The bride said, “I do … not know this guy.”
Michelle Wylie has spent the past four years trying to guess the identity of an uninvited wedding guest seen in snapshots taken on her special day.
And now, owing to the power of social media, her matrimonial mystery has finally been solved.
“It was always in the back of my mind, who was that and why was he there?” Wylie, 38, from the UK, told SWNS, of the unfamiliar fella at her November 2021 nuptials. “To find out eventually after all this time is quite something.”
The millennial — who tied the knot with husband, John, at the Carlton Hotel in Prestwick, Ayrshire — spotted the suspicious attendee the second she saw pics from her big day.
“As soon as I got the sample of the wedding pictures, I noticed it straight away,” added Wylie, a digital facilitator for the NHS. “We all said, ‘Do you know who that is?’ We were asking around the family and friends, and no one had any idea.”
“No one remembered him being there on the day,” she remembered, “and we now know he slipped away straight after the ceremony.”
Hoping to get to the bottom of the conundrum, Wylie routinely shared the images on Facebook, assuming someone would eventually fess up to being the “ransom stranger” who crashed her bash.
But, sadly, the newlywed “never got far” in her search — until this week.
“I was looking through the wedding pictures, and I just thought, ‘I’m going to message someone with a lot of followers and ask if they can share,’” said Wylie.
She reached out to content creator Dazza, with over 400,000 Facebook fans and 129,000 TikTok subscribers, asking him to plaster the pictures all over his platforms.
“Daz put it up and within two hours we had found [him],” Wylie raved.
The unknown interloper was Andrew Helliman.
But he’s not just some sneaky creep who gets his jollies by invading sacred occasions for the free food and booze — à la Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in 2005 buddy flick “Wedding Crashers.”
Instead, Helliman had merely made an innocent mistake.
“I was at the wrong wedding!,” he confessed to SWNS after seeing his mug in Wylie’s wedding photos on Dazza’s page.
“Four years ago my partner was acting as bridesman (male bridesmaid) for his friend Michaela’s wedding and I’d been invited as his plus one,” Helliman, 33, a painter and decorator, explained. “For some reason he told me it was at the Carlton hotel in Prestwick at 2:00 p.m., when it was actually being held at the Great Western hotel in Ayr.”
“He had already left in the morning to help with whatever it is bridesmen do, and left me to make my own way to the wedding.”
Running late to the fête, Helliman pulled up to the Carlton with just minutes to spare, believing that the wedding festivities taking place outside of the hotel — such as a bag piper who welcomed invitees with tunes as they entered the venue — were for his partner’s friend.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Cool, this is obviously the right place,” recalled Helliman, who’d only met the bride and didn’t expect to know anyone else at the wedding other than her and his beaux.
“I parked my car and rushed inside. I made my way into the hall and saw the groom standing and waiting nervously,” he added. “I had never met Michaela’s husband before so I thought, ‘Alright, this must be Ben.’”
“The fact that I didn’t recognize a single person in this place didn’t raise any alarm bells.”
But bells began ringing in his head once Wylie, a perfect stranger, began making her way to the altar.
“The music started, everyone stands up and turned around to watch the bride walk down the aisle, and “OMG, that’s not Michaela!” said Helliman, who was mortified by the mix-up.
“You can’t exactly stand up and walk out of a wedding mid-ceremony,” he said, “so I just had to commit to this act and spent the next 20 minutes awkwardly sitting there trying to be inconspicuous.”
After Wylie and John swapped “I Do’s,” Helliman made a clean escape to Michaela’s wedding.
“I was almost as popular as the actual bride and groom and spent most of the night retelling that story to people,” he joked.
And despite his best efforts to remain unnoticed at Wylie’s ceremony, wedding photographers caught him in the accidental act, prompting her years-long hunt for his identity.
Thanks to Dazza, Wylie and Helliman finally met face-to-face on Thursday.
“It is unbelievable,” said Wylie. “I just could not stop laughing when I heard the story. It is so funny, and the way [Andrew] tells the story is brilliant.”
“You just don’t hear about things like this happening,” she continued. “I just cannot stop laughing about it. It is great to finally find out who it was.”
The unlikely pair plans to keep in touch now that they’ve officially met.
“Our wedding day really was the perfect day,” Wylie gushed, adding that she wishes Helliman would have stayed for her wedding reception rather than leaving. “But this [blunder] adds another great story to it that gives us even more special memories.”
“It has certainly put a lot of smiles on people’s faces.”
