There are plenty of not-so-pleasant things you expect to turn up at a wedding: overexcited aunties, an uncle who has had one too many, a cousin mysteriously assigned to the gift table and, inevitably, someone asking when you are getting married. Ghosts, however, tend not to make the guest list. And yet, across old palaces, destination hotels and beautifully decorated ballrooms, people working at weddings have occasionally encountered things they simply cannot explain. A room that nobody wanted to enter. A familiar face where there shouldn’t have been one. A few strange coincidences. Moments that feel otherworldly. None of this makes a wedding any less auspicious. If anything, weddings have always been surrounded by rituals, blessings and a sense of the unseen. These are simply the stranger stories from the margins. A fun little detour for those who like their shaadis with a side of mystery.
The Rash That Checked Out Early
In 2025, destination wedding photographer and founder of Seven Mantra Films, Sneha Naravade arrived at a posh hotel on Yas Island, Abu Dhabi to document a lavish three-day wedding. The celebration was spectacular, she says, but there was one strange hitch. “As soon as I entered the hotel, I developed strange rashes all over my arms.” It wasn’t her first time on Yas Island, yet the painful reaction was completely unexpected. Still, the wedding went on without a hiccup. “It is easily one of the most beautiful weddings I have covered. Then, as my team and I headed to the airport, the rash began to ease. Within 24 hours of returning to home in Mumbai, it had disappeared completely, without medication.” A perfectly rational explanation may exist, but the timing remains rather mysterious.
The Call From Room 3006
In 2006, during a wedding, Akshay Gupta, a gifting and catering expert who was then a trainee at a palace hotel in Udaipur, received a call that shouldn’t have been possible. An entire wing was under renovation, with around 18 rooms “gutted and stripped bare”. Only Room 3001 still had a working phone. “The celebrations were taking place in another wing. Then, at around 8am on a Saturday, it rang. The call came from internal extension 3006. That wing had no electrical wiring and no telephone cabling running through it anymore. Everything had been ripped out for the renovation.” The phone rang for a couple of minutes, unanswered, before stopping. Then, a little while later, it happened again. “The same call, the same extension.” Someone was sent to investigate. Room 3006 was locked, and inside, “nothing out of place, nothing disturbed. No explanation followed, not by engineering, not by staff”. As Akshay puts it: “Just a phone that rang twice from a room that, by every technical measure, couldn’t have made the call.”
The Bridesmaid In The Dream
For Reshma Ramaiah Rice behind Resh&Co Events, the strange encounter happened before the wedding she was planning. “I had a dream we were setting up for one of my couple’s weddings and one of their bridesmaids had pink and green hair and was helping me with the centrepieces.” Reshma jokingly mentioned it to the bride during their next check-in, only to be met with shock. Her close friend, who had passed away in college, had dyed her hair pink and then green. “If she was alive she would have been a bridesmaid.” What made it stranger was that Reshma had never met her. “I honestly don’t remember what she looked like other than the hair so I couldn’t describe it to the bride.” She admits, “It is still creepy because she would only dye her hair those two colours and that’s the person I dreamt.” There may be no explanation, but in the dream, she was simply there, helping with the wedding.
The Bride Who Appeared In The Mirror
For bridal makeup artist Misha Anand, one wedding morning in Jaipur remains impossible to explain. She was doing the bride’s makeup in a suite when she noticed, in the mirror behind the bride, what looked like another woman standing near the doorway. “I assumed it was one of the bridesmaids, so I didn’t think much of it.” But when Mira turned around, the room was empty. The bride laughed it off until Mira looked back at the mirror. The woman was still there, now standing directly behind the bride. “She was dressed like a bride too, but her face was completely blurred, almost like I couldn’t focus on it.” Mira turned around again. Nothing. Then the bride quietly asked, “You can see her too, right?” Neither spoke for several minutes.
The Wedding That Happened Twice
Not every unexpected wedding story is supernatural. Payal Phyade recalls a bride who held two ceremonies so her single mother would not be excluded from her daughter’s big day. “The bride had two wedding ceremonies just to respect her single mom and not allow her to feel left out.” Payal explains that in the traditions she was referring to, single mothers can be asked to remain away from certain South Indian wedding rituals. “Single moms can’t come on stage for wedding rituals in south, they should be in shadows.” So the bride created another way: one wedding that allowed her mother to participate, followed by a second ceremony conducted with the traditional rituals. It wasn’t about choosing between family and tradition, but making room for both. And perhaps that’s a reminder that weddings can be auspicious precisely because they evolve with the people celebrating them.
The Grandmother Who Came To Bless
For wedding guest Mira, the unexplained moment came at her cousin’s wedding. Her grandmother had passed away years earlier and had been particularly close to the bride. During the celebrations, Mira stepped outside into the garden and thought she saw her grandmother standing in the distance, dressed in a pale sari. She looked again, and the figure was gone. There was no frightening encounter, only a strange sense of recognition. Later, Mira noticed the bride wearing a piece of jewellery that had belonged to their grandmother. Perhaps it was coincidence, a trick of the light or simply memory surfacing at an emotional moment. But Mira chose to see it differently. “It felt like she had come to see the bride.” Whether apparition or imagination, the moment felt less like something to fear and more like a blessing from someone who should have been there.
The Painting With Two Faces
For British wedding videographer Rupert, one wedding at a centuries-old Yorkshire estate left him baffled. While filming the bride getting ready, he captured a shot of her beside a framed portrait. “It was an elderly gentleman, and I thought nothing of it.” Twenty minutes later, he filmed the same room from almost exactly the same angle. This time, the portrait appeared to show a young woman. “I thought I’d somehow filmed a different room, so I checked the footage. Same bedroom, same angle, same painting.” He showed the venue coordinator, who immediately went quiet. “She told me there had never been a painting of a woman in that room.” Even stranger, she said the portrait of the elderly man had hung there for decades. “I went back through the footage frame by frame. The woman only appeared in that one shot.” By the time the wedding ended, the portrait was back to normal. “I still can’t explain what I filmed that day.”
The Flowers That Arranged Themselves
For wedding florist Anaya, one wedding at an old heritage property in Thailand ended with a detail she still refuses to explain. The evening before the wedding, her team finished dressing the bridal suite and left a small vase of white tuberoses on the dressing table. “We had placed them in a very specific way and I remember it clearly because I was particular about the arrangement.” The next morning, Anaya found the flowers scattered across the room, except for three stems neatly arranged on the bride’s pillow. “Nobody from my team had been back inside. The room was locked and the bride hadn’t arrived yet.” Then the bride’s mother saw the flowers and went pale. Her daughter’s late grandmother, she explained, had always left exactly three tuberoses on the bride’s pillow before every family wedding. “She said it was something her mother had done for years.” Anaya says the room suddenly felt very cold. “We didn’t touch the flowers after that.”
