Seeking the Bride

It is a tradition to every marriage that after wedding there's a honeymoon. Couples usually go to romantic places, especially in Europe, to celebrate their unity and also to have a good vacation. It's also their first time to be private and be away from their parent's intrusion and influence - their first time to be husband and wife.

However, it is not an exception that honeymoons often are happy; that couples really enjoy their time. There are incidents when the two fall in an eventual breakup, ending their commencing relationship or worst, gone by a tragic accident. Well, chances always roam everywhere. Occasionally, they can be absent or present.

Anyway, the urban legend I'm referring here concerns wedding celebration and honeymoon.

I found an almost completely different but quite similar story from another country. I don't know if it is appropriate to compare our's to their's, but I saw it connected.

The Story

[Taken from the Internet:[1]]

A young woman was about to get married, and she decided she wanted to hold the wedding in the backyard of the large farmhouse where she grew up. It was a beautiful wedding and everything went perfectly. Afterwards, the guests played some casual party games, and someone suggested hide-and-seek so they could get the children to play too. It wouldn't be hard to find a place to hide around the house. The groom was "it," and the bride wanted to make sure that she won the game. When no one was looking she slipped inside the house. She ran up to the attic, found an old trunk and hid in it. No one could find her. Her new husband wasn't worried though, he figured she must have just gotten tired and went inside to rest. So everyone went home. The groom looked around the house, but he couldn't find her anywhere. He and her parents filed a missing person case, but she was never found. A few years later when her mother died, the woman's father went to go through his late wife's things that were collecting dust in the attic. He came to an old chest. The lid was closed and the old lock was rusted over and holding it closed. He opened the lid and was terrified to see his daughter's decaying body in the chest. When she hid there, the lid had closed and the rusty parts of the lock had latched together, trapping her there.

And here's ours:

[Taken from a Book:[2]]

A Japanese newlywed couple went to Europe for their honeymoon. In Paris, the wife spent hours shopping for clothes. At one trendy boutique, she decided to try on several dresses. So the husband waited outside the dressing room. A long while passed and the wife didn't come out. So the husband began to wonder what was keeping her. He inquired of one of the shop girls; she checked, then told him, to his surprise, that the dressing room was empty. His initial reaction was that his wife was playing a practical joke on him. So he went back to their hotel. But she was not there. Still thinking it was a joke, he sat down to wait for her. As the hours passed, he became more and more anxious. And when she had not returned by the following morning, he was distraught. He called the police, the boutique, and all the Paris hospitals. There was no trace of her anywhere. The police did what they could, but after three weeks, there wasn't a single clue. Exhausted and in despair, the husband returned to Japan. Five years passed. And then the husband, finally having gotten over the loss of his wife, received a phone call from a friend who had just returned from a trip to the Philippines. The friend told him that he had seen the wife in Manila - as the featured attraction of a freak show. With great sadness, the friend explained that the wife's arms and legs had been horribly mutilated.

And I found another version from the internet.

[Taken from the Internet:[3]]

The Missing Bride A Japanese newlywed couple went to Europe for their honeymoon. In Paris, the wife spent hours shopping for clothes. At one trendy boutique, she decided to try on several dresses. So the husband waited outside the dressing room. A long while passed and the wife didn’t come out. So the husband began to wonder what was keeping her. He inquired of one of the shop girls; she checked, then told him, to his surprise, that the dressing room was empty. His initial reaction was that his wife was playing a practical joke on him. So he went back to their hotel. But she was not there. Still thinking it was a joke, he sat down to wait for her. As the hours passed, he became more and more anxious. And when she had not returned by the following morning, he was distraught. He called the police, the boutique, and all the Paris hospitals. There was no trace of her anywhere. The police did what they could, but after three weeks, there wasn’t a single clue. Exhausted and in despair, the husband returned to Japan. Two years later, he found himself in the Philippines during a carnival. He stopped in front of a freak show in a shabby old tent. The sign above the entrance read “The House of Oddities”. Curious, the man entered and was disgusted at what lay within. Crouched in cages, he saw a collection of hideously deformed freaks. The bizarre denizens were terrifying examples of human misery. In the last filthy cage, he was horrified to see the featured attraction: A twisted, scarred and mutilated woman, rocking back and forth and groaning strange animal-like noises. The sign on her cage read “The Worm Woman”. She had no arms or legs. They had been hacked off and just her torso remained. Her face was covered with jagged scars from horrible operations and her mouth was sewn shut. As she turned her sad eyes up to look at him, the husband screamed as he recognized the birthmark on his wife’s face.

Well, both stories really are different because the first one died inside an old trunk after playing hide and seek with her groom and other relatives and friends invited to the wedding. While in our story, the Japanese woman just got vanish and later found mutilated in a freak show in the Philippines.

What made them quite similar is that both were couples and the female was the victim. But I'm not telling that the stories came from only one source - they're not.

There was actually another urban legend from another country where one of the characters just disappear and the protagonist searches her and haven't found anymore. In the end, the main character found out that she was already dead. I didn't put it here because the persons in the story were not couples but a mother and daughter.

I don't really know when and where did the story started to spread. I'm a bit sure that it didn't start here till I found an evidence.

I have questions on the urban legend (our's). How did the woman vanish? And how did she come to the Philippines? Paris is very far from the Philippines.

The story seemed to be made up by someone or not an original Philippine urban legend. If it is truly an urban legend, it is possible that the story came from Japan because all the characters in the story were Japanese, or from Europe, or really just an invention of someone else.

If you know another version of it or any information about the story, feel free to post what you knew in the comments or e-mail me. Thank you.

Sources:
[1] http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/classics/a/The-Missing-Bride.htm
[2] True Philippine Ghost Stories. Book 4. 2004. Gianna Maniego et al. PSICOM Publishing. ISBN 971-8995-99-4.
[3] https://plus.google.com/communities/111469882949028487861

Image Source:
http://mistletoematters.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/mtoebride1.jpg