The Bloody Mary is the legend of a spirit, apparition, or ghost summoned to reveal the future. It is said that if she repeats her own name, she will be reflected in the mirror. Bloody Her Mary's appearance can be benign or malignant, depending on historical variations of the legend. Bloody Mary performances are mostly seen in group games. Once upon a time, a divination ritual recommended that a young woman carry a candle and a hand mirror and climb backwards up the stairs of a darkened house. When they look in the mirror, they should be able to catch a glimpse of her future husband's face. However, it was possible that her skull (or Grim Reaper's face) could be seen instead, suggesting that she would die before marrying.
In today's ceremonies, Bloody Mary is said to appear as an individual or group, ritually chanting her name and performing acts of cataptoromania. This is done by repeatedly chanting her name into a mirror placed in a dimly-lit or candle-lit room. The name must be uttered thirteen times (or some other specified number of times). The Bloody Mary apparition allegedly appears as a corpse, witch, or ghost that can be friendly or evil, and is sometimes seen covered in blood (hence the name). The lore surrounding the ritual states that participants may endure the apparition screaming at them, cursing them, strangling them, stealing their soul, drinking their blood, or scratching their eyes out. Some variations of the ritual call Bloody Mary by a different name—"Hell Mary" and "Mary Worth" are popular examples. The modern legend of Hanako-san in Japan strongly parallels the Bloody Mary mythology.Staring into a mirror in a dimly-lit room for a prolonged period can cause one to hallucinate. Facial features may appear to "melt", distort, disappear, and rotate, while other hallucinatory elements, such as animal or strange faces, may appear. Giovanni Caputo of the University of Urbino writes that this phenomenon, which he calls the "strange-face illusion", is believed to be a consequence of a "dissociative identity effect", which causes the brain's facial-recognition system to misfire in a currently unidentified way. Other possible explanations for the phenomenon include illusions attributed, at least partially, to the perceptual effects of Troxler's fading and possibly apophenia. For even self-hypnosis.[citation needed There is some debate on the identification of Bloody Mary and if she is based on a real woman. A number of historical figures have been put forward as candidates for 'Mary' including Mary I of England (daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon), who had around 300 religious Protestant dissenters burned at the stake during her reign, earning her the nickname 'Bloody Mary'; Elizabeth Báthory, a 17th-century Hungarian countess who allegedly tortured and killed around 650 girls and women, bathed in their blood, and was accused of vampirism;and Mary Worth, who has been identified as either a woman who killed slaves escaping the American South via the Underground Railroad or a woman who was burned at the stake during the Witch trials in the early modern period.
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