Truly Bizarre

While reading some of the headlines on the Fox News website, I ran across this one: "Chinese Police Bust Ring Suspected of Murdering Females to Serve as Brides to Dead Bachelors". I honestly just thought that somewhere, there must have been a typo. It didn't make sense. So, because it caught my attention, I read on..."A ring of gangsters who traded in the bodies of women they murdered, selling them as brides to keep dead bachelors happy in the afterlife, has been arrested in China."
Well, that certainly cleared things up...sort of.

The article went into great detail about how three Chinese men built a business around a Chinese superstition regarding bachelors and the "afterlife". Apparently, " It is not uncommon in rural parts of China for a family to seek out the body of a woman who has died to be buried alongside their son after the performance of a marriage ceremony for the deceased pair." Well alrighty then! Does anyone else think this is just a little bit weird?

But the story gets better. According to the article, the "dead bride" entrepreneurs discovered that they could make a good living by providing dead women to families who believed that their dead bachelor son needed a good woman for the afterlife. So they did what anyone in that situation would do...they preyed on vulnerable women (a prostitute and a mentally handicapped woman), killed them and then sold them for a profit. Of course!

This became a quite lucrative little business for the three men, though there were problems along the way. In one instance, the men did not make quite as much profit because the family purchasing the body was dissatified with the quality of the DEAD woman's body. WHAT!?!?!

But alas, the three body-dealers got caught and arrested. Says Yang Dongyan, 35, “I just wanted to make money. It’s a quick way to make money. I was arrested too soon otherwise I had planned to do this business a few more times.”

Seriously, this has to be one of the most bizarre stories I've ever read.