Ah, should I even say this… it didn't actually happen to me, I just heard it from someone, but after I heard it I couldn't sleep for a while. I really couldn't.
I'm not totally sure, but apparently it's a story that's been going around among kids who went on a school trip to Gyeongju. A specific youth hostel — the name, well, I won't bother saying it, but apparently if you look it up it comes right up. Four-story building. It happened in one of the rooms on the fourth floor.
That night, six or seven girls were all sleeping in the same room. It was the first night of the trip, so everyone was wound up — they stayed up late eating snacks and talking, and fell asleep one by one. Maybe an hour after the lights went out, right at that moment when everyone was just sinking into deep sleep.
Suddenly there was this scream — a sharp, tearing sound.
One of the girls had pulled the blanket over her head and was crying. Not sobbing — trembling, crying like she couldn't breathe. Everyone jolted awake, turned the light on, started asking what was wrong, what happened — and she was pointing at the window, barely able to speak. Her lips had gone white.
What they managed to make out was that someone had passed by outside the window.
Why is that scary? Because the room was on the fourth floor. No railing outside the window, no balcony, just a wall. Just the outer wall of the building. There was no structure there for a person to walk on. But what she said was — she'd half-opened her eyes toward the window in her sleep, and something had slid past on the other side of the dark glass. Not a shadow, she said. A person. Facing sideways.
Not just walking past. Looking in through the window as it went by.
Everyone told her she must have imagined it, must have been dreaming. She gradually calmed down. They turned the light off, lay back down, and somehow managed to fall asleep.
But here's the thing.
When she woke up the next morning, she was alone in the room. Every single one of the others was gone. Turned out they'd all gone to sleep in the room next door. They'd crept out quietly, one by one. And left her there alone.
Isn't that the most chilling part? If they were scared, they could have all left together, or woken her up and taken her with them. But they didn't. Couldn't. When someone asked them about it later — what did they say?
"We didn't want to touch the one sleeping by the window."
Not that they were scared. That they didn't want to touch her.
Apparently similar stories have kept coming out of that same hostel ever since. Nobody knows what it is that passes by the fourth-floor window. It just passes by. But always — always looking in.
