You’re ten years old. You’re at your best friend’s birthday party, a sleepover this year: An important rite of passage for any child. Even though you were all instructed by the parental units to go to bed no later than ten o’clock, you’ve stayed awake for hours afterwards, tucked into your sleeping bags and laughing with another in the dark. Out of the sea of pillows drifts a solitary whisper: “Let’s play Bloody Mary!” A hush falls over the group; one person scoffs, muttering, “That’s dumb,” but by and large, the idea appeals. “Who’s going to do it, then?” The group asks, struggling to keep their voices down in their excitement.
You lift your head from your pillow. “I will.”
A collection of hands pushes you softly yet firmly into the bathroom, shutting the door behind you and latching it tight. You turn on the flashlight clutched in your hand with a click. You turn towards the mirror. “Bloody Mary,” you begin. That’s one. “Bloody Mary.” Two. “Bloody Mary.” Three.
What will happen when you reach thirteen?
***
You’re 19 years old, and your parents have left you on your own for the weekend. You’re home from college for the summer, filling your days with a minimum wage job and your nights with whatever you can find to occupy yourself in a town that now seems far too small to you. What to do tonight? You’re not a party person, so the idea of calling everyone you know and having them get drunk and trash the house is out. But then, suddenly, you know exactly what to do. You call your best friend—the one who had that sleepover nearly a decade ago, with whom you’re still as close as can be. “Let’s play a game,” you say.
That night, you both arm yourselves with a piece of paper. You each write down your full names—first, middle, and last—before pricking your fingers with a pin and dotting the paper with a drop of blood. You go carefully around the house, turning out every light and switching off every appliance. Then, you stand before a closed wooden door, making sure to set your pieces of paper down in front of it. You each light a candle; once they’re lit, you stand them up on top of the papers. You knock on the door 22 times, with the final knock falling precisely at midnight. You open the door, blow out the candles, and close the door.
There. That should do it.
You both relight your candles and embark upon the strangest game of hide-and-seek you’ve ever played. If the stories are true, you know these two things for certain: Do not let your candle go out for longer than ten seconds, and do not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to be caught.
The Midnight Man is not a forgiving opponent.
***
You’re older than you’d like to admit, but you’re still fascinated by all those games you really shouldn’t be playing. Maybe it has something to do with the ritualistic aspects of them; maybe you’re drawn to the warning labels that always seem to accompany them; maybe you just like a good old fashioned ghost story. Whatever the reason, you decide that when your best friend is in town visiting for the first time in ages this week is the perfect time to play another. You friend will be your failsafe; the game, as they say, is afoot.
You start by setting up the designated room at 11pm. One chair faces north, with two other chairs flanking it, facing each other, an arm’s length away. You set a mirror in each of the two side chairs, such that if you sit in the north-facing chair—your throne—you can just barely see yourself out of the corner of your eye. You show your best friend the bucket of water and the mug you’ve set in the room, and you place a fan on low power directly behind your throne. Then you exit the room, the door left open, the fan left on.
At 3:30 in the morning, gripping an object of sentimental value in one hand and a lit candle in the other, you approach the room. The door is still open; the fan is still on; you are seated in your throne by 3:33. Good. That’s how you know it’s safe to proceed. Keeping your eyes focused on the darkness in front of you, you begin asking questions. You aren’t certain whether you’ll receive any answers, but if you do, they’ll come from the mirrors. Who will be speaking? You don’t know. But whoever they are, you suspect they might be worth listening to.
The game is called Three Kings… but is it you who are the king? Or are you merely someone else’s queen or fool?
***
There are scads and scads of games like these floating around out there in the ether, and thanks to the Internet, they’re more accessible than ever. Bloody Mary, of course, has a long tradition of being passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth; she may be the angry spirit of Queen Mary I of England, or she may be a car crash victim who suffered from horrible disfiguration named Mary Worth. The Midnight Game and Three Kings, on the other hand, are more recent creations that fall under the “Ritual” genre of creepypasta. For those unfamiliar with the term, “creepypasta” describes all those spooky stories the Internet has collected over the years; it’s a bastardization of “copypasta,” which is turn a bastardization of “copy-paste”—the method by which huge blocks of text get shared from person to person in the digital age. Most versions of the Midnight Game allege that it was once an old pagan ritual used as a punishment for those who disobeyed the gods; this claim is, of course, unsubstantiated, so apologies to all the actual pagans out there who keep having to explain that no, it’s not—it’s just a story. Three Kings, on the other hand, first appeared on the nosleep subreddit—the same place Boothworld Industries came from—and got so popular that it spawned its very own subreddit, Three Kings Corner.
You’ll notice that many of the ritual-type games involve mirrors. The idea is usually that by peering into the depths of its reflective surface, the mirror will somehow become a window, promising to show us ghouls, ghosts, or sometimes even glimpses of the future. Here’s the crazy thing: It’s not total bullshit. We do see things in the mirror when we play these sorts of games… just maybe not for the reasons those games would like us to think. Stand back, everyone—I’m going to try science!
In 1804, a Swiss physician, politician, and philosopher by the name of Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler discovered that if you stare at a single point for even a short period of time, other stimuli within proximity to that point will look to you like they’ve disappeared. This phenomenon is called Troxler’s fading or the Troxler Effect, and it’s incredibly easy to see in action. Try this: Focus your gaze on the black cross in the middle of the GIF seen below and stare at it for about 30 seconds.
Did the purple circles around the edge vanish? Gasp! It must be witchcraft! Or, y’know, just an optical illusion called the “lilac chaser.” You might also have seen a greenish dot circling its way around the image in a clockwise direction. Neat-o, right?
But we’re not done yet. In 2010, Giovanni B. Caputo of the University of Urbino’s Department of Psychology published a paper in Perception that took Troxler’s fading to the next level. Caputo had 50 people between the ages of 21 and 29 stand in front of a mirror in a quiet, dimly lit room for ten minutes; then, at the end of those ten minutes, each participant was asked to write down what he or she saw in the mirror during that time. The results do not sound like it was a good time: 66 percent reported huge deformations of their own face; 18 percent saw the face of one of their parents, but with some wacky and disturbing changes; 28 percent saw someone they didn’t know; 28 percent saw some sort of archetypal face, like that of an old woman or a child; 18 percent saw an animal face; and a whopping 48 percent saw what are described as “fantastic and monstrous beings.” What essentially happened is that Troxler’s fading caused each person to perceive certain traits as having disappeared, after which the Caputo Effect, as it’s called, caused the brain to fill in the gaps with whatever other information floating around it that it could. The result? Monsters. Monsters in the mirror.
But although Troxler’s fading and the Caputo Effect explain what we see when we play these games we shouldn’t play, it doesn’t explain why we play them in the first place. Me? I suspect it has something to do with the idea of tempting fate.
In recent years, Jane Risen of the University of Chicago and Thomas Gilovish of Cornell University have done a lot of research into what goes on in our brains when we tempt fate. Apparently it’s a three-step mental process: First, some behaviors make specific outcomes seem even worse than usual due to the fact that they highlight the contrast between what almost happened and what actually didhappen. Second, our survival instincts cause negative scenarios to fire up our imaginations more than positive ones. Third, the more you think about something, the more likely it seems to be true. (This is why we do things like second-guess ourselves even when we know our initial reactions to certain stimuli were probably right.) So, when you put all three steps together, you get this: nNgative outcomes feel worse after tempting fate, which makes us focus more on them than on the good outcomes, which in turn makes them seem a lot more likely to happen. The craziest thing about this whole process? We do it automatically. We’re hard-wired to want to tempt fate.
Add to that the biological triggers that cause us to take risks, even in the face of dire consequences, and, well, you’ve got something pretty powerful. Recent research focusing on neurotransmitters in the human body has revealed that one of the biggest factors in the risk-taking equation is dopamine. Not only does it help control motor skills, but also—and even more importantly—it’s our motivation. It drives us to seek the unknown, and it helps us deal with emotions like anxiety and fear. It’s what has charged explorers and innovators for centuries—and it’s what still charges us today to do crazy things like climb mountains and ride roller coasters and play games that could put our immortal souls at risk.
So, then, knowing these several pieces of the puzzle, I think the big picture for why we’re drawn to playing games we shouldn’t play looks something like this: Rituals have been performed throughout history for a huge variety of reasons. One of those reasons is rebellion, and tempting fate is at its core an act of rebellion. If we can gamble by, oh, say, attempting to invoke the forces of darkness or what have you, and win—the winning is important—then somehow it’s a demonstration of our strength. It proves that we’re the highest-functioning power there is. We control our own fates—not some oogie-boogie creature we’ve been taught to fear by our elders and (so we’re told) betters.
After all, we don’t really believe that Bloody Mary will burst out of the mirror and drag us back in with her, or that the Midnight Man will catch us and do unspeakable things to us if we don’t relight our candles in enough time… right?
Recommended Reading:
Better Safe Than Sorry: Why We Believe in Tempting Fate
Tags: bloody mary, lucia peters, mirror games, scare yourself silly
I have literally never been brave enough to finish Bloody Mary.
I’ve never been brave enough to try Bloody Mary. ::shudders::
I was going to be all like, “You know what, I will go try Bloody Mary RIGHT NOW” but then I remembered that I am staying in a musty dirty old hotel room in Beijing where there are weird faded stains on the wall that are probably tea and not blood, and you know what? I’m gonna wait until I get back to the US to try this one.
I did it in fourth grade, and to be honest, it still freaks me out. Hell, I watched the Bloody Mary episode of Supernatural several years ago, and I, a fully grown human, was afraid of my mirrors for months afterward.
WHY ARE YOU SCARED OF ME?I HAVE NOT HURT YOU NOR WILL I EVER………………..WHO AM I YOU ASK?I AM BLOODY MARY…………………
i’ve never been brave enough to try to start playing it!
I LOVE these articles
I went “yessss” very quietly under my breath when I saw this. I haven’t even read it yet!
Me, too; that optical illusion thingy was the total best!
I used to lay in bed thinking of Bloody Mary to the point where I HAD to get up and go to the bathroom to play the game in order to even get to sleep. I always kept a hand on the lightswitch, though…
This seems like a great place to mention that when I was parking my bike at work this morning I found a copy of “Michelle Remembers” <a href=”http://(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers)” target=”_blank”>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers) in a pile of junk outside the dumpster. I was really excited (it takes place in the city I live in! One of the buildings is across from my office!) and brought it in. When my boss got in, she came in to say hello and lost it when she saw the distinctive red hardcover on my desk. “Is that Michelle Remembers?” she asked. I said yeah, have you read it, and she freaked out and says that she’s never heard of it, but that she saw it, the red cover and the title in her dreams last night. She’s locked herself in her office.
o_O
WAIT, that book is about satanic rituals? Is that the one where they tear a cat open over the girl? Sorry for the gross question, but that was in a book I read in middle school, and I’ve been trying to remember what it was ever since.
YES IT IS
THAT BOOK WAS SO FREAKY
Isn’t it?! I was really excited when I saw it – now I am mildly perturbed
Isn’t it freaky how we associate items with terror like that? I had a book as a kid about haunted pets (it came from the Scholastic book sale, so it couldn’t have been THAT awful), all about cats and dogs who refused to enter rooms and behaved strangely and all that. That book scared me so badly that I didn’t want to TOUCH it. I didn’t want to go near it lest the ghosts get me. It’s so deeply embedded in my brain that it creeps me out right now, in the middle of the afternoon in the office. When I managed to throw it away at last, it was a crowning moment of bravery for me.
Books (and, I guess, DVDs/videos/etc) can be so weirdly and horribly evocative.
+1 for Scholastic book sale.
(it came from the Scholastic book sale, so it couldn’t have been THAT awful)
It really could have. You must have gotten higher quality Scholastic book sales in your childhood.
I always check out Moe’s behaviour when alone in the basement. If he’s cool, then I’m cool but if he’s staring intently in the corner or at the outside door, it’s heebie jeebies time (the frosted side is GHOST, the shredded wheat side is MOUSE).
There have been two books that I have had to remove from my bedroom as an adult before I could go to sleep:
And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (extra creepy murder!)
A Parcel of Patterns, by Jill Paton Walsh (extra creepy plague!)
They were each separately packed off to the library book sale posthaste.
Wait wait wait! Re: Scary Scholastic books! Has anyone read Stonewords: A Ghost Story? I read it in elementary school, and it has haunted my dreams ever since! Girl becomes friends with ghost girl, ghost girl turns mean but in vicious, pre-teen girl ways EXCEPT IMMORTAL AND ALSO A PYROMANIAC. There’s a dollhouse, and I think it takes place in Maine (maybe?)
My memories of reading it as a kid always take over my more current memories of re-reading it as an adult. I have the first book in the series, which I don’t think is the as creeptastic as the rest. Maybe I’ll reread it tonight and try to hunt down the rest of the series.
This was my favorite book in elementary school! I’d forgotten all about it, now I’m going to have to go read it. I swear, I read it maybe 50 times over the course of my childhood. I can seriously even picture the layout of the house in my mind.
It didn’t really scare me though? I was a weird child.
AAAAH I was seriously JUST trying to remember the title of this story last week! It was driving me nuts. I was almost convinced I had imagined it, or mashed a bunch of YA fiction together in my head into a single creepy / time-travel novel. Thanks, @christina and @Kelly, for proving to me I’m not totally unhinged (at least in this instance). 😀
Some other thoughts :
1) Seriously I’m so glad I’m not the only person who remembers this!
2) OMG WHAT IT’S A SERIES WHAT
3) Is it wrong that I’m sooort of tempted to order a used copy from the US now
light as a feather, stiff as a board
I was just trying to remember the name of that! So many sleepovers…
I LOVED THAT GAME SO MUCH.
I played this in the woods with some friends once as a preteen, and I swear to god that I did float, if only for a second.
Oh, the first Bloody Mary sleepover. I was totally convinced that it was Mary Tudor’s ghost and positioned my Protestant friends closest to the mirror.
*flappy hands* I loooove The Ghost in My Machine! Going back up to actually read this now.
I love your *flappy hands*!
My sister was so freaked out after a Ouija session with the neighbor kid that I had to help her. I made neighbor kid loan us the board as well as neighbor kid’s little sister, about the same age as our 3-year-old little brother. I made my freaked out sister watch as I instructed to two little kids to play with the board. No one literate ever touched the board and the result was predictable nonsense. My sister *knew* that would be the result. But she could not calm down until she saw it. We humans can really f- ourselves up.
This is the same sister who wanted to watch Hitchcock’s The Birds but could not do so alone. We were in college at different schools and she scheduled the viewing session for when we could meet at our parents’ house. She made me sit next to her through the whole movie, no snack or bathroom breaks. She clutched a pillow the whole time.
Her kids recently asked to watch the same film after Aunt RoseCamelia talked it up. My sister gave me a dirty look, but affirmed that it would be a very good film for them to learn from, artistically and cinematically. Then she flat refused to have it shown in her house. Decades later she is still freaked out. Those poor kids have to find a friend to rent it or stream it for them.
When I was 12 I made my little sister watch Poltergeist with me (on Betamax, natch – it was the 80s). But it was so scary we spent most of the movie hiding behind an album cover (remember – 80s). Can you guess what (80s) album it was? Can you? Huh?
Yes, it was Ghost in the Machine. I am not making this up.
I let a friend of mine talk me into using a Ouija board with her. When the planchette actually started to move, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of betrayal. I knew she had to be moving it herself and man…talk about feeling lied to. I’d have much rather nothing happened.
Do you feel she was conscious of her hand movement? Was she aware of her own motives?
I dunno.
She was super into witchy stuff (we both were, although I was a skeptic mostly there for the spectacle) and did automatic writing. To be honest, her automatic writing was amazing. She was normally about a 40-50WPM typist, but when she was working with her spirit guide, she could type up to 90WPM. When we were using the Ouija board, the spirit guide apparently got bored after spelling out like three words, so the planchette moved over to the image of the woman holding her hands above the board. My friend took this to mean she should quit with the board and move to the computer keyboard where she then started cranking out a whole bunch of stuff about past lives and such.
Edit: It took everything I had not to put spirit guide in quotes up there. I feel I deserve some sort of recognition for that.
Recognition given. Yes, you deserve it.
I swear to God, we once asked the ouija board to make the dog go upstairs AND THEN HE DID.
And then we threw the board away.
The real scary game you shouldn’t play is far worse than bloody mary.
It’s Cruddy Larry.
It’s conceptually the same, but instead of summoning a weird, demon form of Mary Queen of Scots, you summon Cruddy Larry. Knock three times on your mirror on Flag Day, and he appears. He’s this dude from Florida with one of those perm on the top mullets, really tall 1970s style socks, jorts and a fanny pack. If summoned, he’ll hang out on your couch eating takis and slim jims out of his fanny pack, drinking diet mountain dew, putting his feet all up on your couch. And if you ask him to leave, he tells you his house is still getting fumigated, or that it rolled away, or it got eaten by a shark (he’s always really unclear about if he lives in a house, trailer, or houseboat) . And if you just try to forcibly move him, he just lays there, repeating “No can do. I gotta stay here til some other little girls summon me”. Spooky.
Cruddy Larry *is* worse! Does he have a gold chain showcased in his chest hair? The term you are looking for is “tube socks”. I had several pair, having survived the 70s in person.
ETA: I only wore tube socks under long pants. I was *not* gross. And my Marcia Brady hair was perfect.
With shorts one wore “peds”, little white socks that top below one’s ankle. And there were cute, colorful little puffy poms at the back to keep your peds from slipping down into your Keds. That’s what girls wore, anyway.
I miss peds with pom poms. They might have looked kinda stupid, but they worked.
I still have a pair, from around 78/79. Green pompoms, in this case. The socks are perfectly good and I just never got around to throwing them out.
He does indeed have a gold chain, showcased by chest hair that cannot be tamed by his sleeveless undershirt. And his tube socks are definitely the gross kind, with that one color band up at the top.
Wait, has Mallory done a dirtbag haint entry yet?
…I like Slim Jims and Diet Mountain Dew.
Slim Jims and Diet Mountain Dew are one of the ways he gets you. Imagine: you’re a little girl, you can’t drive, you want slim jims and or Mountain Dew..why not summon Cruddy Larry? But then you’re stuck with him.
And he doesn’t share. He just wipes his hands on your mom’s couch. bwhahahaha!
Hahahahaha, oh nooooo! 🙂
candyman candyman candyman!
Watched that movie last year with 4 friends. We all admitted to being terrified of it as kids (it felt more real since we’re from Chicago). But we figured we’re adults now so we can handle it.
Turns out, 20-somethings scream just as loudly as children.
Vaguely related: I went through a phase aged about 9-10 where I would check every scary ghost story book I could find out of the school library and read them at night and then not be able to sleep for weeks after. I was a particular fan of murderous animal ghosts (black dogs on lonely country roads, and a memorable one about a skeleton dog that would climb in the bedroom window – I still don’t like sleeping with open windows). And also one about ghost children who live in the forest and have backwards feet. (What kind of weird fucked-up Catholic school library was this, in retrospect?!)
Oooh! ALSO we had a ghost called Pinky-Pinky who lived in the girls’ toilets at school and if you went to the toilet alone it would GET YOU. As far as I know this is a very specifically South African pre-adolescent girl bit of folklore: the artist Penny Siopis has made some magnificently creepy artwork about it which you should all google immediately.
That urban legend sounds like the Brazilian “Blonde in the Bathroom”. She’s said to be the ghost of a beautiful young girl who died tragically in a public bathroom (usually suicide in a school bathroom, but it’s a pretty mutable story). She has long blonde hair, and has cotton wads in her nose because it was bleeding when she died.
Apparently the legend started in Australia, made its way around the world, and hit the big time in Brazil for some reason.
…That gif actually has a green circle going clockwise, though. Doesn’t it? If you scroll down so you can only see a little of the bottom circles, you still see the green dot go through them every few seconds.
I think what you’re seeing is the after image from the purple- the purple blinking on and off on the grey eventually leaves a green after image.
When I was in 6th grade there was such a huge Bloody Mary fad among the girls that the principal did a special announcement just for us to tell us to knock it off. All the boys were bewildered and had to be filled in.
I was too scared to join in.
I’m not surprised the boys were clueless.
12 year-old girls are badass to a walk-away-from-an-explosion-while-putting-on-sunglasses level
When I was in first grade I was scared shitless of Bloody Mary.
Almost literally. I had the HARDEST time going into the bathroom at all, even in daylight. Some of my friends told me about her (I think in this version you had to hold your hands together in front of the mirror like you’re praying and say ‘bloody mary’ three times) and that entire summer was wracked with terror and a near phobia of bathrooms.
When I couldn’t avoid using one, I kept my hands firmly on either side of my body so they wouldn’t even go NEAR each other. I also started actually sleeping in my own room (rather than one of my siblings’, I was scared of sleeping alone but less scared than I was of Bloody Mary) because it was farther from the bathroom- because obviously even being in proximity to a bathroom in a place where you might accidentally touch your hands together is dangerous.
I was also nervous about windows near the bathroom because windows are very similar to mirrors, right?
Yes they are (sort of):)
i dont think windows are the same as mirrors. Im scared silly of charlie charlie and i dont even want to try play bloody mary. I know they are both nonsense stuff to scare the witts out of people but i never play charlie charlie my myself. Once when i was out with my friends outside my friends house we played it and i didnt sit down without shaking. When we played it i said nothing. i just watched, terrified that if i joined in i’d get cursed but now after reading this i feel Much much better and know the its phooey. IM SOO RELIVED. If i ever get the creeps because of those two games ever again im going to read this article and talk to a trusted adult. I know thats the most mature thing to do as a kid.
I love this post, I love all the links, and I have spent the last hour or so of my workday doing nothing but reading all of this.
And now I know why I won’t sleep tonight.
Any of those “stare at a friend/yourself in the mirror until the face starts to morph” things were unbelievably scary to myopic me who had put taken off her glasses for the night. Faces where just white blurs with fuzzy, gaping holes where eyes and mouths should be. Even now, as an adult with 20/20 vision I can’t look at myself in the bathroom mirror if I get up at night.
Do boys play these games? Because I’ve only ever hear of girls doing them.
According to guys I know, what boys did at sleepovers was dare each other to go out on the roof and then lock the window.
Mirrors. *shudder*
Though I blame Bette Davis and “Watcher in the Woods” for that problem.
By the fifth grade, I was super scared of Bloody Mary after hearing lots of stories from friends about their cousins’ friends who DEFINITELY died. I had a mirror in my room, and was terrified that maybe I’d accidentally say the words 3 times in my sleep or something, and started sleeping with the hallway light on, which started a small war with my parents over wasting energy.
One evening when my dad was saying goodnight, I reminded him to leave on the light in the hall outside my room. Exasperated, he said, “There’s no such thing as Bloody Mary! Here, look.” He turned to the mirror. “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody–” I lunged to turn my bedside light on, and then my mom was there asking why on earth I was screaming and sobbing, which lead to a small disagreement between my mom and dad about proper parenting.
The next morning my heart was STILL beating a bit too fast, and when my teacher asked me what was wrong, I said in all seriousness that my dad had tried to kill me the night before. Or maybe kill himself. Or kill himself in front of me. I don’t remember, but then the school called to have a chat with my parents.
Kids, amirite?
I still can’t sleep in total darkness, and don’t have any mirrors in my bedroom.
My issue with the bathroom mirror at night (until I have the door closed) has always been that the heroine (or occasionally the hero, but usually the heroine) is calmly doing her 3 a.m. thing, she looks up, and there’s a ghost/demon/serial killer RIGHT BEHIND HER. It’s much like my childhood reasoning that the monster always seems to wait until its victim has opened their eyes and had a moment to freak out, so if you keep everything up to your chin covered, and give no indication that you’re aware of the world around you, you’ll be fine.
Most of my fears are apparently influenced by cinematography.
im now terrified. i might read the article again to reasurre me…
Hmm. I never played these games. I figured that trying to convince my mother that it was Friday—- and not Wednesday; seeing an uncle after he came back from Viet Nam with a mohawk, a serious drug problem, and a new personality; and watching the grandmother we cousins called “Sea Hag” cooking in our kitchen or wanting to swab our throats with iodine just blew all that girly shit out of the water.
This was really fun to read! I was (am) one of those weenies who absolutely refused to play any sort of game like that. I also convinced myself that staying perfectly still in bed when going to sleep means that no otherworldly creature could ever find you. Basically ghosts are the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.
Also, this is kind of picky but the second person you cite from Cornell is named Thomas Gilovich (not Gilovish)!
Oh my GOD, Lucia Peters! Your website is basically the best thing on the internet, although I’ll be DAMNED if I’m going to read it after the sun sets. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
Wait wait wait! Re: Scary Scholastic books! Has anyone read Stonewords: A Ghost Story? I read it in elementary school, and it has haunted my dreams ever since! Girl becomes friends with ghost girl, ghost girl turns mean but in vicious, pre-teen girl ways EXCEPT IMMORTAL AND ALSO A PYROMANIAC. There's a dollhouse, and I think it takes place in Maine (maybe?)
My memories of reading it as a kid always take over my more current memories of re-reading it as an adult. I have the first book in the series, which I don't think is the as creeptastic as the rest. Maybe I'll reread it tonight and try to hunt down the rest of the series.
When I was a kid in elementary school in Baltimore in the ’80s, we had a local variant: Black Aggie, who like Bloody Mary could be summoned if you said her name while staring into a mirror at midnight. Between the Black Aggie stories and the Bloody Mary stories, I was absolutely terrified of mirrors for years.
Coincidentally, I was just on vacation in Providence and went on a “ghost tour” there with a friend, and the tour guide told us about a Victorian girls’ game where you had to hold a hand mirror and a lighted candle, stand at the top of a staircase with your back to the stairs, and hop backward down every step. If you made it to the bottom without falling and breaking your neck or looking away from the mirror, you were supposed to see the face of your future true love. Better than summoning a demon, but probably responsible for a lot more fatal accidents.
I have played all those games and the only ones that worked was THREE KINGS CORNERand Bloody Mary…when i played Bloody Mary she didnt attack me.She just talked to me…if you just want to talk without seeing her then say “Bloody Mary” 13 times and then spin 13 times .run the water and ……..there you go…you can hear her /talk to her without getting hurt or seeing her…TRUST ME IT WORKS
i am terrified of mirrors…always have been before bloody mary,candy man,baby blue,,black aggie…when i heard of them i got so terrified that i cant stand hearing people talk about mirrors
I am disproportionately glad that someone else does this.
Well, you can always play the Midnight Game, you know. Do it right and, well, good luck.
I read the article every time i get the creeps about ANY creepy game. It refreshes my mind and tells me that i was worried about nothing. I creep myself out by reading about creepy stuff and when i read this i realise i got myself worked up about nothing.