CW: Death, Ghosts and Dead Bodies, Abortion (I believe maybe just 2 lines), Some talk surrounding disrespect for the dead
There’s a history of marriage that goes beyond the living. After all… ghosts can get married too! Inter-mortal marriages, post-mortem marriages, pre-mortem marriages— ghosts and spirits have been getting married for a long time. Marriage is a human ritual that some even deem necessary for a peaceful afterlife. Jump in and learn how ghosts find love and partnership with us! And you’ve had a few weeks of particularly long episodes with us, so enjoy a short one this week.
And we tried really hard on the Mandarin in this episode, so I hope we did at least a passable job of it!
I started out mentioning that there was some sort of version of the ghost marriage in many places all over the world, including here in the U.S. So to start our list this week, I’m giving you this paper that talks about Ghost Marriage in five different socieites.
This episode we focused on the Chinese tradition of ghost marriage, so I’ll start by linking you to the Wikipedia. There’s very brief info on the page, but really, just scroll down to the sources at the bottom, because those are super good sources.
This is the source I took several quotes about money from and quotes the Dr. Huang, the researcher who has been studying ghost marriages in rural China.
There’s a show on Netflix called The Ghost Bride, and it’s based on stories the author, Yangsze Choo heard growing up in Malaysia. Here is her story about that.
This link goes really in depth about the ritual, the history, the beliefs, the labor the body and ghost serves for the people doing these, and there are a ton more sources toward the bottom.
Here I’m just linking the book M mentioned that deals with ghost marriages. The Undertaking of Lily Chen.
And this is just a fascinating documentary about the Loess Plateau around which Dr. Huang is conducting his studies on ghost marriages. The place has such interesting history of revitilization.
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