Losing Ritual Corpse > Spectres

Is there a sure-fire way to not lose ritual corpses when changing gear around?
I feel like I took every precaution - took off desecrate / offering.
Made sure h/o was clear. I go to unequip the gem and the corpses should appear in my h/o but it didn't, and I lost a perfect turtle corpse. I went to check my last wp after looking around the h/o, looked in different h/os as well.

I do it every league, and most of the time the corpses do appear, but once every while they don't and it's just such a gut punch it makes me want to just quit the league (I play ruthless) cause of the amount of time it takes to farm a perfect corpse.

The current implementation of ritual corpse > Spectre is so archaic. This is an issue that people complain about almost every league. I feel like some sort of safety net such as adding the ritual corpses to your own desecrate pool and not having ritual corpses be targetable by others would make it so that these issues don't screw over SSF players, especially if corpses are so rare.

Can't wait for the PoE2 spectre system port over to PoE1 to NOT include ritual corpses, that'd be great.

*Edit
Someone suggested that they could even become itemized again once they become an "inactive" spectre, and have them either drop on the ground (won't work in h/o) or in your inventory.

Do it in town (spectres, auras and stuff are deactivated there) and make sure the spectregem goes back into the exact same slot on the exact same item.

If you have to recolor the item this wont work, so do right at delve mine waypoint cuz items can drop there.