Mrs. Ydoolb: A Bloody Mary Story
The substitute teacher arrived on a Tuesday morning like a shadow cast by nothing at all.
"Good morning, class. I am Mrs. Ydoolb."
Someone in the back row snickered. "Did she just say 'Ye-doob'?"
"It's pronounced Ee-DOOL-bee," the substitute teacher corrected sharply, writing her name on the whiteboard in careful letters. "Mrs. Ydoolb. Y-d-o-o-l-b."
More snickers rippled through the classroom. Jenna had to admit, it was a pretty weird name. Mrs. Ydoolb's smile tightened as she heard the muffled laughter, her chalk pressing harder against the board.
Mrs. Ydoolb was tall and pale, with dark hair pulled into a severe bun that looked like it hadn't been disturbed since the 1950s. Her dress was navy blue with small white buttons that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. When she smiled—which she did often and without reason—her teeth appeared too sharp, too numerous.
"Today we'll be studying reflection in literature," she announced, her voice carrying an odd echo despite the cramped classroom. "But first, I need you all to turn your desks to face the windows. Natural light is so much better for learning, don't you think?"
The students grumbled but complied, metal legs scraping against floor tiles. As they repositioned themselves, Jenna caught something in her peripheral vision that made her freeze.
In the window's reflection, she could see every student's desk, every backpack, every pencil case. She could even see herself, bent over as she dragged her desk into place.
But Mrs. Ydoolb was missing.
The teacher paced at the front of the room, adjusting her papers, speaking in that echoing voice — yet in the glass, there was nothing where she should have been. Just an empty stretch of floor.
Jenna blinked hard, certain she was seeing things. When she looked again, Mrs. Ydoolb was staring directly at her, that too-wide smile stretching across her pale face.
"Is there something wrong, dear?"
"N-no, ma'am."
"Wonderful. Now, as I was saying about reflection..."
Jenna spent the rest of class period trying to make sense of what she'd seen. Something about their substitute teacher bothered her beyond the missing reflection—something familiar and wrong that she couldn't quite place.
It wasn't until the next day, sitting in study hall and staring at the attendance sheet Mrs. Ydoolb had left on her desk, that the realization hit her like a sledgehammer.
She pulled out her notebook and carefully wrote the letters: Y-d-o-o-l-b.
Then, beneath it, she wrote them backward: b-l-o-o-d-y.
The pencil slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor.
"Oh crap," she whispered.
At lunch, Jenna showed Maya and Tyler her notebook discovery, the backward letters spelling out "bloody" in her careful handwriting.
Tyler leaned over, his mouth full of pizza. "That's creepy. But probably just a weird coincidence, right?"
"You really think she's Bloody Mary?" He laughed, but it sounded forced. "Prove it."
Maya went very still. "That's... that's just a coincidence."
But Jenna could see in her friend's eyes that she didn't believe it either.
Tyler Rodriguez had never met a dare he wouldn't take. It was both his greatest strength and his most dangerous weakness, depending on who you asked. His mother called it "fearless curiosity." His teachers called it "reckless disregard for authority." His friends just called it Tyler.
"How?" Maya asked, though she looked like she immediately regretted the question.
"Easy. Bathroom mirror. Three times. You know the drill." Tyler pulled out his phone and switched to video mode. "I'll record the whole thing. When nothing happens, you owe me five bucks each."
The second-floor boys' bathroom was empty during lunch, which Tyler took as a good sign. He set his phone on the sink counter, angled toward the mirror, and hit record.
"Okay, here we go. Bloody Mary dare, Westfield Middle School, October fifteenth." He looked at his reflection and grinned. "This is for you, non-believers."
The first "Bloody Mary" came out strong and clear. His reflection grinned back.
The second felt heavier somehow, like the words were sinking into something thick and dark. His reflection seemed to lag just a split second behind his movements.
The third time, Tyler's voice cracked.
The lights flickered. The mirror's surface rippled like water, though the glass remained solid under his fingertips. His reflection smiled wider than Tyler's actual mouth.
"Oh, shi—"
The scream that followed echoed through the entire second floor. Students in nearby classrooms looked up from their work. Teachers paused mid-sentence. In the cafeteria below, Jenna's blood turned to ice water.
Maya was the first to reach the bathroom, with Jenna close behind. They found the door standing open, fluorescent lights humming overhead. Tyler's phone lay on the floor, still recording. The screen showed an empty bathroom.
But Tyler was gone.
On the mirror, written in what looked like condensation but felt permanent, five letters spelled out a name: RELYT.
"Tyler backward," Maya whispered.
Jenna picked up the phone with trembling fingers. The video showed Tyler saying the words, showed the lights flickering, showed his face changing from cocky confidence to pure terror. And then, in the final frame before the phone clattered to the floor, pale hands reaching out from behind the mirror's surface.
The principal found them there ten minutes later. The adults had reasonable explanations for everything: Tyler had run away (he'd been caught sneaking out before), the writing on the mirror was obviously a prank (probably Tyler's own handiwork), and the video was clearly doctored (kids these days with their technology).
But Jenna had watched Tyler's face in that final moment. She'd seen real fear. And she knew, with absolute certainty, that her friend hadn't run anywhere.
He'd been taken.
The mirrors started misbehaving the next day.
It began subtly. Reflections that lagged a heartbeat behind reality. Smiles that lingered after faces had turned serious. Whispers that seemed to come from the glass itself, too quiet to understand but loud enough to feel.
Mrs. Ydoolb banned mirrors from her classroom entirely.
"Vanity is the enemy of learning," she explained, confiscating a compact mirror from Brittany's backpack. She held it up to the light, her own face nowhere to be seen in its surface, then dropped it deliberately. The mirror shattered against the floor with a sound like breaking bones.
"Oops," she said, smiling that too-wide smile.
Jenna found herself checking every reflective surface compulsively, searching for signs of Tyler. Sometimes she thought she saw him—a flash of his red hoodie in a window, his face pressed against the inside of a bathroom mirror, his mouth moving soundlessly as if he were screaming.
Maya noticed it too. She'd grown quieter since Tyler's disappearance, jumping at shadows and flinching whenever someone said her name. During fourth period, she approached her locker with the same caution most people reserved for wild animals.
"It's just a locker," she whispered to herself, spinning the combination lock. "Just metal. Just—"
The door swung open, revealing the usual chaos of textbooks and crumpled papers. But in the shiny surface of the magnetic mirror she'd attached to the inside of the door, something else stared back.
Mrs. Ydoolb's face smiled at her from the reflection, though the substitute teacher was supposedly in the classroom three doors down. The reflection's eyes were solid black, and when it smiled, Maya could see too many teeth.
"Hello, Maya," the reflection whispered.
A hand shot out from the mirror's surface—pale, cold, with fingernails like broken glass. It grabbed Maya's wrist and pulled.
Maya had time for one strangled scream before she was yanked forward, her body somehow folding into the small mirror like she was made of paper. Her backpack hit the floor with a thud, papers scattering across the hallway linoleum.
Students who witnessed it would later claim Maya had simply run away, though none of them could explain why they'd thought they'd seen her standing by her locker just seconds before finding it empty. The security cameras showed nothing unusual—just Maya opening her locker and then static for thirty-seven seconds.
But the next morning, when Jenna worked up the courage to check the bathroom mirror, she found two names written in backward letters: RELYT and AYAM.
Tyler and Maya.
Tyler's name was written in what looked like frost, already beginning to fade. Maya's name was etched deep into the glass itself, permanent as a scar.
Maya was gone. Really, truly gone.
But Tyler... Tyler might still be saveable.
Jenna waited until after school, when the hallways emptied and the custodians moved to the far wing. Mrs. Ydoolb's classroom stood unlocked—the woman never seemed to worry about security, which should have been the first red flag.
The desk drawers opened without resistance, as if they wanted to be searched. Inside the bottom drawer, beneath a stack of unmarked papers, Jenna found a leather-bound notebook that felt older than the school itself.
The pages were filled with names written in that same backward script she'd seen on the board. Hundreds of names, maybe thousands, organized in neat columns. Most were crossed out with red ink that looked suspiciously like dried blood. But some remained untouched, and at the very bottom of the most recent page, written in fresh black ink:
RELYT
AYAM
Maya's name had a red line through it. Tyler's didn't.
Jenna flipped through more pages, her hands shaking. The names went back decades, maybe centuries. Some she recognized from local missing person reports that had never been solved. Others seemed to be from different towns, different states, different eras entirely.
At the front of the notebook, written in careful script, were what looked like rules:
The ritual must be completed by the summoned. Three times spoken, three times bound. Names claimed in reverse, souls preserved in glass. The marked may be retrieved before the crossing. The crossed are mine eternal.
Jenna's phone buzzed with a text from her mom, asking when she'd be home. As she looked at the screen, her reflection stared back from the black surface—and for just a moment, it wasn't alone. Mrs. Ydoolb's face hovered behind her reflection's shoulder, smiling.
Jenna spun around, but the classroom was empty.
When she looked back at her phone, a new message had appeared—not from her mom, but from an unknown number:
Soon, dear. Very soon.
That night, Jenna researched everything she could find about Bloody Mary legends. Most were folklore, campfire stories designed to scare children. But buried in obscure forums and digitized historical records, she found patterns. Missing children in towns where substitute teachers had briefly appeared. Mirrors that cracked spontaneously. Reports of a woman who cast no reflection.
The stories went back over a century, always following the same pattern: she would arrive during a teacher's absence, work her way into the students' fears, and then begin collecting. The children who said her name became marked, trapped in the space between reflections until she decided their fate.
Some were kept as playthings, conscious but powerless in their glass prisons. Others were consumed entirely, their essence feeding whatever hunger drove the creature that wore human faces.
But according to one nineteenth-century account from a town in Massachusetts, there was a way to trap her—to turn her own reflection-magic against her. It required courage, mirrors, and the one thing Bloody Mary seemed to fear most: her own name spoken in her presence, both forward and backward, by multiple voices at once.
Jenna closed her laptop and looked at herself in her bedroom mirror. In the glass, her reflection mouthed words she wasn't speaking:
Save him.
Jenna smuggled the mirror to school in her backpack, wrapped in her gym clothes to muffle any sound. It was an antique hand mirror her grandmother had given her—silver-backed glass in an ornate frame that felt heavy with more than just weight.
Mrs. Ydoolb was writing on the whiteboard when Jenna entered the classroom, her handwriting flowing backward before correcting itself. Today her smile seemed sharper, hungrier.
"Ah, Jenna. I was hoping you'd join us today. We're discussing... reflections."
The word hung in the air like a threat. Several students shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Everyone had heard the rumors about Tyler and Maya by now, though the official story remained "runaway students."
Jenna took her seat and waited. Mrs. Ydoolb moved around the room with predatory grace, her footsteps silent despite the clicking heels. In every reflective surface—the windows, the glass-covered posters on the wall—her presence was conspicuously absent.
"Reflections are fascinating, don't you think?" Mrs. Ydoolb continued. "They show us truth. They reveal what we really are beneath all our careful pretenses."
She stopped directly in front of Jenna's desk. Up close, her skin had a waxy quality, and her breath smelled like old pennies.
"Some people are afraid to look at themselves, Jenna. Are you?"
"No," Jenna said, her voice stronger than she felt. "Are you?"
The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Mrs. Ydoolb's smile faltered for just a moment, revealing something cold and ancient underneath.
"What did you say?"
Jenna pulled the mirror from her backpack and held it up, angling it toward Mrs. Ydoolb's face. "I asked if you're afraid to look at yourself."
The substitute teacher stepped back as if the mirror were made of fire. Around the room, other reflective surfaces began to flicker. In the windows, Jenna could see multiple faces—Tyler's among them, pressing against the glass from the other side, his mouth open in a silent scream.
"Put that away," Mrs. Ydoolb hissed, her voice no longer human.
"Why?" Jenna stood up, mirror raised. "What are you afraid we'll see?"
The classroom erupted into chaos. Shadows stretched and twisted across the walls. Every piece of glass in the room—windows, picture frames, even eyeglasses—began to show different images. Faces of missing children. Empty rooms. Endless corridors of mirrors reflecting nothing.
Mrs. Ydoolb's form flickered like a broken television signal. For a moment she appeared as she truly was: something timeless and hungry wearing the shape of a woman, her mouth too wide and filled with broken glass instead of teeth.
"You don't understand what you're meddling with, child."
In Jenna's mirror, Tyler's face appeared clearly for the first time since his disappearance. He was banging on the glass from the inside, his lips forming urgent words: Now! Do it now!
Behind him, barely visible, Maya's face watched sadly before fading away completely. She was truly gone, claimed and consumed.
But Tyler was still fighting.
"Everyone!" Jenna shouted to her terrified classmates. "Say her name! Both ways! Now!"
"Bloody Mary!" The first voice shook but held strong.
"Bloody Mary!" Another kid joined in.
"Wait, Mary Bloody!" Someone remembered to reverse it.
Mrs. Ydoolb shrieked, her form becoming even more unstable. Cracks appeared across her skin like broken porcelain.
"BLOODY MARY! MARY BLOODY!" The entire class was chanting now, their voices growing stronger with each repetition.
The mirror in Jenna's hands grew burning hot, then ice cold. The silver backing began to crack, and through the fissures, she could see Tyler reaching toward the surface from the other side.
Mrs. Ydoolb collapsed to her knees, her carefully maintained human appearance dissolving completely. What remained was shadow and hunger and the echo of countless children's screams.
"BLOODY MARY! MARY BLOODY!"
The chanting reached a crescendo. Every piece of glass in the room shattered simultaneously—except for Jenna's mirror, which blazed with silver light.
Tyler's hand broke through the surface.
The mirror exploded in Jenna's hands, but instead of cutting glass, warm light poured out like water. Tyler tumbled forward, solid and real and breathing, though his eyes held the hollow look of someone who'd seen too much.
Mrs. Ydoolb gave one final shriek before collapsing into shards of reflection—not glass, but broken pieces of stolen light that faded to nothing as they hit the floor.
The regular teacher, Mrs. Henderson, found them twenty minutes later when she arrived to collect some papers she'd forgotten. The official story was a gas leak that had caused hallucinations and broken windows. Tyler was discovered in a supply closet, confused and claiming he'd been trapped in the mirrors. The administration was grateful to have one of their missing students back and didn't ask too many questions.
Maya's name was quietly removed from the student roster. Her parents were told she'd been placed in a special program out of state. There was paperwork to prove it, documents that appeared overnight in filing cabinets, signed by officials no one could quite remember meeting.
But Jenna knew the truth. Maya was gone, her essence consumed by something that wore human faces and fed on childhood fears. Tyler had been saved because he'd been kept as entertainment, not food. Maya had been claimed entirely.
Tyler wouldn't look at mirrors anymore. He ate lunch with his back to the cafeteria windows and kept his phone face-down on his desk. Sometimes Jenna caught him staring at blank walls with an expression of profound loss, as if he were seeing something the rest of them couldn't.
Three weeks after Mrs. Ydoolb's disappearance, life at Westfield Middle School returned to something resembling normal. The broken windows were replaced. The bathroom mirrors were resealed. Students gradually stopped avoiding their reflections.
But late at night, when Jenna brushed her teeth before bed, she sometimes noticed that her reflection moved just a half-second too slowly. And once, just once, she was certain she heard it whisper her name in a voice that sounded almost like Mrs. Ydoolb's.
In the medicine cabinet mirror, behind her reflection's shoulder, something pale and hungry watched and waited.
The game, it seemed, was far from over.
Some mirrors, once cracked, never truly heal. And some things, once invited in, never really leave.
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved. This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog. Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission. This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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