What time is it right now, everyone?
It's all right. I just felt like asking.
Today I'd like to talk about Tapgol Park — not the park itself, but the alley that winds around behind it. Those of you who know the area will understand what I mean when I say that the moment you step into that alley, the air changes. Even in the middle of the day. Even when the sun is blazing straight overhead, there are quite a few people who say the back of their neck goes cold the instant they turn that corner.
I wish it were just imagination.
This is something I heard from someone else. Apparently, a few years back, there was a man who walked through that alley fairly often — a man in his early forties. I'll just call him Mr. K. His publishing company was nearby, and he'd gotten into the habit of cutting through that back lane on his way home. One evening, right at the start of summer, around seven o'clock with the sun still hanging in the sky, he noticed a woman standing on one side of the alley.
Nothing particularly strange about her. She was just standing there. Close to the wall, her face tilted slightly downward. An ordinary summer dress. But as Mr. K passed by, he caught a smell. Incense — though not the kind you'd find in a temple. Something older and damper than that. Like old wood burning slowly. An odd thing to smell on a summer evening in that alley, and without quite meaning to, Mr. K looked back.
The woman had raised her head.
Mr. K described the moment like this: she was smiling, but the smile had no end to it. The corners of her mouth were drawn up, and her eyes were fixed on him — except he couldn't tell what they were actually seeing. The focus wasn't on his face. It felt more like she was looking at something just beyond his shoulder, somewhere behind him. And yet her body was turned toward him. Squarely toward him.
Mr. K kept walking. Quickly.
The strange part came later. That night, back home, he took off his jacket and found that one shoulder was damp. He thought it might be sweat, but the other side was perfectly dry. Only that one shoulder. And from that damp patch came the same smell he'd noticed in the alley. Burning wood.
He threw the jacket away that same night.
I can't say for certain, but the person who told me this story mentioned that the area around that alley was once the site of a temple called Wongaksa, back in the Joseon dynasty. The temple burned down during the reign of Yeonsangun, and the land lay abandoned for hundreds of years after that. Right in the heart of Seoul, yet overgrown and unlit — the kind of place that drew people with nowhere else to go. People who had to keep their love hidden. People the world had no room for. And some of them, it seems, died there.
Someone who claimed to know a thing or two about that alley once said this: the ones there are a little different. Most ghosts stay fixed to the place where they died, but the things in that back lane — they hitch rides on people passing through. On their shoulders. Even in broad daylight.
Maybe they just want to be carried somewhere for a little while.
Or maybe there's somewhere they're trying to get to.
I honestly don't know.
But I'll say this: if you're walking home tonight and one shoulder feels inexplicably heavy, or a smell drifts past you that you can't quite place — I think it's better to just pretend you didn't notice.
Don't look back.
