Minghun — Dead People Marry Each Other

An unusual, from a Western perspective, custom is growing in popularity in China as discussed in Jim Yardley, Dead Bachelors in Remote China Still Find Wives, NY Times, Oct. 5, 2006:

For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone whose needs must be maintained. * * *

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple. * * *

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants — or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.