The legend of the Mistletoe Bough is one of England's most haunting domestic tragedies, attached to several great houses — Minster Lovell Hall in Oxfordshire and Bramshill in Hampshire chief among them. On her wedding night, the story runs, the young bride proposed a game of hide-and-seek through the rambling old house, and chose as her hiding place a great oak chest in a forgotten attic. The heavy lid fell and its hidden spring-lock snapped shut, and she could neither raise it nor be heard.
The story
The wedding party searched in vain; the bridegroom spent his life grieving for a wife who had simply vanished on the night of their marriage. Only many years later, the tale ends, was the old chest opened and the skeleton found within, still in its bridal dress, a withered garland beside it — the bride who had hidden too well. Popularised by Thomas Haynes Bayly's nineteenth-century ballad 'The Mistletoe Bough', the story fixed itself to crumbling manor houses across the country, each claiming the fatal chest, and remains a favourite of English Christmas ghost-telling.