Sometimes you hear a story that’s so grim and gruesome that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a scene from a horror film, but you really couldn’t make this up. Chinese authorities have just arrested 11 people in the eastern province of Shandong for digging up the bodies of dead women and selling them on as ‘ghost brides’. We know. Actually terrifying.
The custom of ‘ghost marriage’, which is still parts in rural parts of the country, involves burying a dead woman next to an unmarried man who has recently died to make sure he has a companion in the afterlife. It doesn’t matter if he has never seen or spoken to the woman before, because evidently you can’t be too picky in the afterlife.
In this case, the 11 arrested men have been accused of excavating a Shandong woman’s body from a grave in March this year and selling it on to middleman for nearly £2000. One of the suspects who’s surname has been revealed to be Wang said in an interview that the value of the corpse increases if they’re exhumed and sold on as soon as possible after they have died. Speaking about a corpse which was sold three months after her death, he said:
‘Years-old carcasses are not worth a damn, while the ones that have just died, like this one, are valuable.’
Grim, grim, grim. Stealing corpses is a criminal offence in China and if the 11 men are charged they could face up to three years in prison, which doesn’t seem enough for the insane creepiness of the crime, really, does it? Good luck sleeping tonight…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.