Thread: China Teenage girl dug up to be 'corpse bride'

Teenage girl dug up to be 'corpse bride'

Five people have been arrested in China for digging up the corpse of a young woman to be a "ghost bride" for a man killed in a car crash.

Published: 1:26PM BST 15 Jun 2009

The suspects included a grieving father who allegedly paid his four accomplices around £2,700 pounds to find a female to be his son's companion in the afterlife.

The men were caught after unearthing the remains of a teenage girl who had poisoned herself after failing her university entrance exams last year, a newspaper in Xianyang in China's Shaanxi province reported.

In rural China, superstitious villagers have for centuries sought out the bodies of recently deceased woman to be ghost brides for young men who die single.

Marriage ceremonies are conducted for the two corpses, and the bride is placed in the same grave as her husband.

Under Chairman Mao's rule, officials made strenuous efforts to stamp out the ghoulish practice but it has since resurfaced in some rural areas.

Last year, a gang in southern China was arrested for strangling young women to sell as ghost brides when the supply of female corpses in their area ran short.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... bride.html

Oh my ....

Oh my ....

Originally Posted by Judy

Oh my ....

You can say that again!!!

Originally Posted by Judy

Oh my ....

Oh look!!! You did!!

I'm sorry......I just couldn't resist teasing you a little bit.

I guess I hit the submit button again after it had already sent.

Originally Posted by Judy

I guess I hit the submit button again after it had already sent.

I do that quite often myself!!

Hey, I love your tag line! Good One!

This story just makes me...



Dixie

I just went back through some of my research files and....ha-ha...dug up some info I've got on this practice which goes back to ancient times and not just in China.

Ghost, or spirit, marriages generally take place when a couple is engaged and one dies before the wedding.

In the case of the male decedent it's a matter of carrying on lineage and also, to clear the way for younger brothers, if any, to be married because custom dictates that they cannot marry before the older brother.

In the case of a female it's to allow her to enter into the lineage of her husband's family because custom dictates that an unmarried woman has no descendents, except through her husband's family.

For the most part, these things don't occur like it did in the story. It's a mutual arrangement between families......even if a couple didn't know one another in life.....and is carried out in a more spiritual and symbolic way as opposed to in such a literal sense.

The idea of a ghost marriage in the spirtual or symbolic sense doesn't bother me......heck, our rituals probably seem weird to other cultures too.

But geeez......to go digging up corpses and killing to meet inventory shortages is going a little too far overboard