A trio of Chinese people were detained by the police for possibly stealing a dead woman's body from a tomb in northern China last Saturday, according to the Guardian.
The main suspect was a 72 year-old-man who learned about the death of the young woman in a village in the Shanxi province and thought about selling her corpse to a dead man's relatives, according to the Daily Mail.
The three men pretended to be related to the deceased woman and negotiated a sale price of about $4,000 with the relatives of the deceased man, the People's Daily stated.
The trio planned to sell the dead body as a bride for a "ghost wedding," an ancient Chinese ritual wedding. When two single people died, their living loved ones joined them together in marriage for the afterlife, the Guardian reported.
Xu Keqian, a professor of Chinese language and culture at Nanjing Normal University, said that the afterlife matrimonial ceremony goes back centuries to poor rural towns where superstitious people believed in an afterlife. According to the Daily Mail, the villagers thought if they married their single deceased relatives off then that would ward off the bad luck that comes with dying while unmarried.
After the two corpses are married postmortem, they are reburied in a tomb while drums and gongs play, commemorating the wedding ceremony, noted the Daily Mail.
Kequian explained that in most cases, the man and woman were engaged while living and then died before the wedding, thus bringing about the "underworld marriage ceremony," the Daily Mail stated.
At this time it is not known whether the men will be charged for theft or fraud or other related charges.
