Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Cosmic Candy
Todd: A long, long time ago, one of the kids from 
Eight is Enough,
the little kid—
Collector: You mean Nicholas?
Todd: Yeah, well the little kid, he ate fi ve packs of Cosmic Candy and lots of soda 
and he blew up.
Nate: And all the other people on the show ate him.

---

84 Children’s 
Folklore
Todd: They did not! He just blew up.
Collector: Was this on TV or in real life?
Todd: No, it really happened. It was on the news and you heard the boom and 
everything.
When Mindy Jackson, a student at Binghamton University, was giving a barbe-
cue in her backyard in Johnson City, New York, in the spring of 1980, seven-
year-old Todd and five-year-old Nate came over to tell a few stories, which Mindy 
recorded. Around this time period, as Gary Alan Fine’s 1979 study “Folklore 
Diffusion through Interactive Social Networks” shows, legends about carbon-
dioxide-filled candy exploding in children’s stomachs were circulating actively. 
This exchange between Todd and his younger brother Nate is a good example of 
legend dialectics: a claim that might or might not be true, followed by doubt and 
then insistence that the story is true.
Mary Whales
Well, they say that Mary Whales was going to a party one night; and after the parties she 
asked her boyfriend to take her home; and he didn’t want to go home right then and they 
got into an argument. And so she was walking home that night in the rain and she crossed 
the street and got hit by a car and was killed. And they say that every time that it rains 
that she stands on the corner of 38th and Northwestern and hitchhikes a ride and if you 
don’t give her a ride you will crash at the next stop light. And if you do give her a ride she 
will tell you to take her to a big white house and by the time that you get there she will be 
gone and the back seat of the car will be wet.
And another way that I hear it is that she went to a party and she ask her boyfriend to 
drop her off at the drugstore and so he did. And she was walking home in the rain and she 
got hit by a car and she died in the hospital and she was buried two days later. And ever 
since then when it rains she stands on the corner of 38th and Northwestern and hitches a 
ride. And it has the same ending as the other one.
Thirteen-year-old Debra gave these two variants of the legend of Mary Whales 
to Janet L. Langlois on a questionnaire at Holy Angels Elementary School in 
Indianapolis, Indiana, on February 8, 1973. Langlois published Debra’s sto-
ries in her 1978 essay “ ‘Mary Whales, I Believe in You’: Myth and Ritual Sub-
dued” (18–19).
These two legend variants add substance to the ritual of summoning Mary 
Whales, Mary Worth, or Bloody Mary, which involves repeating Mary’s name 
a certain number of times while standing in front of a mirror in a darkened 
bathroom or other room. The legends, which follow the well-established pattern 
of the “Vanishing Hitchhiker” cycle, provide details about Mary’s sudden death, 
which may explain her desire to hurt those who dare to summon her.

---

Examples and Texts 85
In “ ‘Mary Whales, I Believe in You,’ ” Langlois analyzes the relationship be-
tween legend and game in relation to myth and ritual. Alan Dundes’s “Bloody 
Mary in the Mirror” (2002) applies psychoanalytic theory to this widespread 
phenomenon of the childhood underground.