The bride wore black.
Renee Rotting wouldn't have it any other way.
Victorian lace covered her arms. A dark veil trailed behind her and lifted in the October wind. Her bouquet was black and crimson, with crystals tucked among the flowers.
Her bridesmaids wore black, too.
“I knew immediately,” Rotting said of planning the wedding. “Crimson, vampiric, gothic, dark.”
Strips of lace floated from wooden beams like cobwebs overhead. Candles flickered among antique silver.
The Casper woman did not walk down the aisle to the organ's familiar “dum-dum-da-dum,” but to the slow, solemn swell of Dead Can Dance's “Ulysses.”
Her wedding stood apart in a state where 62% of adults identify as Christian, Pew Research Center found, and where the white dress and church aisle remain familiar wedding traditions.
But she isn't alone in wanting something different.
“I think goth and alternative people have always been willing to have the aesthetic, portraits, and weddings they actually want,” Casper photographer and artist Stephanie Frantz-Volin said. “But more people are openly sharing about it nowadays.”
Feral Women
Frantz-Volin owns The Wilted Daisy, a vintage store carrying alternative clothing and accessories, operates a moody portrait studio above Book'in It, and organizes events meant to bring Casper's goth and alternative adults together.
Her monthly Mocktails and Moonlight market mixes vintage clothing steeped in 1980s goth style with flash tattoos and locally made macabre art. Every third Thursday, another small group gathers for the Feral Woman Social Club.
Ask Frantz-Volin what makes something goth and the answer isn't simply black.
“Goth isn't necessarily an aesthetic alone, but more of a lifestyle and subculture,” she said.
Women come to her for boudoir portraits that look and feel like them. Couples seek her out for the darker, moodier quality of her work.
She hasn't seen a sudden explosion in that business, but she says it's been a steady flow — and no two clients are the same.
Some people turn toward enormous lace dresses. Others wear spikes and jewelry made from bone.
There are traditional goths, modern goths, pastel goths and those whose tastes pull heavily from the 1980s.
Frantz-Volin has photographed gothic portraits at Crimson Dawn and elsewhere on Casper Mountain, where black lace and dramatic silhouettes stand sharply against pine forests, granite and the softer colors of the mountain.
“Over the last year and a half, I've been connecting with more and more likeminded individuals,” Frantz-Volin said, “and it's definitely helped build a solid little community.”
Flowers, Crystals, Bones
AnnChey Everhart's wedding didn't look like Rotting's.
She turned toward flowers, crystals and bones.
Her wedding cake appeared to grow from moss. Beneath a crescent moon, two skeletons danced together.
She and her husband considered a handfasting ceremony but ultimately wrote their own vows. There was no “till death do us part." Instead, a sign at the ceremony read, "Till Death do us Party."
There also was a poem built around the hope that whatever bound them together wouldn't end in one lifetime.
For Everhart, the appeal of goth culture is a willingness to look directly at mortality and find beauty in things other people might dismiss as dark or unsettling.
Bones, taxidermy and remnants of death can become art, she said — "another life of sorts for something otherwise left behind."
It took her time to become that comfortable with being seen.
Everhart says she was bullied heavily for being goth in junior high and eventually stepped away from it. She came back after deciding other people's opinions weren't going to dictate how she looked.
“You'd be so pretty if you didn't have a fishing tackle box in your face,” she remembers people telling her.
Casper looks different to her now than it did then, she says. There are more places to find one another, more people openly dressing as they want to dress and, when the occasion calls for it, marrying that way too.
Intention, Not Decoration
Not every alternative wedding is Pagan, and not every Pagan wedding is goth.
The distinction between lifestyle and decoration becomes particularly clear once the ceremony itself begins.
Nikki Saegert is a Pagan priestess, healer and wedding officiant who builds ceremonies around the relationships and beliefs of the people standing in front of her.
That can mean handfasting, casting a sacred circle, or prayers and offerings to nontraditional deities, she explains. Saegert has made handfasting cords herself and carved offering bowls specifically for wedding rituals.
Sometimes even the colors are chosen less for how they'll photograph than for what they mean.
“It's more than the aesthetic,” Saegert said. “It's the attention to intention behind the ceremony that sets the energy.”
Then she put it more simply.
“That intention is the difference between a lifestyle and an aesthetic.”
'It's All On The Table'
Wyoming doesn't keep a registry separating conventional wedding officiants from people willing to perform Pagan, earth-based or other alternative ceremonies, but couples looking for them can find them.
Public Wyoming officiant listings include at least a dozen people who perform handfastings— a ceremony in which a couple's hands are bound together with cord as a symbol of their commitment — and others who openly identify with Wiccan, Pagan, Norse and other nontraditional spiritual practices.
One Casper minister lists Wicca, Spiritualism and Hellenic Reconstructionism among her affiliations.
A Sheridan officiant says she became ordained specifically to perform a friend’s wedding and hand-binding ceremony and now offers handfastings among her services. As for what else couples can ask her to incorporate, her philosophy is pretty simple: “Pretty much, it’s all on the table.”
Others openly identify with Pagan, Wiccan, Norse and other nontraditional spiritual practices.
They exist within a much larger and more familiar religious landscape.
Wyoming is still predominantly Christian, a place where church aisles, white dresses and traditional vows remain familiar wedding-day imagery.
The goth brides of Casper may look unusual in the Cowboy State, but they are leaning into one very Wyoming tradition: doing whatever they darn well please.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
