“Child Bride” from the Horror Wedding
Series is inspired by the superstitions surrounding corpse brides that
originated in ancient China and the practice that continues to this day. In
rural China, especially, ancient folklore feels closer to history than to myth
and the horror tradition of the corpse bride lives on.
In “Child Bride,” a young girl is tricked
into marrying a dying man. Shortly before their vows, her new husband dies, but
the wedding must continue to starve off terrible luck for his family. Later that
day, the family poisons the young bride so that she can join her husband in his
coffin, their cold hands linked by a red ribbon.
Over time in 9th and 10th
century China, for a single man to die without family was thought to condemn
the soul to bad luck, lowering his odds of escaping the cruel punishments
inflicted in the Underworld. This was paired with a persistent belief that the
deceased single man would haunt his family, still in search of a bride, and
bring them enduring bad luck.
To appease this ghost, the family needed to
find a “ghost bride” for him to marry. In most cases, these brides were molded
from clay or silver and buried with the body. The most effective defense
against haunting, however, was to marry the dead man to an actual woman, a
female corpse or living bride.
Families would dig up corpses, bind them
with wire to prevent the rotted limbs from falling off, dress them in wedding
clothes, and rebury them beside men who died unmarried. Ghost weddings are just
as ornate and ritualized as living ones, with a dowry and formal ceremony
followed by a funeral procession and banquet. This gruesome practice continues
to this day, based in this abiding belief in the ability of the soul to
transcend death.
First documented during the Song Dynasty, the
practice was still so common when communism reached China that, in 1949, the
government banned ghost marriages. For decades, the practice remained dormant,
with only occasional grave disturbances. However, as China experienced its
recent economic boom, corpse brides have reemerged.
Each year for the past five years, at least
ten cases of grave robbing have been recorded in the northern Chinese
provinces. The true count is likely far higher. In general, local Chinese
police overlook occurrences like these, perhaps because working against ancient
traditions and superstition is an uphill battle. A man who killed his wife to
attempt to sell her body as a corpse bride was arrested in 2011. Two years
later, a group of men were arrested for selling ten bodies for $40K. In 2015, a
norther Chinese village reported 14 female corpses had been stolen in the same
month.
In 2016, a man was arrested after he
promised to work as a matchmaker for two women. Instead of finding them
husbands, however, he killed them, intending to sell their bodies as corpse
brides.
In 2020, Chinese parents dug up the corpse
of their daughter, who had committed suicide 12 years before and been buried by
her husband. The family stole the body from the husband’s family cemetery and
then sold the body for $9K to a different family as a corpse bride for their
recently deceased son. The families performed a ritual ghost marriage, then
reburied the bodies together, the woman in a symbolically red coffin. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, the police refused to investigate when the woman’s husband accused
the family of grave robbing.
Corpse brides is a lucrative industry, with its own matchmaking services. These professionals connect the families of recently deceased men and women. What actions they take from there are their own business. You would think these matchmaking agencies would need to operate underground (pun intended), but they are still openly active, according to Chinese reporters. After all, a sentence of just three years for digging up a body is not much of a deterrent. Not when the potential payout is so high. The fresher the corpse, the higher the price-tag. A recently buried body is worth upwards of $16K.
Northern Chinese families have begun
resorting to drastic measures to protect the bodies of women. Commonly, women
had been buried on distant mountains to hide their graves and protect the
families from hauntings. Now, it’s much more common to see graves in the yard
beside the house. Some pour concrete into open graves to deter thieves. Other
build fences and even install motion-activated security cameras or hire
security guards to help keep their beloved dead in the ground.
The Chinese population, still feeling the
fallout of the One Child Policy and preferential treatment of males, remains
unbalanced, reinforcing the practice of performing ghost weddings while the
woman is still living. Because of the prejudice against single women, still
called “barren branches” in rural China, an unmarried woman is often not
allowed a formal burial. Marrying dying women to recently deceased men is a way
for both families to avoid bad luck and for the women to honor, rather than
shame, their family trees.
References
Butler, J. (2016, March 3). Ghost
Marriages Involving Corpse Brides Are On The Rise In China. Weird Asia
News. https://www.weirdasianews.com/2016/03/03/ghost-marriages-involving-corpse-brides-rise-china/
Jiang, E. (2020, December 11). Chinese
family dig their deceased adult daughter’s corpse before selling it as a “ghost
bride.” Mail Online.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9042939/Chinese-family-dig-deceased-adult-daughters-corpse-selling-ghost-bride.html
Tan, C. K. K., Wang, X., & Chen, S.
(2018). Corpse Brides:Yinhunand the Macabre Agency of Cadavers in Contemporary
Chinese Ghost Marriages. Asian Studies Review, 43(1), 148–163.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2018.1546277
Tsoi, B. G. (2016, August 24). China’s
ghost weddings and why they can be deadly. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-37103447
Xiuzhong Xu, V., & Xiao, B. (2018, May
2). Ghost marriages: A 3,000-year-old tradition of wedding the dead is still
thriving in rural China. ABC News.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-07/ghost-marriages-in-rural-china-continue-to-thrive/9608624
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