Bloody Mary: you say it in front of a mirror and turn round three times..

Interesting point on the line above. This is, I believe, the old "Bloody Mary" story that was au courant when *I* was a littlun. Well, perhaps not exactly current as my grandfather admitted to hearing a variant when he was a kid.

In any event, last week I received a distressed phone call from a mom down the street. Gar (my imaginative lad) had told her sensitive little one the exact same story, only that the ghost of "Bloody Mary" resided in their elementary school boy's bathroom, and now her little tyke wouldn't go to the john unless a parent was with him.

I reassured her that I would look into it, and had Gar apologize and do the manful thing... he was just repeating what he'd heard on the playground, after all.

The astonishing bit is that the old story is still here after all these decades, word for word!

One wonders where the original stems from. It clearly predates the alleged 1970s source material quoted in the link above-- I know I heard it as a child, or a version of this story. Perhaps the origins are rooted to an earlier "Typhoid Mary" or maybe the "Hail Mary" prayer, perverted by the retelling? Who knows?