On a quiet night in Incheon, a narrow waterway ran beneath the moonlight. It was said that since ancient times this channel had cut through the heart of the village, bearing witness to the lives and deaths of all who dwelled there. Strange sounds would rise from its banks without warning, and with them a cold wind that swept through without cause — the villagers called it the Wind of Grudges.
Beside the waterway stood an old bridge that no one had touched in living memory. It had been built during the Joseon era, and once countless people had crossed it in the course of their daily lives. But the bridge harbored a darkness within it. According to what had been passed down, a young woman from the village had vanished at the time of its construction, and ever since, those who crossed it would hear the weeping of a woman whose face no one could name.
The village elders warned that the bridge had been cursed by that woman, and that one day it would swallow everything whole. The young dismissed this as superstition and thought nothing more of it. Then one evening, a group of curious young men decided to cross the bridge and call forth the spirit of the missing woman. When they reached the middle of the span, a thick fog rose suddenly around them and a woman's sobbing drove itself into their ears like a blade. They realized, with cold certainty, that the sound was rising from beneath the bridge.
Their hearts nearly stopped with fear, yet not one of them could find the courage to look back. In that moment, a figure emerged from the fog — a woman, staring at them with eyes that did not blink — and she spoke. "If you do not uncover the secret bound to this bridge, you will be cursed without end." With those words the fog dissolved, and the young men fled across the bridge and back into the village without once slowing their steps.
From that night on they were tormented by nightmares, and every time they neared the bridge their legs grew heavy as stone. The villagers, resolved to honor the warning their ancestors had left them, sealed the bridge off entirely. It stands now at the edge of the village in perfect silence, and no one will speak its name aloud. For the bridge holds fast to the secret of a cursed soul, and still it whispers — on and on — with all the bitterness of the dead.
