WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 1: All Ghost Stories Are Fake
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“The moment K-ko saw what was reflected in the mirror...”
“Ha. There isn’t a single new one.”
In the end, I tossed the eighty-year-old Japanese magazine onto the desk before I had even finished reading it. I had won the auction only after cashing in a savings account, what with overseas payment fees and international shipping. I had even escaped the threat of overtime after hearing it had arrived today, but when I opened it, the thing had far too many defects.
Several pages had been torn out entirely, while something had apparently been spilled over others, leaving the paper warped and ruined. But the real problem was that it did not contain a single new ghost story.
“Shouldn’t there be at least one story that got left out between editions?”
After leaving a three-star review on the secondhand marketplace, I clicked into my blog’s [Rare Record Collection] category and began writing.
[Overseas Collection Review: 1940 Record of Strange Tales, Claimed to Have Belonged to a Grandfather in Misagi Prefecture]
Included tales: Seeing Your Future Husband Through a Mirror. The Returning Corridor. Communications from a Dead Military Radio Operator. The Mirror That Stands Upside Down. The Fox Wife of the Bamboo Grove. Ten types in total.
No differences compared to the 1970 edition. The sentence structure appears to have been translated from Western ghost stories through an intermediate language. And...
“What is this?”
I thought I had seen it all, but there was another page. The final two or three pages had stuck together, making them unusually thick. I couldn’t believe they had sold this as high quality. I should block that seller.
“Wait. I think I can handle this much myself...”
When I held a light to the paper, I saw that a sheet had been wedged between the pages. It was folded neatly.
‘Was it deliberately glued in there rather than neglected?’
For a moment, I debated whether to take it out. Maybe it was some rare ledger tucked into the book. But the paper was only the size of a small memo.
In the end, I took out my book-repair tools.
You never knew. Something rare might turn up.
‘Let’s see, if I do this here...’
The paper had likely been glued in place for decades, so I expected it to be damaged when I pulled it apart. Yet the moment I gripped it with tweezers, the glue gave way and released the note, making my concern seem pointless.
“Wow.”
The note was blotched, its edges so ragged they were nearly crumbling away. It smelled of old mildew.
‘At least a hundred years old... or maybe not?’
A secret bond? A letter to a lover? A cipher hidden in this book?
My imagination ran wild in every direction.
I carefully unfolded the twice-folded paper with the tweezers. Compared to the damage to the paper, the inked writing was relatively clear.
“To you, may there be good fortune! If you accept the invitation that comes to you within twenty-four hours of reading this note, happiness and good fortune shall find you within nine days. But if you ignore this note, the evil spirit of Sabah will come for you. This note began in Naphrun and was guided along the Zodiac constellations...”
“Tch. It’s just a chain letter.”
My expectations collapsed in an instant.
Still, it was not a completely useless find. I dug through the old newspaper clippings stacked all the way to the ceiling and found one from the 1930s.
I placed the note atop a short article clipping dated March 8, 1931, reporting that chain letters had begun to spread everywhere.
‘If it was hidden in a book from the 1940s, the most plausible explanation is that a note made around the beginning of the craze was preserved inside.’
A genuine chain letter from the 1930s was more than valuable enough to add to my collection. I carefully slipped it between preservation sheets, took a picture, and uploaded it to my blog.
[Overseas Collection: Unverified Appraisal Item / Chain Letter Estimated to Be from the 1930s]
Not long after, a notification popped up alongside a like.
Congrats on scoring rare loot again!
Nothing worth making a live thread about??
Looks like a duplicate of the last one. Any chance you’d sell the item from post no. 12,410? Please, I’m begging you.
I left a short reply to each one.
Thanks. Didn’t find anything. Not for sale.
I never sold anything. No matter how defective it was, no matter if someone offered three or four times what I had paid, what was mine was mine.
They were the ghost stories I had collected.
I really loved ghost stories. To put it grandly, they were a hobby that occupied the largest part of my life. A part of my life itself, really.
When I was young, every holiday meant gathering in a room with cousins around my age and telling scary stories. We were that age, after all. The age when we competed over who could tell the scariest story, who could take the fear the best.
“I’ll buy chicken for whoever tells the scariest story!”
“But Jaehyeon always gets to eat it!”
I had a talent for storytelling. I could add a little flesh to an old, obvious ghost story, or give it another setting and dress it up until my cousins would cry and run away, shouting, “Jaehyeon’s telling another scary story!”
“You know, right behind you...”
“Ahhh, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you!”
“Argh! Damn it! You really scared me!”
The screams that burst out after everyone got immersed in the story, the thrill of imagining what had been described on the page. To me, ghost stories were an entire expanded world.
“Hey, Seon Jaehyeon. Want to go see a horror movie?”
“Ah, I don’t watch stuff with blood flying everywhere. I’ll kill you, seriously.”
“He’s a ghost-story otaku, but he doesn’t watch horror movies.”
“Why not? Is the horror fanatic scared? Or will he admit he’s all talk?”
“If you ask, he’ll start going on about Stephen King’s Three Great Horrors or something and filibuster for an hour. Ask if you’ve got the time.”
“You idiots don’t know the first thing about ghost stories. That isn’t a ghost story.”
Splatter stories that just threw up disgusting images or went on and on about human organs, gore for gore’s sake, were the lowest form of ghost story.
The more intricate the premise, the more it took hold of people’s minds, the more refined the ghost story was. The best kind was the kind that let you reconstruct it in your mind and feel fear from imagination alone.
Well, everyone had different tastes. But that was how I felt.
My passion for ghost stories quickly became hardcore, and I began collecting them in the most literal sense. Horror Express and collections of strange stories from around the world were only the basics. I gathered foreign horror novels, gamebooks, videotapes, CDs, anything I could get my hands on.
And as soon as blogs became a thing, I made one and turned it into a vast archive of my collection.
I backed up every short ghost story drifting around the internet, every strange eyewitness account I found in overseas forums, even suspicious posts that floated through nameless websites before disappearing.
It would have been nice if I had stopped at collecting them, but people’s tastes were varied, and I ended up obsessed with something else.
A niche field so deep it had practically bored through the earth’s strata and was racing through the inner core.
“Is this real?”
“I’ll tell you a fucking genuine experience. Go there if you want to die.”
“Looking for volunteers. Real verification report for XX Mountain Lodge, go go.”
“I’ll stream myself actually playing Hide-and-Seek Alone. Photos included.”
“Selling a doll whose hair grows. Video proof available.”
...
I mean so-called fact checks, testing whether ghost stories were real or not.
Wasn’t it tempting? To find out whether a ghost really appeared in a haunted house. Whether the doll from Hide-and-Seek Alone would actually move. Whether riding an elevator could take you to another world. Whether sleeping with a knife in your mouth would let you see the face of your future spouse.
Wasn’t I scared?
Why would I be?
Ghost stories were all fiction.
They were collections of fabricated rumors built from accounts of unknown origin and word of mouth, without a shred of evidence.
There were all those sightings and cursed objects, yet real physical proof had never appeared even once. At least cursed objects had the excuse that they were burned as ritual offerings. Everything else was just carefully made, spliced-together SCP photos.
Things became even worse after computers and the internet became widespread. It was not merely easier to collect ghost stories. It also became much easier to identify fake ghost stories.
Then smartphones dealt the finishing blow. Why did all those amusement-ride ghost stories disappear after 2010?
Because smartphones were stronger than ghosts.
Everyone just had to take one photo and fact-check it to prove it was fake. The modern cyber age had driven even ghosts out of their homes.
Ghost stories became a genre of lies where you took only the chills and unease as guilty pleasures. Like screaming your head off in a haunted house to relieve stress even though you knew every ghost there was a part-timer.
Yet I was always searching for the possibility that there might be a real one among them.
As I stamped every ghost story I had collected with a label that said, “Fiction!” I kept believing there had to be something real somewhere.
Maybe I searched even harder because I had been discharged from the military without seeing a single military ghost story, when other people claimed to have experienced around two hundred.
Throughout university, I sacrificed my weekends and vacations to verify ghost stories. By the time I graduated, I had even made a [Ghost Story Fact Check] category. My blog filled with live reports and reviews of the stories I had actually tried.
▣ Actually Trying the Method for Going to Another World by Elevator.
▣ Late-Night Exploration of the Mokwon-dong Haunted House. (Permission Obtained. Owner Interview Included.)
▣ Confirming the Truth Behind Cheolseongyo Ghost Bridge!
▣ X-Bay Purchase Special: I Bought a Japanese Doll Whose Hair Grows for Real
▣ Will a Cursed Doll Return to You if You Sell It Secondhand? I Tried It Myself
The response was better than I expected. My blog, which had only been known as a ghost-story blog, saw a flood of traffic thanks to the review content.
The links on internet wikis probably helped. So did the fact that whenever a broadcast, game, or film dealt with anything like a ghost story, it was usually credited with something like, “Source for materials and video: Strange Tales.”
“Whoa, you really went there?”
“Going once could have been luck. You should go three times.”
When traffic increased, skeptics showed up too. Whenever someone left a comment like that, I really did go three times and upload reviews for all three visits.
“This blogger does anything people tell him to do.”
“There isn’t anyone else who follows every ghost-story instruction to the letter and still has nothing happen. He must have ancestral guardian spirits watching his back.”
└ Most live threads are obviously fabricated, but this one is so diligent that there’s nothing to accuse them of. Legendary.
“Looks like he’s got five lives. Or he’s filthy rich. How can a human keep charging into these things and posting such high-quality sre threads?”
└ Sir, “sre”... Let’s not make our age so obvious.
└└ Don’t be ridiculous. Anyone who lets old fandom lingo reveal their age has no future.
After getting a job, I put my annual leave, vacations, and even bonuses to good use, and the blog continued rising by the day. Recently, it felt less like I absolutely needed to find a real ghost story and more like an everyday hobby.
I got to travel, gain views, become popular, and enjoy ghost stories. On top of that, I earned advertising money from source credits. My subscribers and blog neighbors got entertaining posts, secondhand ghost-story experiences, and a few chills of their own.
There is a new post on the Guestbook!
I straightened up without thinking.
The Guestbook. It sounded harmless enough. Messages like, “I enjoy your posts,” were only a bonus. Its true purpose was something else.
“I can’t find the ghost story I saw as a child... Do you happen to know one like this?”
“I used to be a regular at Uwon Restaurant in Byeokjin-eup, Gangwon Province. I think I may be cursed, and I’d like you to fix it.”
“Do you know a real spirit-possessed shaman on Neotube? Could you try a past-life experience? They say this shaman was the real deal and even advised on the film Cheopjang.”
In other words, tips.
Recommendations for horror spots, ghost-story experiences, or requests to verify rumors from unclear sources. I accepted tips regardless of their genre or location, as long as they followed two rules.
First, I did not make visits that could cause legal trouble. Breaking into a psychiatric hospital, ghost sightings in prisons? Sorry, but those were out.
Second, no slashers or gore. As I had said, that was a matter of taste. Some people even posted gory images on the Guestbook and called them tips. I had smashed a keyboard over that and blocked them.
Sometimes people posted advice requests because they thought I was some kind of exorcist rather than a ghost-story verifier. I scrolled down and checked the new post.
“Hello? To you, who have discovered a chain letter, a lucky kiss and blessing! This is your lucky message, valid for only one hour. If you accept this letter’s good fortune, you will have seven years of luck. Otherwise, terrible misfortune will befall you. Please remember. This letter is absolutely not fake and was made only to bring you good fortune. You now have one hour. If you accept this good fortune, please write ‘yes’ in the comments. Wishing you luck, your reader.”
“People still send this kind of thing around...”
With a long sigh, I hit the report-spam button and closed the blog window. At least the chain letter I had found in the book had rarity value. What was the point of one on my Guestbook?
All my energy drained away. Thinking I might have a late-night snack, I opened the refrigerator.
‘Ah. There wasn’t anything to eat at home.’
I had returned from a three-night, four-day business trip only yesterday. I had forgotten that I had cleared out the fridge before leaving. I should have bought something when I got off work earlier.
Clicking my tongue softly, I stood up. I left home to get some exercise and raid the convenience store.
Flicker.
The dark house.
The laptop screen glowed faintly in the darkness. Without a startup sound, white static began crackling across the black screen.
Like a 1980s DOS screen, it gradually distorted and began broadcasting the words aloud.
≪We are waiting for you to listen.We are waiting for your good fortune.We are waiting for your recognition.We are waiting for your sound.We are waiting for your...≫
A moment later, without refreshing, numbers began dropping rapidly like a countdown.
6, 5, 4, 3...
≪We are going to have a g ood t ime.≫
“The elevator has arrived. The next floor is...”
Footnotes:
“Sre” is an old Korean internet borrowing for an online thread. Its use here makes the commenter sound dated.
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