Underworld
marriage is not forgotten in time amongst Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese;
and perhaps in other parts of the world too. Time and again news of similar nature
will pop up in local news paper concerning this ghost to ghost marriage.
In early 70’s,
a neighbor of mine performed this type of marriage for his deceased eldest son.
The story began something like this in brief:
One day, the
youngest son of the neighbor came to my neighbor and said:
“Papa, I
dreamed of a man called himself koko (big brother) came to me and said he
wanted to get married for consecutively a few nights...”
My neighbor
felt very strange as he did have a 3 year old baby died of high fever many years
ago but he has not revealed this matter to his youngest son because things as
such was deemed to be inauspicious in old Chinese society of those days and no
one wanted to bring it up whatsoever. So he and his wife decided to consult an
old medium.
In the
medium’s place when the medium was in a trance, a young soul possessed the
medium and said:
“Papa and
mama, I am Ah Beng and I wanted to get married. I already have someone in mind
and she is Ah Lian staying beside me…”
On hearing
the words of Ah Beng’s ghost, my neighbor visited the graveyard and to his
surprised he found another tomb of a young girl named Ah Lian. So, after some
enquiry with the graveyard keeper, my neighbor finally found Ah Lian’s living
family.
To both families’
surprise, Ah Lian’s sister also had the same dream that Ah Lian wanted to get
married to Ah Beng. Since both families had the same message from spiritual
world, they decided to perform an underworld marriage.
As I heard
that a marriage ceremony was held between two paper effigies representing the
bride and bridegroom. Friends and relatives were invited to attend the ceremony
as if it was a real life wedding ceremony; except that all items such as gold
and silver ingots, car, servants and a big house were made of paper.
The
ceremony ended with burning of paper effigies and paper offerings. I have not
heard of further news of Ah Beng and Ah Lian… not sure if they did come back to
visit their parents or did the spiritual couple have any spiritual babies…
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