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

Part of the preparation for Finnish children’s Ouija board sessions is removal 
of all catechisms, hymnbooks, and Bibles from the room. Children begin with 
simple questions, then ask more frightening questions such as when they will die. 
Virtanen suggests that what happens during Ouija board sessions is “a form of 
psychic automatism, an activity not dependent on normal consciousness. One of 
those present directs the course of the glass by his unconscious muscular move-
ments and the other participants interpret these messages from his subconscious 
as emanating from an outside agency—spirits or the devil” (80–81). Virtanen 
notes that Finnish adults no longer tell stories about Satan or practice magic to 
keep him under control, but children maintain a lively interest in this subject.
One of the most widespread rituals practiced by children since the 1970s has 
been the summoning of a frightening female spirit in a bathroom mirror. Janet 
Langlois identifies this pattern in her 1978 essay “ ‘Mary Whales, I Believe in 
You’: Myth and Ritual Subdued.” Legends about a girl who dies in a car accident 
after getting terrible facial abrasions emphasize passivity; after her death, the girl 
appears on a certain street corner in Indianapolis, asks some boys for a ride, then 
disappears from their car. The accident victim’s name is Mary Whales, Mary 

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Scholarship and Approaches 115
Worth, or Mary Lou, among other possibilities. When a child summons the 
ghost of this unfortunate girl, the ghost becomes an aggressive attacker, inflicting 
scratches on the face of the young person who dares to summon her. Some chil-
dren say that Mary Worth or Whales is a witch who died in Salem; others say that 
she died at the hands of a jealous lover or that she can foretell the future (9, 30).
Since Langlois’s identification of this fascinating set of interrelated legends and 
rituals, other scholars have studied their meaning. Bengt af Klintberg’s intriguing 
essay “ ‘Black Madame, Come Out!’ ” (1988) quotes a 10-year-old Swedish girl’s 
description of Black Madame 
(Svarta Madame),
who appears in a bathroom mir-
ror after someone says “I don’t believe in you, Black Madame” 12 times: “she has 
green hair and red teeth and luminous yellow eyes; she herself is black” (155). 
Black Madame is not the only name for spirits of this kind in Sweden; alternate 
names are Bloody Black Madame, White Madame, Dirty Madame, and Creepy 
Madame. Swedish children began summoning spirits known by such English 
names as Mary and Black Molly in bathroom mirrors in the 1970s, but the term 
Svarta Madame
became dominant. Results of Black Madame’s appearance vary, 
but she is commonly associated with good luck, bad luck, and, in the worst-case 
scenario, sudden death. Af Klintberg concludes that this ritual originated in Eu-
ropean fortune-telling games such as mirror gazing in previous centuries. Like 
television screens, mirrors provide “windows into the unknown” (162–64). In 
Sweden, children tend to downplay Black Madame’s seriousness: “Swedish child 
culture (and adult culture) is probably generally more dismissive of spirits than 
the American” (166).
Psychoanalytic analysis gives the summoning of ghosts in mirrors another di-
mension of meaning. In his essay “Bloody Mary in the Mirror,” Alan Dundes 
suggests that “Bloody Mary” rituals reflect girls’ anxiety as they approach puberty. 
According to Dundes, “the Bloody Mary ritual is a prepubescent fantasy about 
the imminent onset of menses.” Central to his argument is the Freudian premise 
that blood flowing from the head represents “upwards displacement” of blood 
from the urinogenital area (87). Dundes presents 10 texts from female narrators 
and considers other texts from the Knapps’ collection of “Scaries” in 
One Potato, 
Two Potato
(242), as well as Simon J. Bronner’s sample of “Mary Worth Rituals” 
in 
American Children’s Folklore
(168–69).
Although Dundes finds the “Bloody Mary” ritual to be closely connected to 
preadolescent girls, other scholars’ analyses have found the ritual to be significant 
for both boys and girls. In 
Legend and Belief
(2001), Linda Dégh presents a long, 
detailed “Mary Worth” text collected by Sue Samuelson from an 18-year-old 
boy (243– 44). This text and others support Dégh’s contention that “the key in 
this legend is believing and trusting” (244). My own essay “Ghosts in Mirrors” 
(2005) views this legend/ritual complex through a somewhat different lens, sug-
gesting that the ritual primarily offers an opportunity for “daring and testing” 

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116 Children’s 
Folklore
(187) by both preadolescents and college students. While preadolescence and 
the college years differ in many ways, both include fear tests that facilitate greater 
independence and a more complex sense of self.
Few folklorists have studied children’s folklore of the supernatural outside of 
Western culture. Margaret Brady’s 
“Some Kind of Power”: Navajo Children’s Skin-
walker Narratives 
(1984) offers important insight into Navajo children’s percep-
tions of the supernatural. Skinwalkers—witches that wear animal skins—often 
appear as characters in Navajo children’s legends and personal experience stories. 
At slumber parties and campouts on the reservation, children tell skinwalker 
stories along with such traditional Anglo-American ghost stories as “The Golden 
Arm” (100–101). Telling skinwalker stories maintains social boundaries, both by 
affirming that the teller is not a witch and by suggesting the need for a ceremony 
to counteract the effects of witchcraft (50).