Creepy haunted ghost mirrors

Mirrors, despite their ubiquity in our homes and workplaces have always retained something of the eeriness that came with their origins. Myths and superstitions about them are common; mirrors used to be covered upon a death in many homes for fear that the soul might enter them in confusion and become lost, breaking a mirror brings seven years bad luck, Vampires have no reflection for one must have a soul to have a reflection.

Most of the book titles, authors, and films mentioned here can be reserved in your library. 

In Feng Shui one's bed should never face a mirror, and there were the urban legends about Bloody Mary and the like. From the earliest times, mirrors were often used as ritual objects in long dead religions and dark mirrors were indispensable tools for ''scrying'', a kind of divination using reflections used by Nostradamus, among others (the Mirror of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings is a reference to this ancient practice).

Mirrors have a strange quality in that the self we see is us...but not quite, us, a reversed self so it's not surprising  they have long been associated with the otherworldly, and many have believed them to be portals to other worlds, other selves, other dimensions or that evil spirits could use them as portals to our world and our homes.

It was natural, therefore, that mirrors would feature in the worlds of supernatural fiction and the broader literature of the fantastic, having made only a short journey from the world of legend and folklore, to the world of weird fiction. I have not been able to find all the ghost or horror stories-and films-that involve mirrors, so I can only present  a selection here, but I  hope to add to this list, as I learn more.  

Probably the first strange mirror we all encountered was the magical mirror in the story of Snow White: ''Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?''

The most famous example in literature of a mirror as a door to another world is familiar to us all, the titular mirror in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. A mirror appears in Edgar Allen  Poe's story, William Wilson, a story about Doppelgangers, which could be said to be mirrors of the self.

That other giant of American supernatural fiction, H.P. Lovecraft, co-authored a story with Henry S Whitehead called, The Trap. Our protagonist, acquires an old mirror in a derelict house in the Virgin Islands and brings it to a school in Connecticut where he is a teacher. One day, a pupil draws his attention to an anomaly in the mirror, a strange whorling effect in the glass which seems to generate a peculiar fascination in the eye and the mind. They intend to investigate further, but the next morning the boy is missing and no trace of him can be found.

Of course Stephen King has a story on the theme, The Reaper's Image, and although it is just a short incident in Peter Straub's Shadowland we must include Tom Flanagan's terrifying encounter with The Collector in the bathroom mirror. Sarah Water's novel, The Little Stranger, has a mirror. A recent example is, The Reflecting Eye by John Connolly; in his collection of supernatural stories Nocturnes. But perhaps the most unexpected entry in this list is the terrifying; The Entrance by Gerald Durrell, a ghoulish tale included in his humorous and otherwise innocuous collection, The Picnic and Other Pandemonium.   

Of course, the cinema and television soon discovered the possibilities of the mirror and we have a number of examples here. The two films that concern themselves most directly with haunted mirrors are the Kiefer Sutherland movie Mirrors and Oculus with Karen Gillan. However several other stories include mirrors as part of the paraphernalia of dread and terror.

Examples include The Skeleton Key (2005), Mirror, Mirror (1990), Friend Request (Unfriend) (2016), Candyman,Poltergeist 3, and Amityville: A new generation.

In The Vault of Horror, an anthology horror film from 1973, there is an episode The Gate Crasher where a man buys an antique mirror from an eerie, backstreet antique, (the proprietor played by Peter Cushing). Some Dracula films include a scene where it is discovered that the Count has no reflection, most dramatically in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Submitted by Ger D.