This is just sick.
BEIJING – Police in northern China have detained three men for the deaths of two women whose corpses were to be sold as “ghost brides” to accompany dead men in the afterlife, state media said.
Authorities indicated that the killings last year were not isolated cases, the Legal Daily newspaper said on its Web site, but did not give any details.
Yang Dongyan, 35, a farmer from Shaanxi province, said he had bought a young woman for $1,600 and planned to sell her as a bride, according to the paper.
But then he met Liu Shenghai, who told him that the woman could command a higher price as a “ghost bride,” it said. The tradition, called “minghun” or afterlife marriage, is common in the Loess Plateau region of northern China, where a recently deceased woman is buried with a bachelor to keep him company after his death.
Yang killed the woman in a ditch, bagged her body, and sold her for $2,077 to Li Longsheng, an undertaker, who said he could find a buyer, the paper said.
So not only was this woman treated as a piece of property to be sold while she was alive, but because she had more value as a corpse, she was killed and her body sold. And from the looks of it, there’s some kind of secondary market in both live and dead women, since the woman was bought by the farmer to be re-sold. I would guess her family sold her in the first place.
A second woman was also killed and her body sold to accompany some dead man in the afterlife, though she only brought in $1,000 because she was “less pretty.” Though the profit margin was likely higher, since she was a prostitute killed during a session.
So not only do these women have a hard life, but they have to spend the afterlife waiting on some strange man whose family bought them to be his eternal servant.
Oh, and had they not been caught, this Dynamic Duo would have killed again.