Ghosts

Look at this incredible picture of a Chinese Ghost Bride circa 1922. Both teens, she died from a high fever before the wedding. The photo was taken in the early evening, when she was already dead for 6 days. They had to prop her body up with a wooden plank, so as to hold her up. Notice that her feet aren’t touching the ground fully.

Also, notice the 2 rows of Chinese characters. One row was carved outwards, which was said to be meant for the dead. The couple went through the traditional wedding rites for the dead to cement a bond of friendship between two families and to provide a deceased daughter with a patrilineage.

Why? Because the families believed “that should the spirit of the deceased, who, upon finding itself without a spouse in the other world” would cause misfortune for its natal family, as well as the family of its betrothed.

The woman in this 1922 Ghost Wedding is supposedly a nǚ guǐ (女鬼), or a ghost woman. A woman who dies unmarried has no family and can’t become an ancestor, so she returns and haunts. There’s a simple solution to the nǚ guǐ hauntings, though: find a man and pay him to marry her. These “profound weddings” (冥婚) are an important function of the Dàoshi, and a kinder form of exorcism.

There have also been ghost weddings where both parties were dead before the ceremony.

The Chinese culture isn’t the only one to embrace ghost brides and perform ghost weddings. There is a long history of ghost brides and ghost weddings in Sudan and India, and even France.

Many fiction-based novels and TV shows have highlighted the custom of ghost brides as well:

In Yangsze Choo’s novel The Ghost Bride (New York: William Morrow, 2013), set in 19th century colonial Malaya, a young Chinese woman receives a proposal from a wealthy family to marry their dead son.

In Lisa See‘s novel Peony in Love (New York: Random House, 2007), set in 17th century China, the protagonist, Peony, dies at 16 and is later the bride in a ghost marriage to a poet she fell in love with during life.

In Season 2, episode 16 of the television series Bones, “The Boneless Bride in the River,” a woman is murdered and has her bones sold for a ghost marriage ritual.

In episode 22 of the final season of the television series Without a Trace, titled “Devotion,” a young woman was kidnapped and set to be poisoned and ghost married by the traditional Chinese parents of her late ex-fiancé.^[11]

In Season 5, episode 13 of the television series Numb3rs, “Trouble in Chinatown,” Chinese women are being murdered and then their bodies are buried atop the coffins of unmarried Chinese males. The “ghost brides” are picked out by the grieving parents. Shortly before the murder, a brief traditional wedding ceremony is held so that the dead sons have company in their afterlife. While the character performing the murders portrays this as long-standing Chinese tradition, the writers used the epilogue to point out that the authentic tradition did not involve murder and that the criminals had perverted the practice to their own ends.

An episode of Urban Legends portrayed this practice, with a twist. A man was forced to undergo this with his fiancée, who had recently killed herself.

In season 2 of The Blacklist, ghost marriages is briefly explored when a blacklister smuggles deceased female bodies and prepare them for afterlife with a marriage ceremony for the sons of grieving clients.

(Source of novels and tv shows cited, wikipedia)

Do Ghosts Exist?

In a word, yes. They do.

That’s an easy fact to accept if you’re someone who is sensitive to the energy around them, or has actually had paranormal experiences.

For those who have not had the gift of a paranormal experience, it’s an easy fact to question.

Whether you see them or not, they exist. Those who have seen them, felt them and interacted with them, can tell you.

What is a ghost? A ghost is the spirit of someone who has not yet crossed over.

Why does a ghost stay behind? Sometimes it’s a conscious choice. They choose to stay because of unfinished business — some situation that they just can’t leave undone.

Or they might stay behind because they have been so attached to the addictions of their earth plane existence that they couldn’t imagine a reality beyond this one. This fits those with addictions such as drug addicts or alcoholics — even workaholics!

Sometimes someone dies so tragically that they don’t realize they’re dead.

This applies to the ghost mom I wrote in The Fine Art of Deception, Undoing Time. She died so suddenly that even 20 years later, she still didn’t realize she was dead. Of course, too, I think her spirit also wrestled with some unfinished business relating to her two children and her former husband. But out of respect for those who haven’t yet read the book, I won’t say any more about that mystery …

But, for those who have already read the book, most of ghost mom’s story is a completely true ghost story!