Let me tell you something about Seoul Station.
Not just any story about the station — this is about someone who saw something while waiting for the last train.
I heard it a good while back, but it still comes to me sometimes. I can't be certain, but there's someone who claims they heard it straight from the student himself.
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It was winter, a few years ago. A fourth-year university student had been at the library until late, then made his way down to the platform at Seoul Station. It was nearly midnight, and the last train was still about ten minutes out. The platform wasn't completely empty, but there was a feeling to it — everyone standing apart, facing their own stretch of wall. No words, no eye contact. That particular air you only get on the subway late at night.
And then the student said it happened. The back of his neck went cold. The heaters were definitely running, but something passed slowly from the nape of his neck down across his shoulders — not a draft, exactly, because there was no direction to it. The air had just changed, he said. There was a smell, too. Like earth, or something older. Not the usual machine-oil smell of the subway, but something that felt far more ancient.
So he looked up.
At the far end of the platform, where the light was a little thin, a woman was standing. She wore a hanbok in blue — not the bright, cheerful kind you see at festivals these days, but a faded, worn shade of it, like something that had lost its color long ago. Her hair was pinned up, and her posture was upright, yet somehow gave the impression of something quietly collapsing.
At first the student thought she was just someone in traditional dress. Coming back from some event, probably.
But he couldn't see her feet.
The skirt simply continued down to the floor — no feet beneath it. It wasn't that the hem was touching the ground. It was that the skirt ended, suspended, as though hovering just above it.
In that moment, the student said, he couldn't even think to run. It wasn't that his legs refused to move — it was that thought itself had stopped. He stood there staring, and then the woman turned her head. Slowly. And she looked directly at him.
Her eyes were weeping.
Not tears running down her face — it was the eyes themselves that seemed to be crying. Something was pouring out of them, he said. He couldn't tell if it was grief or rage, but it moved straight into his chest. He couldn't explain it, he said. He didn't have the words — but the moment he met those eyes, his chest tightened like something closing around it.
Then the announcement came over the speakers. The train was arriving.
He blinked, and she was gone. Just gone. Nothing in that spot, the far end of the platform standing empty.
He boarded the train and, without quite knowing why, sat at the end nearest that spot — the seat where his face reflected back at him in the window. The train began to move, and the platform slid past outside. In that brief moment, he saw her.
The woman was standing on the platform, watching the train leave. Perfectly still. Just standing there, watching it go.
He couldn't make out her expression — it passed too quickly. But what he can't stop seeing, he said, is the hem of that blue skirt, not quite touching the ground. It stays with him. Even after the train had gone completely, he felt certain she was still there.
On that platform at Seoul Station. Even now, at this very hour.
