The Bride

The Bride is a short story from More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

The Story
The minister's daughter had just gotten married. After the wedding ceremony there was a great feast, with music and dancing and contests and games, even old children's games. When they got to playing hide-and-seek, the bride decided to hide in her grandfather's trunk up in the attic.

"They're never find me here," she thought. As she was climbing into the trunk, the lid came down and cracked her in the head, as she fell unconscious inside. The lid slammed shut and locked.

No one will ever know how long she called for help or how hard she struggled to free herself from that tomb. Everyone in the village searched for her, and they looked almost everywhere. But no one thought of looking in the trunk. After a week her brand-new bridegroom and all the others gave her up for lost.

Years later a maid went up into the attic looking for something she needed. "Maybe it is in the trunk," she thought. She opened it - and screamed. There lay the missing bride in her wedding dress, but by then she was only a skeleton.