The Skeleton Bride

It is with great reluctance and fear that I bring you this tale of one whose very countenance is that of tragedy born of joy. It is in an ever last moment of dread that I scrawl through the moments of my life where this thing formed in manifestations of itself until matter betrayed science and became a thing of substance which haunts me to this day. I speak of none other than the ghastly Skeleton Bride.

In the realm of irrational fears the people responsible for bringing into existence these names of phobias have only seen fit to assign names to the more generalized phobias while leaving every thing else to simply fall under the label of irrational fears but, I wonder if these wordsmiths have ever seen her in her white raiment billowing as she come for you with her cold touch of seemingly endless cycle of death. I imagine they have not. So....I have done the foot work. I have made the necessary adaptations in the art of word smithing to assign a name to this irrational fear. It is called "necrosponsaphobia"

#1 necro- dead tissue. 

#2 sponsa- bride.

#3 phobia- fear of something. 

These words are of course Latin. We can't have a phobia or a horror story without getting latin involved but,  just know that if you suffer from this condition, you are not alone. For those of you who do suffer this mind scarring ailment, and who sleep sound at night not knowing that that is her voice on the wind and that it is not branches that scratch at the window pane, I advise you to turn back now to your pleasant dreams and happy thoughts. 

Boris Karloff, of you are not familiar with him, was one of the early Hollywood giants in horror films. He played Frankenstein in Frankenstein's Monster as well as in subsequent films in the story line. He also played the mummy. 

The first manifestation of her in my life came from a Boris Karloff horror comic that I pulled from a stack that my parents had given me when I was 8 years old. It was a classic plot of boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy kills girl on their wedding day. Now like seven years later boy marries a different girl on the anniversary of the day that he married the first girl. So, the earth shook, and her grave opened up and there she was. Sketched out in black and white with the wind teasing at her tattered white veil held in place by a tiara of long dead flowers. 

 Now, who in the world gives there eight-year-old a Boris Karloff horror magazine? No one, that’s who. It was her cold bony hand twisting fate so that I might find that image of her before my eyes to be burned in my mind so that I might be haunted by her in dreams to come ever lasting while seeking it out in recall to gratify some wanton fear. 

Paying no heed to parental warning, much as you have paid no heed to mine, I read this story over and over till the very essence of her tragedy echoed pity in my heart for her who knew only betrayal in the quintessence of her happiness.

In the 80’s advancements in technology allowed for older films to be digitally remastered from black and white into color. So, old classic films such as “The Wizard of Oz,” “miracle on 34th Street,” could now be viewed in technicolor. This went for horror films as well.

Her second manifestation into my life was through one of those such films called “Twice Told Tales” Which starred Vincent Price, another one of the early giants of horror films. 

This was yet again another twist on the classic plot where boy meets girl, boy marries girl but, girl dies of natural causes on her wedding day. So, boy mourned girl for his whole life, and when boy was really, really old, he went into her tomb to see her one last time to find that the water dripping into her coffin had perfectly preserved her. She lay there in her wedding dress as seemingly pure and perfect as the day of her internment. 

So boy, old boy now, gets the bright idea that he is going to inject himself with some of this water and alas, it work, the fountain of youth was found, and he was a young man again. This old boy who was now a young boy once more got another bright idea and injected his lovely  magically pickled bride with some of this water and alas, alas all around, because it again worked and she was brought back to life but, as the plot thickened and played out with much treachery revived as well, the young boy suddenly became old again. The water had worn off and when he looked at his bride he found before him what was once perfect preservation turned to perfect decomposition in technicolor. 

For me it was the next step in progression of a memory that had not happened yet. As she stood there, wilted bouquet before her, this lich of the wedding chapel, poised to receive her vows, was not only a twice-told tale but a twice lost tragedy all hollowed out inside and seemingly undone again and again, and then again as she was reduced to dust in a moment.

From here the incarnation of this specter in the light of a full honey moon's grace only grows more vivid, ultimately animated, dark, evil and as twisted as the flowers that bloom on her unsettled grave. As the wind speaks her name in incoherent moaning I implore you, turn away from her now so that you may never know the cold emptiness of that which is opposite of breath which issues from her toothy smile.  

In Haiti, the practice of Voodoo is so much as common as Christianity that some aspects of this religion have been incorporated into the latter. Hence, the wedding dress. This white adornment is the universal symbol of purity worn by a blushing bride as she enters into matrimonial bliss and happiness but, not for all. Not for those who carry out their vows of “till death to us part” on the same day that they are made. Not for those whose maiden name is sorrow as she enters into an eternity of baleful bliss.

I feel it important at this moment to note the difference between a corpse bride and a skeleton bride. With a corpse bride you have the ignorant manifestation of partially functional brain matter processes at a primitive level, the wedding cake becomes the wedding…. whoever couldn’t run fast enough to keep their flesh from being gnawed upon. However, standard zombie rules still apply. You whack her in the brain hard enough to cause complete trauma, then down she goes. 

With a skeleton bride though it’s a lot different. There is no brain matter to discombobulate. There is just an empty shell walking around with the spirit of some tragedy dwelling inside of it. It is magical, ethereal. How do you combat that? 

For her third manifestation into may life there were no longer moments of images to move on from or to dwell upon. It was a long strung out series of moments played out in the dark radiance of that white garment symbolic of purity now stained to something muddy and unholy.

It was once again in a horror film called “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” in this particular film a young medical researcher went to Haiti to find the secrets of the voodoo technique known as zombification so that it could be used on patients who were undergoing a major surgery.

During his search he found a voodoo medicine man that was willing to make the potion for him and, come to find out, part of the technique was to store this vile potion, for a set period of time in the skull of, you guessed it, a skeleton bride. 

During this waiting period the star of the film lay sleeping one night and dreamed of a boat coming across a lagoon to where he lay his head, and on board was the skeleton bride that was gestating his future product. 

When she stepped from the boat, moving elegantly in all her rotted grace I knew that it was really me that she was coming for as the camera panned out at her approach. She whispered incoherently and those whispers where enough to send cold chills into my very heart. The darkness all around her was hot with evil and her intent was far beyond the purity of the tragedy that bore this matron of the crypt.

The only other appearance she had in the film was to reach her hand up from a bowl of soup that sat before our lead character. Her nails scraped the porcelain as she pulled back down into the depths of the bowls contents. I couldn’t imagine the level of fear I might have experienced had her hand came protruding from a cup of tea as I sipped.

“The writer sat in a chair shrouded in the shadows of candle light. He took a sip of his tea before setting the cup both gently and quietly on an end table that sat nearby. Bringing his finger tips together he formed a teepee with his hands. With the shadow cast from the candle moving the darkened highlights and lines on his face, he looked out at you across the void that separated writer from reader.”

So, since you still here, in spite of my warnings, I think its time we finish this tale as it has already finished me so long ago.

When I was seventeen I joined the army. By the time I was eighteen I was a full-blown infantry parachute soldier with the 82nd airborne division. It was not long after that her fourth and most grave manifestation came upon me while weak and helpless on a night so cold that the cold itself had abandon all reason.

It was in Fort Chaffee Arkansas in the middle of November. Myself and my fellow soldiers had been moving through the wilderness of this winter landscape that modern convenience had neglected for three days. The pattern was: march for a couple of hours, then rest for about thirty minutes, which was long enough for your feet to freeze completely solid and then, march for a couple of hours more. 

As I said, we had done this for three days, without sleep. Sleeplessness can do some dark things to the mind as I would find out. Being young, I did not understand or know the potential of the unconscious and its ability to make manifest things from inside itself through the act of deprivation, and this was all she needed. A window. And open vulnerability that she might seep in through a crack to take the shape of her full illusorily non corporeal essence.

Sometime near the devil’s hour on the third night, we stopped. We were told that it would be a while before we pushed on again and that we could team up in two-man positions and rotate sleep. The soldier that I was teamed up with looked at me and said, “you do what you want, I’m going to sleep.” So, me being the new soldier and not really having a great orientation on what the best thing to do was or the experience to discern my approach to this new situation I found myself without guidance and chose to do what I thought was the right thing. I faced out with my weapon at the ready to guard the parameter.  

That is when she came for me. The dark cold world became a snowy white, a white like comic book colors, acrylic in tone as pure yet tainted as the loss of her intent of happiness that had been robbed of her. Across the field I could see her. The wind rippled her gown, her voice was on the wind and, she moved toward me as if her feet were not touching the ground. I trembled as the fear ran through my veins covering my skin with burning, tingling sensations like an electric spider web.

If this were a fictional tale then I might would have said a prayer, blessed my bullets, and then ran across the field firing round after round to shatter the long dead bones of this bridely succubus but, this being a true tale I will tell it how it was. I took up the example of my counterpart and curled up in the position of sleep however, she did not go away. Out there on the cold ground where nothing lived I could hear her voice as it continued to moan on the wind a sad song of her tragedy. That entered my ears and my mind. Her icy fingertips on the wind caressed my face and curled in my hair as she sought from me a return of that happiness that she had lost as she told her tale to my soul.

She was not one adhering to any manifestation as it pertained to her individually. She was, indeed, the very essence of the tragedy of any young bride that fell short of her happily ever after. That last consciousness in the action of the last breaths of “I do.” She was the ghost of sorrow felt in all memories and memories to never come to fruition and seeking reunification with that which would never come. 

Now that you know her, know that you can not save her. You may understand her or think you do, but in the end, you will only fail her as did life, happiness, and bliss.

Happy Halloween

Johnny R Draper