Let me share a story that drifted in from the Gyeongju area.
I can't say for certain how much of it is true. It's been circulating in that village for a very long time, so take it for what it is — just a story someone once told.
On the outskirts of Gyeongju, in a small village, there was a family by the name of Kim. They claimed descent from the royal bloodline of Silla, and indeed, the pillars of their front gate stood taller than any other gate in the village. The tiled roofs layered one behind another, so deep and wide that even standing at the outer wall, you couldn't see where they ended. As for the land — no one in the village could say where the family's holdings stopped.
But here is the thing.
There were those in the village who looked upon that family's wealth with unease. When famine came, every other household crumbled — yet the Kim family's storehouses only grew fuller with each passing year. Drought, war, pestilence — whatever came, that house alone remained untouched. And somehow, that made it worse.
Among the village elders, a certain whisper circulated. The family's fortune, they said, had not come through heaven's grace — it had been obtained through a bargain. Some called the other party a ghost. Others referred to it only as "that thing." No one would say exactly what it was. Some said you weren't supposed to say. That saying it would bring something.
I heard that someone once passed by the outer wall of the Kim estate late at night and saw — or rather, heard — something strange. It was long ago, and that person is no longer alive, so there's no way to confirm it now.
It was an evening in early winter. The person was walking alone along the path beside the Kim family's wall, on some errand or other, when a sound came from the other side. At first they assumed it was the wind. It wasn't.
It was the sound of eating.
Not one person — many. The wet, smacking, open-mouthed sound of chewing seeped over the wall from the other side. It was past midnight. The person thought it strange, thought it wrong, and tried not to slow their steps. But then.
Just as they were rounding the corner of the wall, the sound stopped.
And then something began walking on the other side of the wall, moving toward them. Footsteps — but wrong. Too many of them. For a single person, there were six, seven distinct strikes against the ground. The more you tried to count, the more the numbers refused to add up.
The person ran. They didn't look back. But when they got home and undressed, something felt wrong at the back of their neck. When they reached up to touch it, the skin there was pressed in — like the marks left by fingers. They swore no one had touched them.
What happened to the Kim family after that — the villagers don't speak of it in any detail. There are murmurs that the family members began to change, one by one. Someone said that whatever had given them their wealth had simply come to collect what was owed.
I don't know what became of that property.
But there is said to be an elder in that village who will tell you this: near the place where the Kim family's wall once stood, if you go there in the dead of winter, there is a smell.
The smell of cooked rice.
Warm cooked rice. In the middle of the night.
