Chinese police are investigating a bizarre and macabre incident in which a dead woman was married twice to perform a ritual wedlock between two corpses called "yin marriage". During the Spring Festival earlier this month, a family surnamed Wu sold their daughter's dead body for USD 5,557 to a man surnamed Liu, so that he could perform a "yin marriage" -a marriage between two dead bodies - between the Wu's daughter and Liu's younger brother.   

After the pro-forma wedding, the couple were buried in a single tomb, Chinese state-run Global Times reported today. This episode took an even more odd turn, when it was discovered on February 1 that the tomb had been destroyed and Wu's body was missing. Enraged, Liu immediately complained to police about the disappearance of his missing "sister-in-law". A few weeks later, police tracked down five men, accusing them of exhuming and stealing the body of the girl - all to marry her off yet again, for a tidy 30,000 yuan, to another family, surnamed Li, who were also in search of a corpse for one of their deceased male family members, the report said.