Bloody Mary is a ghost or witch featured in Western folklore, which is said to appear in a mirror when her name is called three times.
Names
Other very similar tales use different names for the character including Mary Worth, Mary Worthington, and Hell Mary among others.
Origin
Bloody Mary is typically described as a child-murderer who lived in the local city where the legend has taken root years ago. On the other hand, various people have surmised that the lore about taunting Bloody Mary about her baby may relate her tenuously to folklore about Queen Mary I, known in history by the sobriquet "Bloody Mary". The queen's life was marked by a number of miscarriages or false pregnancies. Speculation exists that the miscarriages were deliberately induced. As a result, some retellings of the tale make Bloody Mary the queen driven to madness by the loss of her children. It is likely, however, that Queen Mary I provided only her nickname to the Bloody Mary of folklore. She is also confused in some tellings of the story with Mary Queen of Scots.
Folklore
In folklore and children's street culture, "Bloody Mary" is a game in which a ghost of the same name (or sometimes other names, such as "Mary Worth") is said to appear in a mirror when her name is stated three times, though there are many variations. Other variations say that the querent must not look directly at her, but at her image in the mirror; she will then reveal the querent's future, particularly concerning marriage and children. Other tales say she kills the person who summoned her. Some even specify that she scratches their eyes out.
Art/Fiction
The legend of Bloody Mary has served as inspiration for movies and television shows dealing with the supernatural. In 2008, for its annual "Halloween Horror Nights" events, Universal Studios Florida developed a new variation of the legend. In their version, "Mary" was a doctor who studied fear by exposing her patients to the thing they feared the most. During the experiments, Mary would sit behind a one-way mirror; the patients would shout her name three times when they wanted the experiment to end.
The TV series Supernatural, in the episode "Bloody Mary", featured a this ghost. Mary supposedly had a dark secret, and would kill people who summoned her if they had a dark secret in their past, by scratching their eyes out, or making their eyes bleed. In the episode, she was killed when the protagonists made Mary look into a mirror herself.