God, should I even be telling this… but I heard it myself, firsthand. It's about this older girl I know, and she said even she wasn't completely sure. But I couldn't sleep for days after she told me.
Apparently one of her friends was really into photography. Let's just call her Y. A few years back, Y went to one of those special night viewings at Changgyeonggung. Alone. There were plenty of other visitors, but when you're focused on taking pictures you end up falling behind the crowd without realizing it. That's exactly what happened. And she had no one with her to begin with.
It must have been past nine when she wandered into the Tongmyeongjeon area. It was spring, but the air there felt different from everywhere else. Damp and cold, with this smell of wet earth — and something else underneath it. Something stale. Like old cloth that had been shut away too long. The older girl told me Y kept wondering why it smelled like that, since it hadn't rained. But Y was so caught up in shooting that she didn't think much of it.
She raised her camera toward the wooden veranda of Tongmyeongjeon, and through the viewfinder she saw something white standing beside the column on the left side of the building. At first she assumed it was another visitor. But something was off — everyone else was far in the distance, moving toward her, while this thing just stayed perfectly still. Pressed right up against the column. She lowered the camera and looked with her own eyes. Nothing. Absolutely nothing there. She raised the camera again. It was back.
She did this three times. All three times, the same.
She tried to write it off as a reflection, a trick of the light — but then she heard something behind her. Footsteps, except not the sound of shoes. More like bare feet on stone. Tak. Tak. Tak. Measured. Slow. Y spun around and there was no one there. All the other visitors were ahead of her. But the sound kept coming. Tak. Tak. Tak. Getting closer.
Y ran. Forgot about the photos entirely and just bolted toward the crowd. She tripped and fell, and as she pushed her hand against the ground to get up, something grabbed her wrist. Cold. Fingers thin as twigs. But the grip was impossibly strong. It lasted only a moment, and when she screamed it let go.
Later, when she was sorting through the photos from that night — the ones she'd taken while looking through the viewfinder — the white shape was there. Right beside the column. But it wasn't standing.
It was kneeling. Head bowed. And its hands were stretched out toward the camera.
She deleted the photos. But deleting them doesn't undo what you've already seen.
Everyone knows Tongmyeongjeon was where the women of the royal court lived — and that more than a few of them died there, in ways that were anything but peaceful. So whose hands those were. And what they were reaching for.
Even now, Y shuts down the moment anyone brings up Changgyeonggung.
