China's courts jail grave robbers who sell women's corpses as "ghost brides" for sons who died unmarried

Kind 1. In the custom of ghost marriage, a family buries a son who died single with a dead bride. Chris K. K. Tan, an associate professor at Nanjing University, writes that families feared the spirit of an unmarried dead son would be lonely and angry; that an eldest son's ghost marriage let younger brothers marry; and that a man who died childless could be given a ghost bride and then a posthumous heir, ideally a relative with the same surname, to continue the line. In 2013 a court in Shaanxi sentenced four people to 28 to 32 months for stealing ten women's corpses, cleaning them, faking medical files and selling them for a total of 240,000 yuan. In March 2014 a three-month-old corpse was sold to a middleman for 18,000 yuan and to a Hebei family for 38,000. In October 2014 Shandong police arrested 11 men for robbing women's graves for the same trade. In April 2016 three men in Gansu were accused of murdering two mentally disabled women to sell their bodies; no outcome is reported in these sources. Later in 2016 a disabled woman was sedated and nearly buried alive, and was saved by knocking on her coffin; police charged six people with abduction, trafficking and attempted murder. Grave robbery carries up to three years in prison.