We have experimentally investigated the bouncing behavior and damping performance of a container partially filled with granular chains, namely a chain-filled damper. The motion of the chain-filled damper, recorded by a particle tracing technology, demonstrates that the granular chains can efficiently absorb the collisional energy of the damper. We extract both the restitution coefficient of the first collision and the total flight rime to characterize the dissipation ability of the damper. Two containers and three types of granular chains, different in size, stiffness and restitution coefficient, are used to examine the experimental results. We find that the restitution coefficient of the first collision of a single-chain-filled damper can linearly tend to vanish with increasing the chain length and obtain a minimum filling mass required to cease the container at the first collision (no rebound). When the strong impact occurs, the collisional absorption efficiency of a chain-filled damper is superior to a monodisperse-particle-filled damper. Furthermore, the longer the chains are, the better the dissipative effect is. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.