Teenage girl dug up to be 'corpse bride'

[bijou]

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. ...

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The only saving grace is that both parties were deceased.

[Gingersnap]

Ick! I wonder how this helps? I thought the Chinese believed that your afterlife was crap unless you had a male heir to look after your ghost. Surely ghost brides don't have living children.

[linda22003]

It's sort of like the Mormons converting ancestors from other religions to Mormonism after death. That makes about as much sense.

[lacarnut]

That is rather spooky even for me; I worked in a cemetery for a year and we only dug up one body to be exhumed. I did not participate in my crew's removal of the casket.

[Defiant1]

This would seem futile after rigor mortis has subsided.

[FlaGator]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWU7FxQIsoM