The original corpse bride

Chinese bachelors and bachelorettes face immense societal pressure to get married and have children.

Chinese parents play a central role in selecting their children’s new spouse. Unwed’s are often labelled as “bare branches” or “leftover women”, and the parents are going to extreme lengths to marry them off.

One young Chinese man who died of leukaemia was found a bride a year after his death by his mother. A young girl from the same village, who was hours away from death from kidney failure, was about to become his betrothed.

The bride passed away shortly after the marriage, and the two families hugged and wept simultaneously grieving and celebrating.

The day after, a funeral was held, and the couple — who both passed away at a young age and had never met each other while alive — were buried together at the family grave.

People are extremely scared of being haunted by deceased family members because they believe ghosts can come back and bring disasters and death.

So the marriage was incredibly significant for the family. After he died, because he was an unwed bachelor, the elders of his family forbade his mother to bury him in the family grave. It is believed to bring bad luck to his family, mainly to his grandmother, who was still alive at the time, if he had been buried into the family grave whilst unwed.

The tradition states passing away without continuing the family line makes a man unworthy to rest alongside his ancestors.

Meanwhile for the dying bride’s parents, if a ghost marriage had not been arranged for their daughter, she would never have been allowed to have been formally buried anywhere at all, since the rules are different for females.

Ultimately, the ritual is meaningless for the dead but self-serving for the living.

But whilst this weird tradition seems relatively harmless on face value, it harbours a very dark side.

China is currently struggling with a huge gender imbalance problem. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, by the end of 2018, there were 32.66 million more males than females in China.

As such many Chinese men now struggle to find a wife, and things have become even more difficult for the bachelors in rural China, as many women leave to work in the city.

Rural families, due to China’s one-child policy, either abort female foetuses or abandon newborn girls in the gutter to die, further adding to the imbalance.

As a result, in provinces like Shanxi and Shaanxi, where coal mining is the main industry and workplace accidents claim the lives of thousands of young men every year, it is extremely difficult for the grief-stricken parents to find their sons a “ghost bride” should they be killed prematurely.

And this is when women are in high demand.

Once the news spreads of a young girl who is dying, tens of families who have lost their unwed sons will start an “auction war” to be able to buy her body.

When the auction is over, the girl’s family needs to deliver the body to the winning parents. At this point, the girl is often still alive.

There have been cases where living people have been “married” to corpses in secret rituals, but more alarmingly reports of grave robbery and even murder occurring.

In just 2015, it was reported that at least 14 female corpses were stolen from one village alone in the Shanxi province.

Turns out if women aren’t going to cooperate by dying, then some people are prepared to go to great lengths to initiate it, in order to make money off superstitious families.

There have been at least 12 murder cases that can be linked to ghost marriages.

A man arrested in Liangcheng County, Inner Mongolia 2017 told police officers that he murdered a woman so that he could make money by selling her body.

Another man was charged with killing 2 mentally disabled women after a body was found in his car. The man had allegedly earlier promised the dead woman’s family that they would find her a husband.

Instead, he is accused of injecting her with sedatives, killing her.

Police believe the same man may have also murdered other women.