You’ve all heard the one about the hook man, right? A guy and a girl making out, they hear on the radio that a deranged killer is on the loose, recognizable because he’s got a hook for a hand. The girl gets spooked and says she wants to go home. Here’s where the story goes in two directions. If the guy goes along with it, if he’s gallant and takes her home, they arrive at the girl’s house—to find a hook prosthesis dangling from one of the door handles.
If the guy doesn’t go along with it, if he decides he’ll just take a look around outside to settle the girl’s nerves so they can get back to business, then a short time later the girl hears a strange scraping sound on the roof of the car. She gets up her nerve, looks outside—and finds her boyfriend dead, hanging from a tree over the car. The scraping sound is the boyfriend’s fingernails on the roof.
That’s a nice little cautionary tale against trying for second base after the movie, right? Well, sometimes spirits use our stories to give them form. There are some real, nonsupernatural stories about killers stalking lovers’ lanes—anyone ever hear of the Son of Sam? And remember how he swore he saw a black dog telling him to kill? More about black dogs later…
Before the Son of Sam, right after World War II, there was a lovers’ lane killer in Arkansas. Since then, we’ve read about cases in Los Angeles; Norman; Oklahoma; all over the place. Some of them we’ve looked into and found a vengeful spirit who’s a little too hung up on teenage chastity.
Once we actually ran into a hook man. A killer with a big nasty hook for a hand. He put on a big show of morality and then went out at night and killed whoever he’d decided was immoral. Prostitutes, mostly, since they were easy targets. His evil persisted after his death, even after his hook had been melted down and recast into—of all things—a necklace given by a father to his daughter. The father was a pastor who didn’t always practice what he preached, if you get our drift, and his daughter’s troubled mind brought the hook man back through her necklace. Classic haunted object, classic vengeful spirit.
Here’s another classic. You stand in front of a mirror in a dark room and say “Bloody Mary.” Either three times, or thirteen times, or a hundred times. Maybe you do it at midnight, maybe you have a lit candle, maybe you spin around in circles, maybe you do it while walking up a stairway backward.
Who’s Bloody Mary? The name comes from England’s Queen Mary Tudor, who was notorious for her persecution of Protestant dissenters. But it’s been applied to a lot of people since then. Mary Worth, for example, accused and convicted of killing her children—but nobody is sure where or when. Probably in your town, a long time ago. Or Bloody Mary can be the ghost of a woman murdered right after her wedding, who might have been pregnant, and you can summon her by saying you killed her baby. If you do it, the story goes, and Mary appears, one of two things can happen. Either she’s going to tell you something about your future, or she’s going to tear your face off and kill you.
The mirror part of the story goes back a long way, farther back than most people probably know. Here’s what Dad said about it:
Divination by mirror has been practiced in nearly all cultures for as long as mirrors have been around. Before that, any reflective surface, especially still water, was used to prophesy or catch a glimpse of the future. Aztecs created TEZCATLIPOCA, “smoking mirrors,” out of mercury poured into a bowl. Queen Elizabeth I’s court magician, John Dee, prophesied with mirrors. Folklore from various places holds that if you perform a certain ritual while looking in a mirror—eating an apple, brushing your hair, conducting any one of a thousand “wise woman” domestic rituals—you will see your future husband. A variation on this is looking into a well at sunrise to watch what reflection emerges as the light starts to shine into the well. In many of these stories, the danger is that you might also see the Grim Reaper, which means you will die before marrying.
Tradition also holds that at the moment of a death, all of the mirrors in a house should be covered so they don’t trap the departing spirit.
It’s bad luck to break mi use they hold the future. That’s why the seven years of bad luck: you’ve broken your future.
And that’s why there’s a mirror involved in the Bloody Mary story. Anyway, if you’re a girl, chances are you were at a slumber party once and someone dared you to summon Bloody Mary. Or maybe it hasn’t happened yet, but believe us, it will.
Here’s our advice: Don’t. She might show up.
How do we know?
Because we’ve met her. Or maybe we should say that we met a spirit that used the Bloody Mary urban legend as a way to get itself back into the material world. We tracked down a ghost, eventually, of a murdered girl named Mary Worthington. Her killer cut out her eyes, and her spirit occupied a mirror in the house where she died. As she died, she tried to write her killer’s name on the wall, but she never finished it, and the secret died with her. Wherever that mirror went, she went, and whenever someone summoned her in that place, she came to life—well, “life”—and killed the summoner if he or she had a dark secret.
That’s how spirits work. They sort of lose their ability to think in shades of gray after a while.
Truth is, we’re kind of like that, too. Comes with the territory. Doesn’t matter how spirits get dangerous, whether they were evil or they just turned crazy from being stuck between two worlds. There’s black, and then there’s white. When spirits start hurting people, we take them out.