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Posted: 23-12-2001 08:44 Post subject: Tragic Wedding legends

I was just thinking about a story which was given wide credence in the village where I grew up and I wondered if there were any similar stories from other areas. The story is, to my mind at least, a myth and seems to have certain characteristics which may be repeated in other places.
In the village of Selling, in Kent, there is a pond just down the road from the church called Ghostdale pond (sometimes Ghostall). The legend has it that a couple of hundred years (exact dates always unspecified) ago a couple were getting married in the church (which is extremely old, norman I think) Upon leaving the church in a carriage, the horses went out of control and crashed the carriage into the pond. The pond is reputed to be extremely deep in the centre, and the coach sank without a trace, killing all aboard. The ghosts of the carriage and its occupants are still reputed to haunt the road, and the pond, at certain times.
As a child, I was thrilled by this story and used to perform many ghosthunting expeditions with my friends, all to no avail,
I was just wondering if there were any similar stories from other places. The story sounds like an archetype, with great tragic elements, so I'm sure it must have surfaced elsewhere.

Posted: 23-12-2001 17:15 Post subject:

Jeez, living in the United States is SOOO boring compared to the UK it seems, I have nothing like that going on around me and I live in Cleveland (ugh)........... Dead / drunk

Posted: 23-12-2001 22:59 Post subject:

Probably the most popular tragic wedding story is the legend involving a bride-to-be and a trunk or chest. These 'bride-and-seek' tales end tragically in the pre-wedding game of hide-and-seek when the bride-to-be - who has hidden too well - is found suffocated in an airtight trunk that she could not open from the inside.

http://www.snopes2.com/weddings/horrors/hideseek.htm

My own work on road ghosts has led me over similar ground, chiefly in respect to the legendary ghost-girl of Blue Bell Hill, in Kent (UK) - said to be a bride-to-be who died in a car crash the night before her wedding in November 1965. The planned wedding is a well-documented fact. Less certain is whether the plethora of sightings of a young woman on the Hill relate to this tragic real-life event - which, regardless of the validity of the connection made by some between it and the ghost sightings, has certain givenly rise to and fuels the evolved legend.
Follow the link to read more, if you wish:

http://www.tudor34.freeserve.co.uk/blue%20bell%20hill.htm

A special sense of poignancy, of deepened sympathy is often evoked in cases of wedding tragedy. When happiness should be at its height, Fate strikes a crueller blow. The media are quick to recognise the powerful 'story' potential of these tragic events - the most prominent of which is probably the deaths of Princess Di and Dodi Fayad in 1997. The press made much of rumours that the couple had been planning to announce engagement or wedding plans not long after the date tragedy struck.
A few references from my files are below:

'Girl dies in car driven by her fiance', The Gazette (Maidstone), 18 February 1975, fp; 'Fiancée tells of wedding plans before fatal crash', Kent Messenger, 20 October 1967, p.3.
Another that is worth mentioning is that footnoted in The People's coverage of the 1965 crash ('Bride fights for her life on wedding day', 21 November 1965, p.10), which, in a reversal of roles over Blue Bell Hill, tells of a bride-to-be's wait by the hospital bedside of her fiancé‚ on the day they were to have
been married - 20 November - the same day as the Blue Bell Hill couple.

Back in the realm of legend, Michael Goss makes passing reference to a traditional ghost story (a tale of four tragic
bridesmaids of Great Melton, Norfolk (see Jack Hallam's The Ghosts' Who's Who (David & Charles,1977), p.24.)) in his book which displays an overt similarity to the 'bridal quartet' of Blue Bell Hill.
I came across another account involving a tragic female foursome, which bears some uncanny similarities to the Blue Bell Hill story (for instance, the fatal car crash in this story also occurred on 19 November - in 1987 (a Thursday)). In this case, however, instead of a wedding eve celebration, the four friends were out to celebrate the birthday of one of the girls, due the next day - the girl who would, for two reasons, become the focus of the story: for one, her body would be the only one not to be recovered after the car plunged off the Pacific Coast Highway near Point Mugu, along California's south coast; secondly, her
mother was said to experienced a pyschic identification with her daughter, having awoken at the time of the accident (around 2 a.m.) with a feeling of drowning.
Furthering the parallels between the incidents is the address of the key victim in each case: The bride-to-be in the Blue Bell Hill case had been staying in Woodlands Road, Gillingham, whereas the Point Mugu victim lived in Woodland Hills ('A Psychic Nightmare', Charles Berlitz's World of Strange Phenomena, Vol.1: Mysterious and Incredible Facts (Sphere, 1989), p.62).

A haunting case with more of a direct resemblance to Blue Bell Hill’s tragic bride-to-be is that of the ‘Ghost Girl of Fifth Street Hill’, outside Huntington, West Virginia. From a location that sounds in
character much alike modern Blue Bell Hill come accounts of a young woman who stands in the rain at the top of the hill (usually after midnight), thumbing lifts from passing motorists, whom she rewards after a few minutes by vanishing from the car. The first account appeared in a Huntington newspaper (not given) of 30 October, 1942, which recounted the experience of a cab driver who picked her up at 4.30 a.m. at the top of the Hill. Stopping at the bottom, as the girl requested, he turned to collect the fare only to find than she had vanished. In November 1958 a newspaper was describing the ghost in similar terms to the Blue Bell Hill girl: “she never says a word and she always disappears from the car like a puff of smoke when it reaches the stoplight at the bridge.”
A friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) 'explanation' relates the story of a young bride killed on the return journey after her wedding, when the vehicle she was travelling in with her fiancé and parents overturned in wet conditions at the foot of the hill. (See ‘Ghost Stories’ by Joseph Platania, for the Huntington Quarterly Magazine
(Issue 36), http://www.huntingtonquarterly.com/Issue 36/ghoststories.html).

A further - final - example is the ‘White Lady of Chickamauga’ (Georgia), said to have been a bride or a bride-to-be who, long after her death, still wanders the scene of this American Civil War battlefield in search of her lost love. Modern visitors to what is now a park at Chickamauga have apparently seen a woman in a white period gown around September or November, while others have seen a ‘ghost light’ roaming the battlefield after dark (see Christopher K. Coleman’s Ghosts and Haunts of the Civil War
(Rutledge Hill Press, 1999), Chapter 19 (‘The White Lady of Chickamauga’), pp.84-87.

Posted: 23-12-2001 23:58 Post subject:

There was an old folk song - 'The Mistetoe Bough' - about one of those bride and seek tragedies. It greatly impressed my rather morbid, 9 year old mind when I first encountered it. The groon frantically searching for his new bride and then, years later, the chest being opened to reveal a mouldering skeleton in bridal clothes:eek:

Carole

Posted: 24-12-2001 00:00 Post subject:

And there was, of course, Miss Havisham, who didn't die, but was as good as dead, shutting herself away with the remains of her wedding celebration.

Does anyone know if this characer had any foundation in fact?

Carole

Posted: 29-12-2001 23:56 Post subject: tragic wedding legends

I don"t know if this fits in but it made me pee my self laughing.When I was a student, I worked as a barman,and inevitably the ritzy wedding came up.The happy couple (or hostilecouple) had taken up positions and the nights proceedings were up to the grooms speach He stood up and said that he would like to thank his best man for looking after his future wife last night ,and sleeping with her.Then taking her hand he dropped it in the best mans hand,and said if you want her so much shes yours.,and walked out. The marriage was annulled as the groom hadnt consumated it,although the best man had ,apparently he had some explaining to do to his wife.

Posted: 14-01-2002 14:52 Post subject: Re: tragic wedding legends

Posted: 14-01-2002 22:36 Post subject:

Carole asked if Miss Haversham had a real inspiration and
I think, without consulting the sources, that she did.

Researchers found Victorian reports of an Australian lady who
took to a reclusive life among her bridal paraphernalia.

I think she was called Miss Donnithorne - that or something
very like it was the name given to the tale by Peter Maxwell Davies
when he used the basis for a chamber opera in the seventies.

Miss Donnithorne's Maggot - a maggot being an olde dance. Sad

Posted: 15-01-2002 03:24 Post subject: Re: Re: tragic wedding legends

Posted: 15-01-2002 04:01 Post subject:

Posted: 15-01-2002 08:04 Post subject:

'Kilo', Art, is the usual abbreviation for kilogram.

And distances in the UK are still given in miles on road signs, etc, but I reckon an increasing number of Brits are used to km as well.

Posted: 16-01-2002 22:33 Post subject:

. . . only because the E-bleeding-C has imposed it on us:hmph:

Carole

Posted: 16-01-2002 23:21 Post subject:

Too damned true...carole!!!!!!! Mad

Posted: 17-01-2002 14:42 Post subject:

I am far more at ease with metric weights and stuff, but I don't see the british believing in Kilometres any time soon. The trouble is that they are just too damn short. A kilometer is no distance, a mile is much more noticeable, you feel like you've gone somewhere if you have walked a mile.

Posted: 17-01-2002 15:27 Post subject:

I'm too lazy to read the other replies so apologies if this has been mentioned before but theres a pub in London near Liverpool Street Station called Dirty Dick's (or there was unless it's been called something like the Drunken Lizard!) . My grandmother used to say that a bride died on the morn of her wedding and that the heart-broken groom paid for the wedding breakfast at said pub to be left out as it was forever (or for as long at the land lords let him). She said that you could buy postcards of the table and cake draped in cobwebs. My nan was born in 1909 so I'm guessing that the story dates from the mid to late 19th century.