Want you to merry a ghost? Here an definitive guide to your posthumous marriage with a dead!

Originally a stub written by Leo S. 🙏🏽 in 2022. Updated by Danijel in 2026

Ok. Apparentoy you want to merry a ghost.
Believe it or not, in some societies, it’s possible, just with a simple precautions.
A marriage in which one or both members of the couple are dead, is an established practice in China, Japan, Sudan, somewhere in France, and even the United States, among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Details and legal nuances vary wildly between cultures, but here is an overview of how to tie the knot with someone who…already passed away!

Although Chinese dating and marriage practices are changing under the influence of technology and online dating, traditional, family-oriented values still rule, with matchmaking, via meddling parents and/or a marriage broker, is big business still today.
Actually, in China, to be female and unmarried at 30 is to be a “leftover woman”, and the 1978 implementation of the one-child policy has complicated the marriage market somewhat due to the societal preference for baby boys.
A 2011 study found that the sex ratio among newborns rose from 105 males per 100 females in 1980 to over 120 males per 100 females during the 2000s, a ratio that has resulted in an overabundance of single men and, according to Chinese custom, older sons ought to marry before their younger brothers.
However, if an older brother should die unmarried at a young age, there is a solution that keeps the social order intact: ghost marriage.
In China, as well as among the Chinese in Taiwan and Singapore, this practices are performed to address a variety of social and spiritual ills, including the desire to placate the restless spirits of those who go to their grave unmarried as, apparently, ghosts with families are liable to direct their discontent within the family circle.
A family whose son or daughter has died at a young age may come to believe that the deceased person is communicating a desire to be wed somehow with a message that can take the form of general havoc on the family, including illnesses that do not respond to conventional treatments, or expressing his desire to be married by appearing in a family member’s dream.
Either way, for deceased women, ghost marriage offers social and spiritual advantages in China’s patrilineal society. In fact, a woman who dies single, without having had children, has no-one to worship her memory or tend to her spirit.
According to Chinese tradition, a dead woman cannot be memorialized within her family’s home, and not even her spirit tablet, a memorial to a dead person that is displayed in a home altar that honors the family ancestors, is forbidden from being placed among the family in which she grew up. A deceased married women, on the other hand, gets to have her spirit tablet put on display in her husband’s home, and a marriage, therefore, ensures that her spirit can be worshipped by bringing her into the family of a husband who has been chosen for her after her death.
On the other hand, If a couple is engaged, and the man dies before the wedding, the woman can engage in a ghost marriage by marrying her fiancé’s spirit and, during the ceremony, a white rooster stands in for the groom.
It seems sometimes the bird also rides in the bridal carriage post-ceremony and thereafter accompanies the bride to formal dealings with the groom’s family but, whether it involves a live person or not, ghost marriage is not legal in China, at least since the reign of Chairman Mao, but the ritual endures, particularly in the northern regions of the country.
But don’t worry.
Most ghost marriages are celebrated to unite the spirits of two departed souls, and not between a dead person to a living one!

Something similar happens in Japan, where ghosts of the people who die early feel a sort of resentment toward the living. Denied the fulfillment of marriage and procreation, they often seek to torment their more fortunate living relatives through illness, financial misfortune, or even spirit possession.
As a result, ghost marriage, allowing a ritual completion of the life cycle, placates the spirit turning its malevolent attention away from the living.
However, the main factor distinguishing Japanese ghost marriage from its Chinese counterpart is that a deceased person is not married to a dead person, nor to a living one, but to a doll, and the most common ghost marriage is between ghost man and bride doll, even if ghost women are occasionally also united with little dolls grooms.
Actually chinese-style ghost marriage, between a living woman and deceased man, formerly took place in Japan, but it was replaced in the 1930s by man-doll marriage, due to an increase in young, single men dying during war and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, when the high number of casualties made it too difficult to find enough (live) brides for them all.
During a bride doll wedding ceremony, a photo of the dead man is placed in a glass case alongside the doll to represent their union. The tableau stays there for up to 30 years, at which point the man’s spirit is considered to have passed into the next realm.
This union is designed to keep the ghost husband calm and prevent him from causing unrest within his living family.

Elsewhere, and more precisely within the Nuer ethnic group of southern Sudan, if a man dies without male heirs, a relative frequently marries a wife to the dead man’s name. The “genitor”, or biological father, then behaves socially like the husband, but the ghost is considered the “pater”, the legal father.
Simply, the woman marries a living man, who stands in for the dead one, and any offspring, while biologically fathered by the living husband, are considered to be descendants of the dead one.
This stuff, which often is carried out when a Nuer man dies in a feud, is conducted in order to secure both the property and ongoing lineage of the dead man.
Interestingly, the woman also receives a payment at the time of the ghost marriage, known as the brideprice, which may include “bloodwealth”, money from those responsible for the death of the man as well as payment in the form of cattle that once belonged to the deceased man.
In this way, Nuer posthumous marriages keep the social order by redistributing wealth and property.

Believe it or not, France is a rare country in which it is explicitly legal for a living person to marry a dead one.
Article 171 of the French civil code, more precisely the laws by which the country is governed, literally states that “the President of the Republic may, for grave reasons, authorize the celebration of the marriage where one of the future spouses is dead”.
Although the civil codes of France were introduced during Napoleon’s reign, this article is a relatively recent addition and its story behind begins with a disaster.
It was December 2, 1959 when the Malpasset Dam just north of the French Riviera collapsed, unleashing a furious wall of water that killed 423 people. When then president Charles de Gaulle visited the devastated site, a bereaved woman, Irène Jodard, pleaded to be allowed to marry her dead fiancé and thus, on December 31, French parliament passed the law permitting posthumous marriage.
Naturally, there are some little rules: the living person, for example, must prove that the couple intended to marry, and has to obtain permission to wed from the deceased’s family!
If the president chooses to grant the wedding request, the marriage becomes retroactive from the day before the deceased person’s death.
Well, the living spouse does not receive the right to intestate succession and they do not acquire the dead person’s assets or property, but if a woman is pregnant at the time of her partner’s death, the child, when born, is considered the actual heir to the deceased.
Posthumous marriages continue to be granted in France still today, usually under heartbreaking circumstances.
For example, in 2009, 26-year-old Magali Jaskiewicz married her deceased fiancé and father of her two children Jonathan George, who died at 25 in a car accident just two days after asking her to marry him.
In any case, hundreds of grieving French fiancées have since married their departed sweethearts, most of them women.

But there are other cases.
According to the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, marriage is eternal, while death is but a moment.
Wedding, known as “sealing” in Mormonism, unites a couple for the rest of their lives and beyond, provided that both spouses live according to the LDS interpretation of the teachings of Jesus Christ.
The Mormon belief that marriage is eternal allows for a wedding ceremony to be performed on those who have already died, something like posthumous Mormon baptisms, ceremonies that take place in an LDS temple, intended to be initiated only by the descendants of those concerned.
Again, in India, occasionally performed in specific regions where children who died young are “married” upon reaching what would have been their marriageable age, while in Nazi Germany, it was practice to marry the pregnant fiancée of a fallen soldier to his dead body in order to legalise, otherwise out of wedlock, the child and provide the bride with the benefits of a soldier’s widow.
The possibility to marry a dead soldier was introduced by secret letter of Adolf Hitler from Nov 6, 1941.
The legality of such a marriages was recognized by the British Occupation Forces in Germany, especially in Hamburg, where they were legally practised until Feb 28, 1946 and elsewhere until March 31, 1946.
The most popular case is the one of Franz Kutschera, an Austrian Nazi politician and government official.
On 4 February 1944, in Deutsches Haus in Warsaw, his pregnant Norwegian girlfriend, Jane Lilian Gjertsdatter Steen, posthumously married him in accordance with pagan rituals. Jane Kutschera died in Norway in 1994 while her son, Sepp Kutschera, became an Alpinist, who was the first to climb Koh-e Keshni Khan in the Hindukush mountains, in 1963, and died in 2014.