Urban Legends

Runaway Bride

Some years ago, a young man and his new bride went to Paris for their honeymoon. While the happy couple was wandering around the city, taking in the sights, they decide to go shopping. The wife goes to a trendy clothing shop and tries on several dresses while her husband waits outside the dressing room. Some time passes and his wife doesn't return. The husband starts to wonder why his wife is taking so long.

He asks a female assistant at the shop to go check on his wife and tell her to hurry up. The assistant returns and said his wife isn't in the dressing room. He is confused and goes to look for himself. The dressing room was completely empty. They do a search of the entire store, but his wife is nowhere to be found.

The husband thought his wife was playing a practical joke on him and went back to the hotel room to wait for her, but she never showed up. As the hours passed, the husband becomes more and more worried. By morning, she had yet to return to their room, so he called the police.

Within 48 hours, the Parisian authorities were looking for the missing American bride. They put her description over the radio stations and TV news channels. They described her as a tall American woman, 24 years of age, with a birthmark on her left cheek. It seemed everyone in Paris was on the lookout for the missing woman, but no one had seen her. It was as if she had vanished into thin air.

The police did all that they could, but after three weeks, they called the search off. The husband began to think his wife had second thoughts about their marriage and must have simply ran off and left him. Six months after she disappeared, he finally left Paris and returned home, depressed and exhausted.

As the months turned to years, the man gave up on finding his beautiful wife. His life had fallen apart. His grief was so strong, he was unable to hold a job or go on with his life. He became a drifter, wandering aimlessly from place to place, country to country, letting fate take him where it may.

Two years later, he found himself at a carnival in the Philippines. He stopped in front of a shabby old tent that was home to a freak show. The sign above the entrance read "The House of Oddities". Out of curiosity, he went inside and was disgusted by what he saw 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 in jagged scars from horrible operations and her mouth was sewn shut. As she turned to look at him, the husband screamed.

He recognized the birthmark on his wife's face.