So in China, there is a thing known as a “ghost wedding.” It’s something you can look up on Wikipedia and explore a bit, but the gist of the ritual involves a corpse or two corpses being married after their demise. That’s what took place in Northern China according to CBS News, where 3 people were detained for attempting to sell the corpse of a young woman to be used in a “ghost bride” ritual:
The official Xinhua News Agency reported that the main suspect, a man aged 72, said he had heard about the death of a young woman in a nearby village in Shanxi province and thought of selling the corpse to relatives of single dead men. Xinhua cited police in Ruicheng county, where calls rang unanswered Friday.
Xinhua said the main suspect and two accomplices pretended to be relatives of the woman and negotiated a sale price of 25,000 yuan ($4,000) with a buyer. While they were raiding a village tomb for the body last weekend, their plot was scuttled by villagers who caught them in the act and alerted police.
The reason behind the ritual is to ward off bad luck, especially with dying while single, and the practice reportedly extends back centuries. It still persists in the more rural areas, but still isn’t something they go through everyday (or maybe it is, making it all the more macabre).
The best part is that there is no time limit on the ghost marriage, so as Death And Taxes points out, the young man who is in desperate need of a spouse before bad luck sets in might still be able to find a proper corpse bride. Perhaps someone will volunteer?
(Via CBS News / Death And Taxes / New York Post)