The current legislation was enacted in 1959 following a deadly rupture of the Malpasset Dam, which killed the fiancé of a pregnant woman.
Lee Yong-mi told Korean media that she would remain celibate for the rest of her life and commit to raising their child.
The living spouse would then stay celibate for the rest of his or her life, but the tradition is not currently legally binding.
Two weeks after the man's death, a Florida court ordered that the alleged marriage be legally recognized.
[15] In 2006, Nicole Paultre, fiancée of police shooting victim Sean Bell, tried to posthumously marry him.
In current practice, men who are dead may be sealed by proxy to all of the women to whom they were legally married while alive.
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank includes a man named Fritz Pfeffer, under the pseudonym Albert Dussel.
Pfeffer and Kaletta moved in together but were forbidden from marrying because of the 1935 Nazi Nuremberg Laws that outlawed marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
[18] In Piers Anthony's novel Bearing an Hourglass, the second novel in the Incarnations of Immortality series, a young woman is married to a man who has died in an effort to continue his family line, as any child she conceives will legally be her husband's.
During the final season of the television series Without a Trace, an episode titled “Devotion” featured a young woman who was kidnapped and set to be killed and ghost married by the Chinese parents of her deceased ex-fiancé.
Before the murders, a short traditional wedding ceremony was held so that the deceased sons would have marriage in the afterlife.
Cort develops an obsession with Sweatt, and after his death she conceives a child with his father and claims that it is James's and declares herself as the first posthumous bride in history.
Although he agrees to drink the poison and die, they decide it is better for him to marry a living woman (who he was previously engaged to) and remain alive until his natural death.
In Season 2, Episode 20 of The Blacklist, the task force investigates the corpses of Chinese-American women being smuggled out of the country to be sold for "Minhun" ghost marriages.