly impossible for her to recognize familiar faces in (unfamiliar) photographs.

After learning more about the disorder, she’s now taught herself to cope by meticulously memorizing the facial feature ratios of familiar faces, kind of like facial recognition software. Strangely, this practice has made her more likely than others to recognize a resemblance between two people that most folks wouldn’t notice until the faces are put side by side. For example, how much Josephine Park (from the horror film Attachment) resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What Do You See in The Mirror?

The scientific study of illusions is fascinating, isn’t it; to objectively study a subjective phenomenon? Here at Homespun Haints, we love speculating about spectral science for fun, but what’s really fun is hearing about the subjective experiences of our haunted guests. Do you have a story from a time when you played the game of Bloody Mary, and it went wrong—or worse, went right? Do you have arcane knowledge on the origins of the Bloody Mary urban legends, or what ever happened to her baby? Why not submit your tale to tell it on a future episode? Just thinking about all the poor children who’ve been sucked into the mirror makes today a spooky day!