In China, dead bodies of dead women are stolen from grave and are sold at a high rate because of the raising demand of corpse brides. According to Lin Xu, deputy director of the Hongtong County department of Southern Shanxi, China, around 36 dead bodies have already been stolen and sold to various families who were looking for dead brides for their dead and buried bachelor family members in last 3 years.

This demand for corpse bride is due to ancient superstition in some parts of China that when an unmarried man dies, it brings bad luck to the family. The only way to prevent this “bad luck” is by finding a dead bride for the dead bachelor. This corpse bride which is basically skull and bones is put together by using metal wires, dressed up as bride and then buried next to the dead bachelor.

The demand for corpse bride is rising for these ghost marriages and the families of these stolen dead bodies are trying to get the body of the late relative back. This is basically a tradition of Medieval China, banned by Chairman Mao Zedong. As a result of this ban, farmers used pictures, paper-made or dough-made dummies to keep this tradition alive.

But when people start becoming wealthy, the tradition of burying real corpse bride returned at many rural places. Now is has become such a lucrative business that one dead body can earn you 11,000 British pound ($15,555). In fact, a decomposed body can also fetch 500 British pound ($708).

Shockingly, in 2011, a man was caught trying to sell his wife’s dead body as corpse bride after killing her. According to Chinese law, the punishment for stealing or defiling a dead body is imprisonment for up to three years. However, this has not been able to limit the practice stealing and selling corpse bride.

The situation is so bad that villagers have started to bury their dead kins near to their residents and the wealthy families are hiring guards for tombs, installing CCTV cameras for 24×7 monitoring, and covering the tomb with steel cages.

Story Inputs: Mirror UK