Light as a feather, stiff as a board! Learn about the history of girls' slumber parties and why they're filled with some of your favorite creepy games
I NEVER WANTED to meet Mary. Sure, I had heard about her. We had all heard about her. My teenage friends called her “Bloody Mary,” “Mary Worth,” or “the Witch Mary.” She passed through mirrors on mischievous nights when girlish giggles and flickering red candles tempted her out of the darkness. But during one childhood slumber party, my 11-year-old girlfriends and I took turns gazing into the bathroom mirror while chanting, “Mary Worth. Mary Worth. Mary Worth. I believe in you, Mary Worth.
Confronting fear—especially fear of the supernatural—is an adolescent rite of passage. Psychologists refer to these ages between 9 and 12 as the “Robinson ages”—the awkward liminal stage when children crave and fear danger. This testing period ripens our imagination with creative storytelling and risky dares that heighten a child’s sense of identity. And let’s face it, it’s far easier to stare at mirror ghosts while we have the support of our friends.
As cholera and tuberculosis ran rampant through nurseries, doctors recommended children have separate bedrooms to contain diseases. To the Victorians, sleeping was serious business, and only the undead stayed awake. For this reason, young women infected with tuberculosis were believed to be victims of vampires who fed on their blood while they slept.
For example, Wyoming’s Rawlins Republican of 1908 mentions a slumber party given by Miss Irene Daley at which fortune telling was one of the attendees’ activities. And Colorado’s Salida Mail newspaper recounted a 1909 sleepover where attendees told “awful ghost stories stored away in the memory of each girl, and which it is said they carried out in pantomine [sic] with the effect of frightening even themselves.” By 1920, other mystical activities begin to slip into these accounts.
These days, however, Bloody Mary is not just an American ghost. Ethnologist Petr Janecek notes that, through globalization, the same scary lady has made her way into Czech children’s folklore and appears as Krvavá Máří. In Sweden, she is known as Bloody Black Madame, White Ma- dame, Dirty Madame, and Creepy Madame. In Spain, girls must beckon Verónica. In Germany, she answers to Heilige Blutige Maria . And in Russia, she is “the Queen of Spades.
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