Fact Check

Legend: Drunk Groom Accidentally Returns Home Alone from His Honeymoon

A group returns a soused young man to his hometown, not realizing he's a newly-married groom on his honeymoon.

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Claim:
A soused young man was conveyed back to his hometown by people he'd been drinking with, who didn't realize he was on his honeymoon.

This legend is another example of the "good samaritans gone wrong" motif: though the would-be good deed doers depicted here don't realize it, they've left a very confused young bride sitting alone in a hotel room back in Blackpool.

As a belief tale, however, this one is fraught with improbabilities. Would a freshly-minted groom really spend a whole day socializing in a bar yet never once mention that he'd just gotten married the day before? Indeed, what was he doing in the bar at all? If he'd left his bride alone on the first day of their honeymoon to go an an all-day bender, perhaps they were both better off for his being returned to his mother.

Sightings: Something akin to this legend happens in the 1916 Douglas Fairbanks silent film His Picture in the Papers. Pete Prindle (Fairbanks) asks a club member for a dollar so he can visit the psychic Vera Carewes. The fellow member misunderstands the purpose of the loan and, duly impressed that Prindle can manage the trip on a dollar, gets him liquored up at the bar. Hours later an insensible Prindle is delivered to the docks and loaded onto a ship bound for Vera Cruz.

Sources

Brunvand, Jan Harold.   The Baby Train.     New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.   ISBN 0-393-31208-9   (pp. 229-230).

Smith, Paul.   The Book of Nastier Legends.     London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.   ISBN 0-7102-0573-2   (p. 29).

The Big Book of Urban Legends.     New York: Paradox Press, 1994.   ISBN 1-56389-165-4   (p. 17).

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994 as a creative outgrowth of his wide-ranging interests in a variety of subjects (particularly folklo ... read more

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