The newly deceased bodies of young women in rural China are in increasing demand for superstitious families to use as, “ghost brides” for sons who died before marrying, to prevent the unmarried dead from haunting the family.
The 2,000 year old practice of spirit brides is becoming more difficult to sustain in a modern twenty-first century China, with its one-child policy, which leads to a shortage of women both dead and alive.
The acute shortage of young female corpses for ghost brides was highlighted by the recent arrests of five men from the Sha’anxi province, who were caught digging up the grave of a teenage girl who committed suicide, after failing her university entrance exams.
A grieving father, who lost his son to an unexpected automobile accident, paid several men thousands of dollars for a ghost bride for his unmarried son. The father had planned to have a spirit marriage ceremony, joining together his dead son and the female corpse in marriage, so that his son would have a mate in the afterlife.
The female ghost bride would then be buried in the same grave with the deceased son, a bachelor in life but not in death.
Despite government efforts to crack down on the ancient practice, rural, largely uneducated villagers continue the ghoulish ghost bride practice.
Some entrepreneurs have taken advantage of a family’s grief for their deceased single son, turning it into a moneymaking business, dealing in the black market sale of female corpses.
Yang Dongyan, also of Sha’anxi province was arrested last year for strangling young women and selling their fresh bodies as ghost brides, when the supply of fresh corpses dwindled.
Dongyan discovered families would pay more for a fresher corpse in good condition, than one that had been buried for a long period. Families seeking ghost brides for their dead, unmarried sons demand young good-looking corpses for the spirit marriage ceremonies.
Dongyan previously traded in live women, who he kidnapped and sold to lonely bachelors, but discovered they were worth more dead, as ghost bride corpses.