The Old Woman Who Became a Goblin

There was once a Confucian scholar who lived in the southern part of Seoul. One day, the story goes, he went out for a walk and left his wife alone at home. While he was gone, an old woman came by begging. She looked like a Buddhist nun, and though she was very old, her face had no wrinkles. The scholar’s wife asked whether she could sew, and when she said she could, the wife made her an offer. “If you’ll stay and work for me, I’ll give you breakfast and supper, and you won’t have to beg anywhere. Will you agree?”

“Oh, thank you so much,” said the old woman. “I’d be delighted.”

Pleased with her bargain, the scholar’s wife took her in and set her to cleaning cotton and spinning thread. In one day she did more work than eight ordinary women and still seemed to have plenty of time to spare. The wife was overjoyed and gave her a great feast. But after five or six days, the wife’s delight and her wish to treat the old woman generously wore off a little, and the old woman grew angry. “I’m tired of living alone,” she said. “I want your husband for my partner.”

When the wife refused, the old woman stormed off in a rage, but soon she came back with a frail old man who looked like a Buddhist beggar. The two of them marched boldly into the room and took it over. They emptied the old ancestral tablet box on the wall shelf and both vanished inside it, so that they could not be seen at all, only heard. Whenever the fancy took them, they demanded food and other things, and if the scholar’s wife failed to please them in the slightest way, they sent plague and sickness after her.

Her children fell ill and died. Relatives who came to see what was happening caught the plague too, and they died as well. Little by little, nobody dared go near the house, and at last it became known that the wife was being held prisoner by the two goblins. For a while the townspeople saw smoke rising from the chimney each day and knew she was still alive. But after five or six days the smoke stopped, and they knew that her end had come. No one even dared to go and find out.

About this story

“The Old Woman Who Became a Goblin” is a grim little tale from Korean Folk Tales: Imps, Ghosts and Fairies, translated in 1913 by James Scarth Gale from the collection of Im Bang. It is one of many stories in the book about goblins who move into a household and bring disaster.

The tale offers no rescue and no explicit closing moral. The goblins take over the box for ancestral tablets, which stands on a shelf; an object associated with the family’s dead becomes the place from which the intruders control its living members.

Read the original: Korean Folk Tales: Imps, Ghosts and Fairies (Project Gutenberg)

Suggested for ages 9–12 with an adult: a bleak tale of coercion, imprisonment and the deaths of children and relatives.

When an agreement becomes control

The original arrangement is specific: work in return for meals and shelter. The old woman later demands the wife’s husband, something the wife never promised. Refusing that demand does not make her responsible for the goblins’ cruelty. Their control grows as neighbours stop entering the house, until the chimney smoke becomes the only sign of her life. The frightening ending is built from that shrinking contact with the outside world.

Find where the bargain changes

Write the original agreement in one sentence, then list the later demands. Which demands go beyond it? Imagine what a neighbour could say to acknowledge the trapped woman’s situation without blaming her for having offered help.

Think about it

• What was strange about the old woman from the very start?
• Why did the old woman become angry?
• Why do you think this story has no happy ending?

Related stories

• The Awful Little Goblin — another stranger who brings disaster to a household
• The Wild-Cat Woman — another Korean tale of a creature in disguise
• Haunted Houses — more Korean goblin tales from Gale