This goes back a ways… well, no, not that far back, actually. It's been going around these past few years, and the details shift a little depending on who's telling it, so I can't swear to any of it… but listen anyway.
You know Naksan Park. That park right in the middle of Seoul. If you follow the old fortress wall up the hill, there's a stretch with a few benches — over in that far corner where the streetlamps barely reach. That's where it happened, or so they say.
He was in his mid-twenties, from what I heard. Nobody knows his name. Just a young man living alone. One autumn night — whether he'd had a few drinks or was just bone-tired, nobody could say — he sat down on one of those benches and drifted off to sleep. The kind of night where you can hear the wind moving, and somewhere far off, a dog barking.
And then… some time later, he opened his eyes.
There was something crumpled in his hand. At first he thought it was a fallen leaf. But when he smoothed it out, it was paper. A small slip of it. There was writing on it — in red — not pen or marker, but something that had bled into the fibers, scraped on in jagged, uneven strokes. It said:
*Next time, I'll take your face.*
You can imagine the state he was in. Falling asleep alone on a bench in an empty park, then waking up with a note pressed into your palm. He scrambled to his feet and looked around. No one. Just the long shadows of the fortress wall, and dead leaves skittering under the streetlamp.
He ran home and switched on the bathroom light… and looked in the mirror. His face was white. Not just pale — drained, every drop of color gone, the way a dead man looks in an old photograph. But the thing that really made his skin crawl was this: when he looked at his teeth, there was something red on them. Like blood. Only he had no memory of eating anything. Said he hadn't put a thing in his mouth before he fell asleep. He never did figure out what it was.
That was when it started. Every night after that, the same dream.
Naksan Park. Even in the dream, it's that same park. But not in daylight — a pitch-black night, no lights, no moon. He's walking alone along the fortress wall path, and from the far end, something is coming toward him. A woman — a woman in white — with no head. Just nothing above the shoulders. And she's walking. Arms reaching forward, slow and steady. Not running. Just that unhurried, measured walk, and somehow that's the worst part of it, he said. No sound either. No footsteps, no rustle of fabric. Dead silence, and only that woman drawing closer.
Every time he jolted awake from the dream, there was a note in his hand. The same red writing.
*Your turn is coming. You'll take my place soon.*
So… what happened to him? I don't know. The person who told me the story stopped right there. When I asked where they'd heard it, they said someone who lives near Naksan Park had told them.
But here's the thing…
He tried to get rid of the notes. Threw them in the rubbish every morning. And every morning after that, there they were again — back in his hand. Still crumpled. As if they'd been there all along.
