Terrington St Clements' ghost bride who appears at Christmas

Terrington St Clement has existed since Saxon times, the first settlement beginning where Hay Green stands now before moving to the higher ground close to where St Clement’s Church stands today.

This was a village which boasted fine houses and where some of the best strawberries in the land were sent by train to London, along with beautiful flowers that thrived in the rich soil.

Seven miles from King’s Lynn and five from Sutton Bridge in Lincolnshire, Terrington St Clement welcomes the same visitor every year at Christmastime: a ghost.

Norfolk boasts two – maybe more – ‘Mistletoe Brides’, one at Brockdish Hall six miles east of Diss in Norfolk, the other in West Norfolk: both fell victim to the same fate, death shortly after saying ‘I do’.

The traditional story dates from the 17th century and is a chilling story for a winter's night: a Christmas wedding, a flirtatious game that ends in tragedy, a skeleton found in a forgotten chest wearing a long white gown.

Thanks to a popular poem written by Thomas Haynes Bayly in the 1830s, the tale became a song which was regularly sung at Christmas time  – the Victorians did love to cast a shadow over even the most joyous of occasions, and how Weird Norfolk loves them for it.

Bayly's poem tells the story of a wedding held in a grand hall decked with holly and mistletoe, a Baron's daughter marrying a Lord in a lavish ceremony filled with feasting and dancing.

''I'm weary of dancing now,' she cried, 'here, tarry a moment, I'll hide, I'll hide. And Lovell, be sure you're the first to trace, the clue to my secret hiding place. Away she ran and her friends began each tower to search and each nook to scan. And young Lovell cried 'oh, where do you hide? I'm lonesome without you, my own fair bride.'

“They sought her that night and they sought her next day and they sought her in vain while a week passed away; in the highest, the lowest, the loneliest spot, Young Lovell sought wildly, but found her not. And years flew by and their grief at last, was told as a sorrowful tale long past.”

At around the time when the Mistletoe Bough was set, it was common for rich merchants to offer a marriage chest, or cassone, as part of a bride's dowry – the intricate chests, often ornately carved or painted, were given to couples on their wedding night. 

There was said to be one by the west door of Terrington’s church.

Was it such a chest that the mischievous young bride clambered into to hide, little realising that when she shut the heavy lid she was imprisoning herself in what would become a tomb?

In the cold, dark church, the new bride waited to be found. And she waited. And waited. Realising that no one was coming, she decided to relinquish her clever hiding place, at which point she realised that a hidden spring in the chest's lid had effectively locked it firmly shut. Her screams for help fell on deaf ears, muffled by the thick wood, and her fingernails tore at the lid of the chest in vain.

Wedding guests whispered that the young woman had escaped into the night with a lover or developed cold feet and run away – but poor Lovell, the poem recalls, pined for his lost wife even as he grew old, weeping for his “fairy bride”.

In the poem, the bride was discovered 50 years later, a skeleton in her wedding dress clutching a sprig of Christmas mistletoe to claim a kiss from her new husband.

Terrington’s legend has it that the ghost of the bride emerges from her chest once a year to join in with carols on the Sunday before Christmas.

The Lovell of Bayly’s poem could be linked to Terrington St Clements’ Lovell’s Hall, a 16th century hall  built on the site of a medieval mansion – in The East Anglian Magazine of 1946, it was said that not only did a tunnel run from the hall to the church, but that the Tudor hall itself was haunted…

Looking for another spooky Christmas story? How about Weird Norfolk's tale of a Christmas close encounter with a UFO in Shotesham?