I'd like to share something I heard while I was in Jeju.
I can't say for certain how much of it is true. I heard it from someone who used to live there, and she said she'd heard it from her own mother. So where the truth ends and the story begins, I honestly couldn't tell you. I'm only passing it along.
They say that when the second lunar month comes, the Yeongdeung Grandmother rises from the sea around Jeju. She is a goddess of wind and water, and during this time she comes ashore, makes a full circuit of the island, and departs. As she leaves, she scatters the seeds of sea life across the water behind her. And so every year, at Chilmeoridang — a shrine nestled at the foot of Sarabong hill in Jeju City — they hold a grand ritual to receive her. Quite an occasion, by all accounts.
But here is the strange part. Throughout the entire second lunar month, while the grandmother walks the land, the sea turns unusually violent. Some say it is because the god who watches over the water disappears along with her, leaving nothing behind to keep the waves in check. Whether that explanation is right or not, the elders there will tell you without hesitation that accidents at sea come far more often during this time.
What I heard, though, goes a step further than that.
It was a few years ago, two days before the Yeongdeung ritual was to be held. A haenyeo — a diving woman — who worked the waters near Sarabong set out before dawn to begin her day, and her path took her past Chilmeoridang. That morning, she noticed a smell coming from the direction of the shrine. Rotting seaweed, she said, but not briny, not damp — something else entirely. Like something drawn up from very deep water. She told people afterward that breathing it in felt like her lungs were slowly filling with the sea.
She thought it was strange, but she meant to walk on. Then she heard something from inside the shrine. At first she took it for the wind, but it was too low for wind, and too steady. Too measured. Like the breathing of a person. Very slow. Very deep.
She stopped. She turned toward the side gate.
There was someone inside.
Standing with their back to her. Extraordinarily tall, she said. Hair soaking wet. Water pooled on the ground at their feet. Four in the morning. The shrine doors were closed. And this figure was not facing outward — not facing the gate where she stood — but had their head tilted upward, toward the inner wall of the shrine. As though looking at something there.
She could not move. She stood frozen, unable even to draw breath, and then the figure began to turn its head. Slowly. Toward her.
How slowly it turned — she said that brief moment stretched out until it felt endless. She could feel the hairs rising on the back of her neck, one by one.
She never saw its face. She shut her eyes. And when she finally opened them again, a long while later, there was nothing. No pooled water on the ground. No smell. No sound. All of it gone.
She did not go out to sea that day. She turned around and went home.
That same dawn, a boat capsized in the waters off Sarabong. It was before the ritual had been held — before anyone had come to receive the grandmother.
Whether the two things are connected, I cannot say. The elders only said that the grandmother had simply come a little early.
What left that water on the ground. How far that head had turned by the time she closed her eyes.
She says she still catches that smell sometimes, even now. In places nowhere near the sea.
