Haunted Houses

There was once a man in Seoul named Yi Chang who often told this story as something that had happened to him.

He was poor and had no home of his own, so he mostly lived in rooms that other people lent him. When things were really hard, he would even move into haunted houses. One time, when he could find nowhere else, he heard of a house in Ink Town, one of the wards of Seoul, at the foot of South Mountain. It had been haunted for generations and was now standing empty. Chang looked into the matter and decided to move in.

First, to find out whether it was really haunted, he called his elder brothers, Hugh and Haw, and five or six relatives to help him clean it out and spend the night there. The house had one upper room that was locked tight. Peering through a crack, they saw a stand with a chair for a spirit tablet, an old harp with no strings, a pair of worn-out shoes and a few sticks and bits of wood. There was nothing else in the room, and the dust lay thick, as though it had been gathering for years and years.

The company drank some wine, then sat round the table playing games to keep watch through the night. Late, toward midnight, they suddenly heard harps playing and a great crowd of voices, all jumbled together so that no words could be made out. It sounded like a big party feasting and making merry.

They talked over what to do. Then one of them drew a sword and stabbed a hole through the wall into the upper room. Instantly a sharp blade came thrusting back out at them from the other side, a blade that glowed blue. Terrified, they left the room alone after that. But the harps and the merrymaking went on until morning. At daybreak the company broke up and left, and none of them ever dared to go into that house a second time.

There was another haunted house in the South Ward that Chang wanted, so once more he gathered his friends and brothers to test whether it was truly haunted. When they went in, they found two dogs lying on the open veranda, one black and one tan, one at each end. Their eyes were fiery red. The men shouted at them, but they did not move. They neither barked nor bit.

But at midnight the two dogs got up, went down into the courtyard and began howling at the inky sky in the most frightening way, leaping back and forth. Then someone came round the corner of the house dressed in ceremonial robes. The dogs greeted him with great delight, jumping round him in their joy. He went up onto the veranda and sat down, and at once five or six demons of many colors appeared and bowed before him in the open space.

Then the man led the demons and the dogs two or three times round the house. They rushed up onto the veranda and jumped down into the courtyard, back and forth, to and fro, until at last they all vanished. The demons went into a hole under the floor, and the dogs went back to their places and lay down.

The company had watched all this from an inner room. When daylight came, they examined the place and looked through the cracks in the floor, but all they saw was an old, worn-out sieve and a few cast-off brooms. Behind the house they found another old broom stuck in the chimney. They told a servant to gather them up and burn them. All day long the dogs lay just as they were and did not eat or move. Some of the party wanted to kill them, but the dogs looked so fearsome that no one dared.

That night the company stayed to see whether the same things would happen. At midnight the two dogs got down into the courtyard and began howling at the sky, and the man in ceremonial robes came, and the demons too, just as the night before.

Frightened and disgusted, the company left the next morning and did not try a third night. A friend who heard Chang tell this story went and asked Hugh and Haw about it, and they said it was all true.

There is also the tale of a scholar who had no home and moved into the haunted house in Ink Town, the one with the upper room where the strange sounds were heard. He and his servants opened the door, broke out the window, took out the old harp, the spirit chair, the shoes and the sticks and set them on fire. While the flames were still burning, one of the servants fell down dead. In fear and dismay, the scholar put out the fire, put the things back in their places and left the house.

After that, another homeless man tried living there. In the night a woman in a blue skirt came down from the loft and behaved in a strange and uncanny way. When the man saw her, he picked up his belongings and left.

And in South Kettle Town, some woodcutters passing behind a haunted house early one morning found an old woman sitting under a tree, weeping. Thinking she was an evil spirit, one of them crept up behind her and jabbed her with his sickle. The figure he took for a witch dashed off into the house, and as she ran she seemed to be only about two feet tall.

About this tale

“Haunted Houses” is chapter XXXVI of Korean Folk Tales: Imps, Ghosts and Fairies, James Scarth Gale’s 1913 translation of stories by Im Bang. Rather than one plot, it gathers several reports about haunted houses in the wards of old Seoul, led by the experiences of Yi Chang, a poor man who would live anywhere, even with ghosts.

Im Bang tells these as true accounts, noting that a friend checked Yi Chang’s story with his brothers. The strange objects in the locked room, a stringless harp, worn shoes and old brooms, seem to be at the heart of each haunting.

Read the original: Korean Folk Tales (Project Gutenberg)

Best for ages 9–12 — a string of creepy reports from the haunted houses of old Seoul.

The housing problem keeps returning

These people enter frightening houses because they have nowhere else to live. That need, rather than simple curiosity, connects the separate reports. The attempts to destroy objects do not reliably end the danger, and one servant dies. At the end, an old woman is attacked because a woodcutter assumes she is a spirit; the narrator’s label should not make that assumption a sound reason for violence.

Compare the reports

Choose two houses and record the need that brings someone there, what is observed and what the visitor concludes. Which conclusions go beyond what the account actually describes?

Questions to ask

• Why was Yi Chang willing to live in haunted houses?
• What did the men find hidden around the second house?
• Which of these hauntings do you think is the scariest, and why?

More stories like this

• An Encounter with a Hobgoblin — a haunted house in Seoul and a goblin who won’t leave
• Cursed by the Snake — the legend of a haunted family seat
• The Awful Little Goblin — another troublesome Korean spirit