Tonight, I'd like to tell you about Itaewon.
The neighborhood we call Itaewon now. Not the bright, noisy streets you know — I mean what lies beneath them. If you head up toward Yongsan, there's a high school, and the area around it used to be called Hwanghakgol. And somewhere in that Hwanghakgol, there was a temple called Unjonsa.
It was a temple of Buddhist nuns. I can't say for certain, but by all accounts it was a quiet, secluded place in those days. A single temple at the foot of the mountain, a handful of nuns. That was all it was.
Then the Imjin War came.
When the Japanese forces pushed all the way to Hanyang, a Japanese commander led his unit into that temple. From what I've heard, he made Unjonsa his garrison. They pitched their tents in the courtyard, unloaded their gear in the main hall. The nuns had nowhere to go. They couldn't flee. They couldn't resist.
What happened after that — well, I don't need to spell it out for you.
After the Japanese withdrew, the nuns never returned to the temple. Whether they couldn't go back or simply wouldn't, I don't know. Either way, they built rough shelters somewhere on the slopes of Yunggyeongsan and lived there together. Sealed off from the world entirely.
Time passed.
And then children were born.
I don't know how the people in the neighboring village first came to learn of it, but the story goes that one night they heard a newborn crying from the direction of those shelters. It was autumn, they say. A still night, no wind, and somewhere out there a baby's cry kept coming. First one. Then another. All within a single night.
When the villagers went the next morning and saw the faces of the nuns, no one could say a word. It was the look in their eyes. The eyes of people who were neither guilty nor innocent. The eyes of people who had simply been there. That was the more frightening thing, or so someone claimed to have heard from an old man in that village.
The people began calling that place itae — itae. 異胎. The place where children of a different womb had been born. The word won was added, and it became Itaewon.
Later, during the reign of King Hyojong, they say the characters were changed — pear trees were plentiful in the area, so they rewrote it as 梨泰院, using the character for pear. Perhaps they believed that changing the name would change something else along with it. I wonder.
But there's one part of this story that stays with me longest.
The night those children were born — the crying. I'm not certain, but from what I've heard, the sound didn't come from a single direction. Some people said it came from the mountain. Others said it came from where the temple had stood. Which is to say, different places, at nearly the same time.
More than one child was born that night.
No one speaks of what became of those children. Nothing was passed down. The nuns, the children — at some point the record simply stops.
The place-name Hwanghakgol is no longer used. No one knows exactly where Unjonsa once stood.
But even now, there are people who say that walking alone through that neighborhood at night, they sometimes feel something is off. Not quite wrong — more like something walking alongside them. And when they stop and turn around, there's nothing there.
Only the echo of footsteps, fading just a beat too late.
