Of course, there are caveats: the living person must prove that the couple wanted to marry and must obtain permission to marry from the family of the deceased. If the President decides to grant the marriage proposal, the marriage takes effect retroactively to the day before the death of the deceased. The living spouse is not entitled to legal succession, i.e. he or she does not acquire the deceased`s property or property. However, if a woman is pregnant at the time of her partner`s death, the child is considered the heir of the deceased at birth. In Anne Frank`s Diary of a Girl, one of the characters is a man named Fritz Pfeffer, under the pseudonym Albert Dussel. In the 1930s, Pfeffer met Charlotte Kaletta. Pfeffer and Kaletta moved in together, but were not allowed to marry due to the Nuremberg National Social Laws of 1935, which prohibited marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Charlotta married Pfeffer posthumously in 1950, retroactive to May 31, 1937.[16] [17] The main factor that distinguishes Japanese ghost marriage from its Chinese counterpart is the inclusion of non-human spouses. A deceased person is married neither to a dead nor to a living person, but to a doll.
The most common ghost marriage is between the ghost man and the bridal doll, but ghost women are sometimes associated with tiny lifeless brides. After a posthumous marriage, the living spouse naturally becomes a widower. Posthumous marriage also brings the surviving spouse into the family of the deceased spouse, which can create a covenant or moral satisfaction. The surviving spouse is also subject to the resulting marital obstacles. In 2006, Nicole Paultre, fiancée of police victim Sean Bell, tried to marry him posthumously.[4] However, this was not possible because no marriage certificate had been signed. Paultre nevertheless adopted Bell`s surname to “honour his memory.” [15] In other words, the woman marries a living man who replaces the dead. All children, although biologically conceived from the living husband, are considered descendants of the deceased. If a heterosexual couple is engaged and the man dies before marriage, the woman can enter into a phantom marriage by marrying the spirit of her fiancé. During the ceremony, a white rooster represents the groom. According to Lucas J.
Schwartze in Grave Vows: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Varying Forms of Ghost Marriage among Five Societies, the bird also gets into the bridal carriage after the ceremony, and then accompanies the bride on official business with the groom`s family. Such cases are rare due to the demands placed on the bride, who must then move in with her deceased husband`s family and take a vow of celibacy. Necrogamy is generally illegal in the United States, although there was at least one wedding-themed funeral. [11] [12] In Nazi Germany, it was customary to marry the pregnant bride of a fallen soldier to his corpse in order to legalize the child out of wedlock and to grant the bride the benefits of a soldier`s widow. An example of this is the Norwegian wife of Franz Kutschera. [3] The South Korean government allowed the pregnant bride of late boxer Duk-koo Kim to “comfort” her spirit by marrying her after a deadly fight with Ray Mancini in 1982. And in Germany, Fritz Pfeffer – mentioned in Anne Frank`s diary under the pseudonym “Albert Dussel” – was posthumously married in 1950 to Charlotta Kaletta, with whom he had lived before going into hiding and eventually dying in a concentration camp. “People who die early harbor resentment toward the living. Deprived of the sexual and emotional fulfillment of marriage and procreation, they often try to torment their happier living parents with illness, financial unhappiness or ghost ownership. The marriage of spirits, which allows the ritual completion of the life cycle, soothes the dead spirit and diverts its evil attention from the living.
The Church`s teaching is not entirely specific about who should be sealed to whom when there are multiple spouses, and the Church allows for sealing whenever there has been a valid marriage between a couple of the opposite sex. One possibility is that no matter how many times a man or woman is sealed, there is only one marriage left in the afterlife. Another possibility is that multiple seals are valid in the next life. The Church does not clearly teach whether polygamous marriages exist in the afterlife or not. It is assumed that proxy arrangements, such as Church proxy baptisms, are available to deceased persons and that deceased persons must accept the ordinance for it to take effect.