Ah, should I even be telling this… It didn't happen to me directly, but the story I heard was so vivid it stuck. And every time I tell it, the goosebumps come right back. So just — listen carefully.
You know that alley in Suwon's Haenggung-dong, near Hwaseomun Gate, where all the fortune-tellers are crammed together? A friend of mine — an older girl I knew — used to live there. One day she called me, and her voice was just wrong. Not trembling, but flat somehow. Drained of something. And she said, "I saw something last night."
Now, I can't swear to this part, but supposedly that alley sits on ground so charged with the energy of Paldal Mountain that shamans were drawn there on purpose. It wasn't just that fortune-tellers happened to cluster there — the land itself was said to be alive with something. But the part that really gets under your skin is Hwaseomun. That gate, back in the Joseon dynasty, was the gate they used to carry the dead out through the castle walls. The living used other gates. Only the dead passed through that one. Which means the gate itself already stands at the boundary between the living and the dead.
And on top of that, during the Catholic persecutions in the late Joseon period, an enormous number of people were killed in that neighborhood. Martyrs. They died without proper rites, and the rumor is that their souls — left to drift through the in-between — settled in that alley. Shamans began holding rituals to appease them, and the fortune-tellers multiplied from there. None of it's been confirmed, but they say if you ask any of the old shamans in that neighborhood, not one of them will deny it.
Anyway, back to her story. It was past midnight, and she was walking home from a convenience store, cutting through the alley. All the fortune-teller shops were shuttered, yellow talismans pasted across every door. She remembers thinking it was quiet — but why did the air feel so heavy — and she kept walking.
Then the cold came up through her feet. She was wearing shoes, but the cold pushed through the soles like she was standing barefoot on bare concrete, and it climbed — fast — from her feet all the way up to her knees. And with it came a smell. Earth, but not ordinary earth. Something old, something damp, something faintly sweet underneath it all. She said it was almost like flowers — but flowers that had already begun to rot.
And then she looked up.
There, beneath the arch of Hwaseomun Gate, right at the edge where the streetlight gave out, someone was standing. Just a silhouette — wearing something that looked like a hanbok — and not quite facing in or out, but standing at an angle that made it impossible to tell whether it was showing its back or its face. She stopped. She blinked. And it was gone. But that was the worst part, she said — the way it vanished. If it had left, there would have been footsteps, some shift in the air, something. There was nothing.
As if it had never been there at all.
She hasn't walked through that alley since. But the part that gave me the worst chill came later. One of the grandmotherly shamans from a shop in that neighborhood said that near that gate, even now, certain things are sometimes seen — lingering, drifting. Unable to tell whether they belong with the living or the dead. Still standing at that threshold, even now.
Not even knowing, themselves, which side they're on.
