Bride

The Bride is a scary story about a young woman who goes missing on the day of her wedding. It is based on an urban legend known as “The Mistletoe Bride”, “Bride and Seek” or “The Missing Bride”. A version of this legend appeared in the book Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

A young couple got married and, after the wedding, they held a reception in the bride’s grandmother’s house. All their family and friends arrived and they laughed, danced and sang, long into the night.

After the wedding reception, the guests decided to play a game of hide and seek. The groom covered his eyes and began counting to a hundred while his new bride and the other guests ran out of the room, looking for somewhere to hide.

Eventually, the groom had found everyone except his beautiful bride. The other guests began calling out her name and searched everywhere for the young woman. They began to grow more and more uneasy when they couldn’t find any trace of her.

Eventually they gave up searching and everybody assumed that the girl had run away and left her husband. As the weeks went by, the husband accepted that his beautiful bride must have had second thoughts about their marriage. He decided to forget about her and go on with his life.

A few years later, a cleaning lady was dusting in the attic when she came across an old trunk. Out of curiosity she opened it. Inside the trunk, she found the rotting corpse of a young woman, still dressed in a bridal gown. There was a wedding ring on one bony finger. It was the missing bride. She must have hidden in the trunk and accidentally locked herself inside. It was impossible to tell whether she had suffocated or starved to death, but her face was frozen in a silent scream.