I don't know if I should even be saying this… but I heard it myself, straight from someone who knows. It's a friend of a friend, so I can't swear to every detail — but listening to it, I felt the chills crawl up my spine. Somewhere in Daegu, not far at all from the busy streets, tucked into an ordinary residential neighborhood — there's a house.
An old detached house. Nothing to look at, just a worn-down building like any other. But they say everyone who moves in ends up with their life quietly coming apart. Unexplained illness. Sudden accidents. Families that start fighting for no reason and fall to pieces. Nobody lasts. One family hadn't even been there three months when the husband collapsed out of nowhere. The hospital couldn't find a cause. They broke the lease and left.
But that's not even the frightening part.
The frightening part is the old woman who lived next door. Her daughter-in-law had been ill for some time — a long-running sickness, apparently. Then one night, in the early hours before dawn, the family woke to find her gone. They went out to look for her, and there she was — standing in front of that house's gate. Barefoot. In the middle of winter.
Both hands gripping the gate. Just standing there. They called her name and she didn't turn. When they took her by the shoulders and turned her around, her eyes were vacant. No expression at all. They brought her inside, and it was a long while before she came back to herself. When they asked what she'd been doing out there, she said she didn't remember. But then — and this is the part that really gets under your skin — she said: *I was sick, so I wanted to go there.* She didn't know why she'd said it. The words had just come out.
I was sick, so I wanted to go there.
That's when the talk started spreading — that the house calls out to the sick.
There was also a stretch of time when the house sat empty for quite a while. No tenants at all. But someone in the neighborhood happened to peer over the wall into the yard one afternoon — broad daylight. There was a woman standing in the middle of the courtyard. Heavy makeup. Eyes and lips an intense, bleeding red, the color smeared and too vivid. Bright, garish clothes. She was just standing there, looking down at the ground. They tried to speak to her. No response. When they looked again, she was gone.
Later, someone asked the older women who'd lived in that neighborhood for decades. They said the house was built over a ghost road — a path the dead have walked since long ago, a passage that's always been there, and that you should never build over it. That warning had been passed down by word of mouth for generations. Whether whoever built the house knew and didn't care, or simply never knew at all — nobody can say.
But here's the thing. That person who looked over the wall — they said the woman was staring down at the ground.
Whatever is underneath it, no one has found out yet.
