Mail Order Corpse Bride

These Chinese sure have some stupid customs. One is the belief that if a man dies without a wife, a female corpse should be buried with the man in order for the couple to be married in the afterlife. They call these dead women “ghost brides.”

And where does one find a dead woman to bury with an unmarried man? Why, from a Chinese undertaker who specializes in brokering dead Chinese women, of course.

From Reuters here:

Chinese police have arrested three men for killing two young women to sell their corpses as “ghost brides” for dead single men, a Chinese newspaper reported, warning the dark custom might have claimed many other victims.

Yang Donghai, a 35-year-old farmer in western China’s Shaanxi province, confessed to killing a woman bought from a poor family for 12,000 yuan ($1,545) last year.

She thought she was being sold into an arranged marriage, but Yang killed her in a gully and sold her corpse for 16,000 yuan. He and two accomplices then killed a prostitute and sold her for 8,000 yuan before police caught them.

The women were victims of an old belief, still alive in the yellow-earth highlands of western China, that young men who die unmarried should go to their graves accompanied by deceased women who will be their wives in the afterlife. Often these women die natural deaths.

Yang and two helpers sold the bodies to Li Longsheng, an undertaker who police said specialized in buying and selling the dead women for “ghost weddings.”

In China, female fetuses are routinely aborted, and female infants are abandoned at orphanages at a high rate because most families do not want to have to pay the hefty dowry that comes at the time of marriage. If you couple this with the mandatory one child per family law, this creates a large surplus of males in the population. Males which, if they die unmarried, creates a horrifying underground economy in the murder and trafficking of ghost brides. It boggles the mind.