Bride and Go Seek
Introduction edit
Bride and Go Seek is an urban legend about a recently married couple. The couple are happy married and everything is going perfect. They eat dinner and are having a huge party in celebration, drinking wine and dining well. The wedding is at the brides grandmothers house and soon the traditional hide and go seek game the brides family always plays gets brought up. The game is started and someone from the immediate family is the seeker (usually the husband or sister of the bride). The seeker after some time finds everyone except the bride. The whole party now searches for the bride but to no avail. The police come and also join in the search but no one can find the missing bride. The groom, family, and friends think she has run away and changed her mind about wanting to be married to the groom. The groom is saddened but decides that he must move on with his life. Years later the brides sister gets married and also has her wedding at their grandmothers house. Once again the hide and go seek marriage tradition is played and being much like her sister, she decides to hide in the attic where she knows no one will find her. She runs to the attic and opens a chest to hide in and discovers her sisters rotted remains with blood on her tattered wedding dress. Her sister had hidden in the trunk years earlier and when she got in the lid slammed on her head knocking her unconscious and locking the trunk.She tried to claw her way out which got blood on her dress but when no one found her she eventually starved to death.
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Trunk similar to those that were thought to contained the corpse
Origins; Where it originated from edit
The earliest reported hearings of this came from a 1948 Alfred Hitchcock movie called [Rope]. Two characters in the film reiterate a recap of a story they heard of a dead bride and a trunk. He does this because the food they are about to be served, from the top of a trunk, reminds him that one of the host's at the dinner party used to love to tell the story when he was there housemaster at there prep school. What he does not know though is that his host and the co-host have actually killed someone and put them in the trunk, adding irony to the story.
However a much older appearance of the tale comes from Thomas Haynes Bayley from a ballad he wrote called ''The Mistletoe Bough''. In the ballad which was written in 1884 depicts the same story of a bride gone missing only to be discovered dead in a trunk some years later.
In Terms of Society edit
This is a much feared scenario in modern day times because what should have been the start of a long and fruitful life was instead the end. What was supposed to be the happiest day for the bride and groom turned into the worst nightmare possible. This could also be feeding on our fears of good things going wrong in unexpected ways. When you think of hide and go seek you think of a childish game not as a way of dying. You could say a society would not make a connection to such a small happy childhood game to a horrible way of dying which shows our fears of happiness(childhood fun) destroying something in our lives. This legend also combines a fear of not only dying by yourself but also in a confined space and dying slowly by starvation. In society we mostly have enough food and water to get by and starving is a horrible though because it is slow and very painful way of dying. With modern medicine most people have long life's and suffer little but this happy bride suffered until she died. This also combines society's fear of suffering when they are dying and even though they could survive if they were not in the predicament there is nothing they can do. Everyone is afraid no a days of things being out of control, everything is controllable and being locked inside a trunk dying is not something that someone can control. This also tells us about society that we sometimes think innocent kid games are not of much relevance until a childhood game goes gruesomely wrong.
References edit
Mistletoe Bough[1]
http://en.allexperts.com/e/l/le/legend_of_the_mistletoe_bough.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/mistletoe-bough.html