Just a moment, everyone.
I want to tell you a story about the very heart of Seoul. Gwanghwamun — the Sejong-ro intersection. Most of you have passed through it at least once. You know the one: tourists and cars and crowds pressing in from every direction during the day.
But there's a strange story that circulates about that place.
I didn't experience it myself. I can't say for certain it's true. It's something I heard — about a man who used to do overnight deliveries, a few years back. Early thirties. I don't know his name. A friend of a friend, that kind of thing. Apparently what happened to him was strange enough that it spread through the people around him.
He was driving north along Sejong-ro, around two in the morning. Barely any traffic at that hour. He stopped at the light just in front of Gwanghwamun, and the road ahead was wide open. Quiet. The statue of Admiral Yi Sun-sin standing far off in the glow of the floodlights.
Then the light changed, and he went to pull away — and his foot wouldn't move. His own foot, on the accelerator, and it simply wouldn't lift. His body was holding him there, refusing. That was how he described it. Not frightened, exactly. Just that his foot wouldn't move.
A car behind him honked, and only then did he manage to go. He was just passing directly in front of the statue when a wave of cold air swept through the car. It was summer, he said. The air conditioning was off.
And then there was the smell.
Not earth. Not blood. Something else — old and damp. Close to the smell of dry asphalt after days of rain, but far heavier, far thicker. It filled the car in an instant, and the moment he cleared the intersection entirely, it was gone.
He pulled over afterward and sat there for a long time. Not because something felt wrong, exactly — he just wanted to cry. He didn't know why. His chest was so tight the tears were right there, pressing at the edges. He said that feeling stayed with him for a long time.
When he eventually told people what had happened, others began to come forward with similar experiences. Mostly drivers going the same direction — south to north. The stories seemed to cluster around that particular direction, almost without exception.
There's a rumor that goes around. That at the center of that intersection, the spirits of everyone who has died there over the long years have gathered and fused into something solid. Not scattered — standing, like a pillar. Some people say it reaches nearly three meters tall. You can't see it. Your car simply passes through it.
Whether any of that is true, I honestly don't know.
But the delivery driver said this: ever since that night, whenever he passes through Sejong-ro, he finds himself checking the rearview mirror. Not because he feels like something has gotten in.
The opposite.
He feels like he left something behind.
