"Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. Informal writing assignment relating an American superstition to the superstitions of the Ibo people.

A childish superstition found in our society is about a woman named Bloody Mary. The story is that if you go into a bathroom and turn off the lights, and say "Bloody Mary" thirteen times, standing in front of a mirror, at the stroke of midnight, Bloody Mary herself will come out of the mirror and kill you. This superstition is very different from most of the ones that we have examined in TFA. I …

…created for personal gain. People create chain letters for personal gain, warning the recipients of the dire consequences that will occur if they do not participate. Perhaps, the Ibo people, long ago, encountered negative occurrences involving twins, so someone decided they were evil, and, from then on, everyone abandoned baby twins for fear of harboring something evil. All in all, superstitions often play different but sometimes congruent or similar roles in American and Ibo cultures.