“Chinese police have arrested three men for killing two young women to sell their corpses as ‘ghost brides’ for dead single men, a Chinese newspaper reported, warning the dark custom might have claimed many other victims. Yang Donghai, a 35-year-old farmer in western China’s Shaanxi province, confessed to killing a woman bought from a poor family for 12,000 yuan ($1,545) last year. She thought she was being sold into an arranged marriage, but Yang killed her in a gully and sold her corpse for 16,000 yuan, the Legal Daily reported Thursday. He and two accomplices then killed a prostitute and sold her for 8,000 yuan before police caught them. ‘I did it for the money; it was a quick buck,’ Yang said, according to the paper. ‘If I hadn’t slipped up early, I planned to do a few more.’ The women were victims of an old belief, still alive in the yellow-earth highlands of western China, that young men who die unmarried should go to their graves accompanied by deceased women who will be their wives in the afterlife. Often these women die natural deaths. Police in Yanan, the poor and dusty corner of Shaanxi where Chairman Mao Zedong nurtured his Communist revolution, said the dark trade went beyond these cases. ‘The actual number is far from just these,’ the paper said.” — Yahoo (US)

(Thanks to Angela for the link.)

At first sight this may be a ghastly story but it doesn’t seem perverse. The ladies were murdered for money. The first was bought, killed, and her cadaver sold for more than a 30% profit. The second one was just killed, so it was 100% profit. You can see why desperate folk would be tempted — but that doesn’t mean they’re perverse. Nor are the ensuing “ghost weddings” perverse, since it’s just a dead body being joined in holy matrimony to another dead body. No doubt the ceremony leaves out that line about “till death do you part.”

If anything is perverse, it may not be the people but the tradition. How can any belief so fundamentally ignorant persist into the modern day? When you read about Google making political concessions to get its search technology past Chinese censors, you imagine that the place must have some degree of modernity to it. In the Information Age, how can people be so misinformed?

Then again, plenty of noise clouds up the signal here in our “enlightened” part of the world. People believe all kinds of whacky shit. No doubt you can name your own examples. Do contemporary technologies weaken these weird beliefs? (Recently there was a meme about Digg “powering Atheism 2.0.”) Or do these technologies just grease the wheels for the most outré beliefs to proliferate? Probably both. Just because it’s the Information Age doesn’t mean everybody’s got a grip on reality — and to the extent that information is virtual, it may well be the opposite.

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