Ah, should I even be telling this… but I genuinely heard it myself. Well — not experienced it myself, more like — I heard it from this older girl I know. And she's not the type to make things up. That's exactly what makes it so unsettling.
She'd just finished working late and was walking home alone. Heading toward the Sejong-ro intersection. She said it must have been past midnight. It was winter — you know that stretch of road that curves around the Government Complex, that wide open boulevard. During the day it's packed with people and traffic, but at that hour it's completely desolate. The streetlights are blazing bright, but that almost makes it worse somehow. You know those nights where the light itself feels wrong.
She was walking along when a gust of wind hit her full in the face. But it wasn't just cold air — it carried something with it. Something damp and heavy. Like soil, and something rotting underneath. In the dead of winter, there's no reason for a smell like that. That's when she started to feel like something was off.
She put her head down and tried to walk faster — and then she heard it. From somewhere behind her. A low man's voice. "Please. Save me." Just those words, nothing more.
At first she assumed someone nearby was on the phone. It hadn't come on that strong, just seemed to drift from somewhere back there. But then she took a few more steps and heard it again. "Please. Save me." Closer this time. She glanced back over her shoulder — and there was no one there. Truly no one. Twenty meters behind her, the street was completely empty.
She should have stopped then, but instead she walked faster. Except the voice wouldn't fall away. If anything it pressed closer, right up against her back. "Please save me, please help me." Now it was two phrases running together, one after the other. The voice was trembling. Like someone squeezing the words out through a throat that couldn't breathe.
She finally stopped walking and turned all the way around.
There was no one there.
But when she told me the story, there was one thing she kept coming back to. It wasn't the voice itself that frightened her, she said. What frightened her was how completely, undeniably human it sounded. Not distant and muffled the way a voice sounds through a phone — but sharp and immediate, like someone had pressed their mouth right up to her ear. She said she could hear the breathing.
She found out later. That whole stretch of Sejong-ro was once a road along which condemned men were marched to their execution during the Joseon dynasty. She's not certain of the details, but apparently among the shamans and spiritualists in that area, there are stories — whispers that at that particular spot, people hear a voice begging to be saved. The fact that multiple people have heard something similar is what really gets under your skin.
She hasn't walked that section of Sejong-ro late at night since. But the thing that truly gives me chills is the last thing she said.
"The thing is… it didn't feel like the voice was talking to me. It felt like it was trying to reach somewhere else. Using me to get there."
I still don't really know what she meant by that.
