Seriously?! Men arrested for trying to join two corpses in “ghostly” wedlock
There is this belief that if a man dies unwed, and is so buried, ill luck will ravage the family members he leaves behind.
What does the family do? They buy a female corpse from female corpse sellers, thieves actually; and bury “her” with their dead old man.
Three men were recently arrested for trying to steal a female corpse, and sell “her,” for this purpose.
Yes, Chinese people can be that “bad.”
Police in north China’s Shanxi Province detained the three “corpse thieves” suspected of stealing a female corpse from a village tomb to sell as bride for the ancient rite of “netherworld marriage.”
“Netherworld marriage,” that’s what they call the custom.
The main suspect in the case, a 72-year-old man surnamed Hou, said he was tempted by the idea of selling female bodies as brides to deceased single men when hearing the death of a young woman in a nearby village, according to the public security bureau of Ruicheng County.
They later claimed to be relatives of the woman and found a buyer who agreed to purchase the body, priced at 25,000 yuan (3,900 U.S. dollars or approximately N770,000), iCrossChina reports.
But their tomb raid on Saturday night was discovered by local villagers, whose reports led to their arrest.
Once popular in some parts of China, a “netherworld marriage” claims that a man who dies unwed would bring bad luck to the family, so he must be buried with a female corpse as a ritual symbolizing a wedding of the deceased.
In 2012, three men murdered a pregnant woman in Shaanxi Province and sold her body as a ghost bride in a case that prompted a national outcry against this grisly tradition.
