My Bloody Mary

 Author’s Note: I wrote this little piece as an assignment for my class on the folklore of New England, where we were asked to describe a local narrative we grew up with. The Bloody Mary of my own elementary school, I learned, was rather unique in the grand scheme of the Bloody Mary mythos- whether because the students of my school were particularly morbid, and I can confirm have continued to be well into adulthood, or because stories in the hands of children have the habit of spiraling wildly out of control remains to be known. I have stricken the names and places used in my actual assignment, but everything in this little piece is nonfiction. Including the ghost herself. What, are you going to prove me wrong?

 Next to my town’s elementary school, there was a large brick building, totally abandoned since the 1920’s. Myself and my classmates, eight years old and burning with curiosity and mayhem, quickly became obsessed with it through stories told by older siblings. Our latest attempt at digging a hole under the fence to explore it foiled, we resorted to having me, the tallest of the bunch, stand on top of the monkey bars to see if I could peer through the dirty windows. I craned and craned, until finally, I saw it: a pale, slender hand, draped in wisps of ratted fabric. I dropped to the ground in a whirlwind of dried leaves and grabbed my best friend by the shoulders.

 “I saw her”, I said to the gasps of my little audience, “I saw Bloody Mary!”

 By lunchtime, tales of my sighting had whirled around the fourth grade class, peppered with the knowledgeable looks and certainty in the fantastic that only small children could have. A friend, who’s older sister had been the first to pass the story down, very seriously told the class that Bloody Mary was a woman who wanted children over anything else. Her husband killed her when she became pregnant, which was why she was bloody and a ghost, you see. A classmate, in a frightened whisper, wondered if that’s why she was next to the school- was she here to steal the children away herself? A student ran from the bathroom, followed by a bemused teacher, and with excited breaths told us that she saw her too- pinned to the bathroom wall with a fork in her skull, dripping blood and brain matter all over the floor… But when she looked again, the apparition was gone. The teacher fought her way through her badgering charges, shook her head and told us only that ghosts aren't real and the building next door was nothing more than an old factory. Of course, we knew better than some grown up.

 As the week progressed, Bloody Mary sightings came flooding in. The bathrooms, the third floor hallway, rattling in the janitor’s closet. There was a furious back and forth about the best way to summon her to prove she was real: a rose stuck through the spine of a black notebook, with your wish written inside, some said, or her name written in your own blood on a mirror. Always in a darkened bathroom, always in a group of three. If someone managed to do it, the story went, and they survived the encounter without being stolen away to be her child in the afterlife, she would grant them one wish each. Anything within our little imaginations. The theories went unproven, as three people could never agree to try at once (and we feared our parent’s reactions to bloody fingertips more than some ghost). When the last of the trees lost its leaves and frost began to spread across the ground, the story had dwindled, unproven and replaced with the much more topical Belwitch. Those of us with younger siblings already planned to tell them the stories of our own Bloody Mary, reveling in the thrill of fear and the odd sense of community that came from being a herd of unruly children with a common enemy. Fourth grade came and went, and we moved on.

 Over ten years later, I stood on top of the monkey bars, now tall enough to see clearly through the windows. I laughed, and pulled my friend up with me.

 “Look,” I said, pointing, “you see? It’s Bloody Mary!”

 From behind the weathered glass, the serene and cobweb coated face of a mannequin smiled back.