The bride exclaimed, “I do … not know this guy.”
For the past four years, Michelle Wylie has been on a mission to uncover the identity of an uninvited guest spotted in photos from her wedding day.
Thanks to the reach of social media, her four-year-long wedding mystery has finally been solved.
Andrew Helliman inadvertently crashed Michelle and John Wylie’s November 2021 wedding.
“It was always in the back of my mind—who was that and why was he there?” Wylie, 38, from the UK, told SWNS about the unfamiliar guest at her nuptials. “To finally find out after all this time is quite something.”
The millennial bride, who married husband John at the Carlton Hotel in Prestwick, Ayrshire, noticed the unexpected attendee the moment she saw her wedding photos.
“As soon as I got the photos, I spotted him straight away,” said Wylie, a digital facilitator for the NHS. “We all asked, ‘Do you know who that is?’ We checked with family and friends, and no one had any idea.”
“No one remembered him being there on the day,” she recalled. “And we now know he slipped away immediately after the ceremony.”
Determined to solve the mystery, Wylie regularly shared the wedding photos on Facebook, hoping someone would eventually come forward as the “ransom stranger” who had crashed her celebration.
But her efforts, she admitted, “never got far”—until this week.
“I was scrolling through the wedding pictures and thought, ‘I’m going to message someone with a big following and see if they can share this,’” Wylie said.
She reached out to content creator Dazza, who boasts over 400,000 Facebook fans and 129,000 TikTok followers, asking him to spread the photos across his platforms.
“Daz put it up, and within two hours we had found him,” Wylie said.
The mysterious guest was revealed to be Andrew Helliman.
But Helliman wasn’t some sneaky party crasher looking for free food and drinks, à la Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in the 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers.
Instead, it was an innocent mistake.
“I was at the wrong wedding!” he told SWNS after spotting himself in Wylie’s photos on Dazza’s page.
“Four years ago, my partner was acting as a bridesman (male bridesmaid) for his friend Michaela’s wedding, and I’d been invited as his plus one,” explained Helliman, 33, a painter and decorator. “For some reason, he told me it was at the Carlton Hotel in Prestwick at 2:00 p.m., when it was actually at the Great Western Hotel in Ayr.”
“He had already left in the morning to help with whatever it is bridesmen do, and I was left to make my own way to the wedding.”
Running late to the celebration, Helliman arrived at the Carlton Hotel with just minutes to spare, assuming the wedding festivities outside—like the bagpiper greeting guests—were for his partner’s friend.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Cool, this is obviously the right place,’” recalled Helliman, who had only met the bride and didn’t expect to know anyone else aside from her and his partner.
“I parked my car and rushed inside. I made my way into the hall and saw the groom standing there, looking nervous,” he added. “I’d never met Michaela’s husband before, so I thought, ‘Alright, this must be Ben.’”
“The fact that I didn’t recognize a single other person didn’t set off any alarm bells.”
But those bells began ringing when Wylie—a complete stranger—started walking down the aisle
“The music started, everyone stood up, and turned to watch the bride walk down the aisle—and I thought, ‘OMG, that’s not Michaela!’” said Helliman, mortified by the mix-up.
“You can’t exactly stand up and walk out of a wedding mid-ceremony,” he added. “So I just had to commit to the act and spent the next 20 minutes awkwardly sitting there, trying to be inconspicuous.”
After Wylie and John exchanged their vows, Helliman quietly made his way 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.
Despite his best efforts to stay under the radar, wedding photographers captured him in the photos—sparking Wylie’s years-long search for the mysterious guest.
Thanks to Dazza, Wylie and Helliman finally met face-to-face on Thursday.
“It is unbelievable,” Wylie said. “I just couldn’t stop laughing when I heard the story. It’s so funny, and the way Andrew tells it is brilliant.”
“You just don’t hear about things like this happening,” she added. “I can’t stop laughing about it. It’s great to finally find out who it was.”
With the help of a popular influencer, Wylie and Helliman finally met this week.
The unlikely pair plans to stay in touch now that they’ve officially crossed paths.
“Our wedding day really was perfect,” Wylie said, noting that she wished Helliman had stayed for the reception instead of leaving. “But this little blunder adds another memorable story that makes the day even more special.”
“It has definitely brought a lot of smiles to people’s faces,” she added.
