2025-07-10 4:55:16 ¶ ●

“The girl with the green ribbon” is such a Stranger aligned story.

If you don’t know what the story then the gist of it is that an unnamed man and women start to date. The entire time they’re together the women wears a green ribbon around her neck, but the man doesn’t really pay any mind to it. It’s only when they get married and she wears the ribbon to their wedding and to their bed does he realize that he’s never seen her without it. So he asks her why she always wears her ribbon and she refuses to give an answer.

Now the end of the story varies widely on where you read it: But in some interpretations the man becomes furious that his wife is hiding a secret from him and begins to resent her. She gets sick and he refuses to take of her out of spite, which she confronts him about. He says that he can’t trust someone who won’t even be honest with him about why she wears a ribbon, and she says if that’s the case then he can take the ribbon off. So he does….and her head rolls right off her neck.

If you took the horror out of what the ribbon was for, then I still think there’s an underrated psychological horror aspect to the women’s husband starting to go crazy wondering what his wife is keeping from him.

I think that could easily translate into a Stranger story where a man starts to doubt who his wife even is because of what’s (on the surface) a slightly odd fashion choice.

IDK I just saw the story again recently and thought “this could very well be a Stranger statement with just a few minor tweaks,” and so I had to immediately post my thought so it’ll stop rotating in my brain like a microwave.