Corpse Brides... Literally...

This is totally weird... and I have never heard of this, but I guess the Chinese have a belief that a man should always have a female corpse buried next to him for him to be married in the afterlife. So there are undertakers that actually find corpses for unmarried men, just to bury next to him....

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.”

Man... remember what I said about 2020... and all the extra men vs women... uh oh... god, I cannot get over how weird this is!