Today is Friday the 13th! And we’re in luck, we have one next month too. Growing up, we made a big deal about Friday the 13th. The silly superstitions, the Friday night slumber parties, and the sleepover culture games we played to scare the living pee-pee out of ourselves.
After looking back at what some of these games were, I just can’t believe we actually played these games as young as we were! I don’t know what you young boys were doing. Probably off playing touch football or something. And we’re over here summoning demonic spirits in a dark bathroom.
Bloody Mary
I can specifically remember being with some of the girls from my Girl Scout troop. It was after school hours during a scout meeting. During a snack and bathroom break, a few of us went to the bathroom to play Bloody Mary. We all gathered in front of the bathroom mirrors. One of the girls turned the light off and we all started chanting, “Bloody Mary, I have your baby.”
The way we used to play, if you say “Bloody Mary” three times in the mirror, she leaps out and slashes your neck. Ok, not much better than soul snatching. But I do remember at one point a girl saying she noticed scratches around her collar bone. Who’s to say it wasn’t Bloody Mary herself having a little fun? Or just a young girl scratching herself for the attention.
Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board
The movie the Craft depicted this pretty well, minus the actual witchcraft part of it of course.
After years of trying and trying to actually raise one of our friends up off the floor, a group of my middle school friends and I finally succeeded. How you might ask? Physics.
Apparently there is a trick to this. The person lying on the floor to tighten up every muscle in their body rather than be dead weight. Lifting a 2×4 vs. a sack of potatoes. Works like a charm.
Hide and Seek in the Dark
Playing Hide and Seek is a whole different game when the lights are out. If it wasn’t at Girl Scout camp, my adventures in Hide and Seek in the Dark came when the neighborhood parents allowed all us kids to go back outside after dinner. After the sun went down and the street lamps turned on. We had a good hour or two, just as long as we stayed within certain parameters of the block.
One year at Girl Scout camp, we stayed at an old campground with large cabins. The rooms in the cabins had these creepy metal hospital beds for us to sleep on. Now, if you weren’t spending every evening telling ghost stories and playing scary games, you were doing it wrong. And these cold, dark, long hallways made it perfect for playing Hide and Seek in the Dark.
OK, so we might be too old nowadays to enjoy any of these childhood shenanigans. But it sure has been fun thinking about the games we once played. Whether it was at a friends sleepover or at summer camp, good times were always had and fun memories were surely made.
Now that’s what I’m talking about!
