Tag Archives: mínghūn

Ukategorisert

The Ghost Bride – The Book and the Real Ghost Marriage Behind it

1 Comment
Advertisements

Ghost Marriage is not something we only read about in fictional books and watch in horror movies. Sometimes the fiction is inspired by the truth, like with the Malaysian book, The Ghost Bride from 2013.

Malaysian author Yangsze Choo (朱洋熹) heard many types of lore, legends and myths when she was growing up in Malaysia. Being a fourth generation Chinese Malaysian, many of the stories she heard were rooted in Chinese tradition. “As a kid, you’d sometimes hear, ‘So-and-so got married to a ghost or to a dead man.’ And that always really sparked my interest,” she told InsideEdition.com once.

And when she wrote her book, The Ghost Bride, she wrote a fictionalized version of a real thing based on the stories she heard about Ghost Marriages. The book was published in 2013, but painted a story from a very different time. 

Read More: Check out all ghost stories from Malaysia

The book The Ghost Bride is set in 1890s Colonial Malacca, a Malaysian Chinese woman accepts a marriage proposal from a wealthy family to be the “ghost bride” to their deceased son who died a mysterious death to save her family from going bankrupt. Desperate to escape the situation, she needs to battle both the dangers of real life as well as the dangers of the afterlife and the hauntings of the dead. 

Her book was a great success and even got its own Netflix TV-series adaptation. Although The Ghost Bride is a fictional story, the concept of Ghost Marriage is anything but.

Ghost Marriage or Mínghūn in Chinese Culture

The tradition of Ghost Marriage or Mínghūn 冥婚 is an ancient Chinese custom in China and among Chinese communities abroad, representing deep cultural beliefs surrounding death and the afterlife. In this unique ritual, the family of the deceased takes on the responsibility of arranging a marriage for their loved one who has passed away, ensuring that the bond continues even beyond the grave. This practice is believed to provide comfort and peace to the deceased, allowing them companionship in the afterlife, as it is thought that they will not be lonely without a spouse.

In more extreme cases, there is a living person that are to be married to a dead one. This happened more when parents had this choice or to send their children to brothels or servants. “In many ways, it is a choice between two evils. Never an easy choice,” Choo said.

Although Ghost Marriage is fairly uncommon, but these poignant ceremonies are still very much alive today, with families sometimes going to great lengths to conduct elaborate rituals and find suitable partners for their deceased relatives, demonstrating the enduring significance of family ties and filial piety even after death.

Read Also: Ghost Marriage — The Chinese Way to Marry the Dead

The Ghost Bride took three years to write and a lot of things inspired what would eventually be her book. When she researched for it she remembered all of these stories she had heard about and read in the papers. She also learned that her friend’s family had been involved with a Ghost Marriage many years ago in the 90s or early 00s. 

The Wedding of the Dead that Inspired the Ghost Bride Book

The Ghost Bride: The cover of the book that Yangsze Choo was inspired to write after the old tradition.// Photo

One night, Yangsze Choo’s friend’s grandmother woke up from a dream. She said to the family the next day that it was her son who had visited and told her that he had met a girl in the underworld and wished to marry. 

Her son gave his mother the girl’s name and address to her family so that the grandmother could go see for herself. So the grandmother went to the address she had gotten in her dream and according to the story, actually found the family. 

Read More: Check out the book The Ghost Bride

When she talked to the mother of the girl who had died, it turned out that she had the same dreams as the grandmother had. She had been visited by her dead daughter in the dream and said that she too wished to get married. 

The two families got together and held a wedding for their belated children. Just like they would have if they were alive they had a ceremony with Chinese bridal sedan chairs as well as a feast after they had taken their vows and they got their soul tablets. 

After the wedding the two families were joined and worked as any extended family would, joining them for large family happenings. 

More like this

Newest Posts

References

Featured Image: Netflix ‘The Ghost Bride’ (2020)

What Is a Ghost Marriage? The Real Story Behind the Unusual Practice in New Netflix Show ‘The Ghost ‘ | Inside Edition

article, Ukategorisert

Ghost Marriage — The Chinese Way to Marry the Dead

2 Comments
Advertisements

In China there was a tradition of ghost marriage where the family of the dead arrange a marriage from beyond the grave, and there are still cases where the old tradition is not quite dead. 

The practice of mínghūn (冥婚), yinhun (阴婚) or Ghost Marriage in China, has been practise for over three millennials in some form in the country. There have also been found forms of Ghost Marriages in Sudan, India and France, Germany in various forms, but not like in the traditional sense that mínghūn is considered to be. 

The mínghūn is used about a marriage when one or both of the parties in a marriage are deceased at the time of the wedding. The bride’s family demands a dowry, all in the form of paper tributes, which is what you offer the dead. 

Read More: Check out the article about the book about ghost marriage and the real history behind it: The Ghost Bride – The Book and the Real Ghost Marriage

There is even a ceremony and a banquet to marry the two for eternity. The one thing that sticks out from a normal wedding between two living people is the digging up the bones of the bride if she was buried to place them inside her new groom’s grave. 

Why Marry The Dead

The reason for the Ghost Marriages is so that the dead won’t be alone in the afterlife. Many elders particularly believe that people dying without fulfilling their wishes to get married will not rest and come back to haunt the living. There is also the case of connecting family bonds for the living. 

The Horror Marriage: The Ghost Marriage or mínghūn have strong traditional ties that are still hanging on in modern day China. It is often used a motifs in Asian horror movies and series. Here from the movie, The House That Never Dies (2014), featuring a Ghost Marriage. Read here about the haunted mansion it is set in.

One of the more practical reasons for marrying off your dead relative in a Ghost Marriage, was the custom that dictated that a younger brother shouldn’t marry before the elder one was. And if the elder brother was dead, a Ghost Marriage would be proper to not disturb the brothers ghost. 

In many cases, Ghost Marriages were and are means to bury their loved ones in a proper way. A nice idea and sentiment, but can this practice be dangerous for the living or even the unvilling dead?

An Old Tradition that Lives On

Although the origin of this practice and the ritual is mainly unknown, there are still some cases that still uphold the tradition of Ghost Marriage, especially in northern China and other more rural parts. 

Read More: Check out all our collection of ghost stories from China

In 2015, there were no less than 14 female corpses stolen in one village in the Shanxi province to meet up the demand of corpse brides. There was a market for it, and so was the opportunity of making money from it as the price of a corpse of a young woman has skyrocketed, and could go for up to 100 000 yuan, even if the sale of corpses was made illegal in 2006. 

The price is determined by how complete the bones are, how pretty she was, family background, and cause of death. For example would a woman that died of an illness be worth more than one that died in a traffic accident. 

Stealing and Murdering for the Dead

The Living Ghost Brides: In modern media, Ghost Marriages are often presented were a living woman is being sacrificed to a dead man as his wife. Here from the Filipino horror movie, The Ghost Bride (2017).

In 2021 the ashes of a popular live-streamer were stolen from Shandong province in eastern China. The internet celebrity named Luoxiaomaomaozi had taken her own life during a lifestream, but her ashes were stolen by a staff member of the funeral home to be sold to a local family as a ghost bride to their dead son. And this is not the only case in recent times where some went too far to get a body.

Like a case from April 2016 were a man was charged with the murder of two women with a mental disbility, claiming he wanted to sell their corpses to be used in ghost weddings. This happened in Shaanxi province, north-west in China, but it isn’t the only place. 

In 2015, a man in Inner Mongolia was arrested because he killed a woman so he could sell it to a family, looking for å ghost bride. The man, only known as Ma, had promised the woman to find them husbands, but ended up killing them instead to sell their corpses. 

Why are these cases so prominent in northern and central China such as Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan and Inner Mongolia provinces? There are several factors included here as well as cultural beliefs and strong traditional practices. There are also very practical reasons. The ratio of men to females is extremely high, and the coal mining community sees many young men die before their time and before their marriage. A gift from a ghost bride seems like a small compensation.

How to Arrange a Ghost Marriage

Although the practice was banned in 1949 by the Chinese Communist government, there are still those who practice this in secret, and in many cases it is considered almost a profitable business. There are several ways the Ghost Marriage can be arranged. 

Often it is a standard arranged marriage where the parents seek a matchmaker to find a suitable spouse for their child. In fact, ghost marriage matchmakers have seen a big profit in their business over the years. 

Sometimes, the family of the deceased goes to a divination and hears about the wishes from beyond the grave that the family member is seeking to be married or they have a dream themselves. Then it is up to the family to seek out a suitable spouse the deceased already has pointed out or help in the quest of finding one. 

The Dangers with Ghost Marriage: Even though, in the rare cases it happens, most ghost marriages happens between two already dead children with both their parents consent to join the families. However, there have been instances with the corpses of women being stolen in order to use them as ghost brides.

Then when the two families are all agreed, it is just to host the ceremony, where they give gifts to the couple. They do this by burning either paper money or paper pictures of things they would need in their home, like a fridge, chairs, a bed, tables. They burn these papers as the costume is to bring it to the spirit world where they can use it. Then there is the banquet and a feast to join the two families. And then the similarities between the marriage of the living and the marriage of the dead ends. 

Then the rest of the marriage ceremony takes a darker turn. Because then all that is left is to dig up the corpses and bury the two dead together in a grave where they will be together for the rest of time. 

Variations of the Ghost Marriages

However, in recent times, some have begun to practice to marry off a living person to the dead. If the girl’s fiance died before their wedding, she could choose to go through with it to be married. This is not only seen in China, but also in places like Korea and Japan. Some would be hesitant to this though as it would require her to go through with a funeral ritual as well as take a vow of celibacy and live with his family. 

It is not only in mainland China where this practice is held. In Taiwan, there is also a tradition of marrying off an unmarried woman, although no bones dug up are necessary. 

In this tradition, the family of the woman places a red envelope with paper money, a lock of hair or a fingernail in the open and waits for a man to pass by and pick it up. The first man is the winner and it is seen as bad luck to refuse the marriage. He may be allowed to marry a living woman later in life, but the ghost bride should always remain as the first and primary wife. 

More like this

Newest Posts

References

China’s ghost weddings and why they can be deadly – BBC News

China’s ‘ghost marriages’ see dead dug up for macabre marriages despite government crackdowns | South China Morning Post

GHOST MARRIAGES IN CHINA | Facts and Details

Chinese internet celebrity’s ashes stolen for ghost marriage – Global Times