WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Natty

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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈

Episode 3: Odaesan Blood Creek (1)

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In the end, I lost.

…Fuck.

The express bus that would carry me to the underworld pulled in. The board displayed its boarding notice.

10:00 Seoul to Sokcho, via Yangyang. Geumyang Express Bus.

Would you accept your good fortune?

A week had passed since that fortune spam arrived, polite only in tone. I had desperately ignored it the entire time.

Ghosts existed in this world. I had no choice but to believe it. My daily life and mental state had been completely wrecked.

The office lights kept turning on and off. The copier printed ghost faces instead of documents. A disgusting image popped up in a project presentation, so I even had to write an incident report. Then a ghost sprang out of the electronic approval system too, wrecking me twice over.

On my commute, the bus driver's neck would spin around at random. Whenever the next-stop announcement played, it either sobbed or the stop button bled.

On the third day, I had to watch people endlessly fall onto other cars' hoods. Crushed people rolled along the ground, then clung to the bus and pounded on the windows for over thirty minutes.

I felt like I had endured every nightmare sleep paralysis could offer. Dreams within dreams were a given. One hanged ghost played on my stomach while standing on its head. Eyeballs on the ceiling played Gomoku using the ceiling pattern, blinking at me whenever they wanted a look.

I thought I would lose my mind and die. Now I understood why people held shamanic rituals, made offerings, and clung to religion. I thought I would wither away alive.

If it had been a ghost story with an escape route, like the elevator one, I could at least run away. But who was I supposed to consult when I could just see ghosts in my ordinary life?

‘Isn't this an actual curse?’

I took paid leave and tore my home apart. I went through every ghost-story book, object, collectible, newspaper clipping, and other thing I had gathered from all over.

Then I realized something.

‘The note is gone.’

The chain letter I had clipped alongside a newspaper article was nowhere to be found. I couldn't have thrown it away. I had even preserved it properly before storing it.

‘My blog. I definitely uploaded a photo there.’

I checked the newest post in the [Unverified Appraisals] category. There had definitely been a photo of that old, crumbling, ruined piece of paper.

But every blog post I had written was gone. Only one sentence remained.

≪Looking for me? This isn't the place.≫

Ha. Hahaha.

I opened the guestbook. The annoying Lucky Letter and its greeting to me were still bobbing there in the newest post.

≪Will you accept the good fortune that has come to you?≫

Yes.

Post.

A new reply appeared beneath mine immediately.

≪Congratulations to you, who have seized good fortune! Before I give you a wonderful gift, I would like to give you one small test.≫

≪You, who are curious about real ghost stories, please confirm whether Odaesan Bloodwater Valley is a real ghost story.≫

What if I said no?

≪I believe you have already experienced enough. If you will accept it, please leave an answer.≫

After thinking and hesitating for quite a while, I posted a blog notice instead of replying.

Next weekend, I'm heading to Sokcho! I'll fact-check the Odaesan Bloodwater Valley ghost story.

That one short reply restored the peace I had lost for a week. When the body felt comfortable, the mind did too. I even considered pretending not to know anything.

Then, at exactly that moment, the chain letter gently dangled some bait in front of me.

It had somehow found a scan of a nineteenth-century British collection of strange tales that I had been searching for over two years, then posted a link to it. It contained the original story behind Jumping Jack. Even foreign libraries couldn't find it because it was a cheap penny dreadful…!

‘If I experience one ghost story and get a rare item, isn't that a net gain somehow?’

After finishing my self-justification, I booked a bus to Sokcho, transferred three more times between local and village buses, and entered this lonely mountain path into the valley.

[Wait! Do you still have to go in? This section is an extremely dangerous area where safety accidents occur every year without fail!]

‘Wow. That sign kills my motivation right from the start….’

The warning sign at the entrance even had mosaicked photos of accident scenes attached to it. I took a picture of the sign.

‘Finish quickly, then go home quickly. Back to my normal life.’

My mind was already elsewhere. The valley was an afterthought. My head was full of Sokcho's best potato dumpling soup, cold raw-fish soup, and whole potatoes from highway rest stops. Only after agonizing over my food route for a while did I enter the valley trail.

Odaesan Bloodwater Valley in Gangwon Province.

Well, it did have a proper name. Chuam Valley. A sad place in the middle of nowhere with terrible transportation, more famous for ghost stories about drowning deaths than travel blogs.

The formula of water plus people equals ghosts was practically a ghost-story rule. At beaches and valleys, there were places with signs instead of rescue markers saying things like, “What looks like a person submerged in the water is not a drowning victim but a buoy. Do not attempt a rescue.”

And the whole blood-flowing valley thing. When you looked into it, the blood usually turned out to be iron-heavy geology or runoff from an abandoned mine.

‘That one valley where keeping your hands in the water supposedly gives you a massage turned out to have electrical leakage nearby, so current was running through the water….’

If the ghost story became real this time too, where would it begin? Slowly going over the story again, I climbed the mountain.

🩸【Story Time】I Saw a Ghost at XX Valley

Just like the title says. This really happened.

My dad's side of the family lives in a mountain village in Gangwon Province, around Odaesan.

After we finished tending the family graves, there was always a valley we went to play in.

It was about a twenty-minute walk from the road for us kids.

There was a rock slide shaped like a little waterfall, so it was a great place to play.

I think it was around Chuseok. The adults were resting after we tended the graves, so us kids went to play.

We hadn't even arrived yet when we heard people playing.

Water sounds, laughter, everything. But when we got there, nobody was there.

The sounds kept going, though. Like people were playing right beside us.

Honestly, we were scared shitless, but we put on a brave face.

“Maybe they got scared because we showed up, haha,” we said, laughing.

Then one of the older guys suddenly said, “I'll go up and take a look,” and climbed the slope.

We tried to stop him, but he wouldn't listen. Why the hell was he going up there?

But once he got up there, he stopped answering. We couldn't hear any people either. We were getting anxious, so we kept calling for him.

“Hey, what are you doing? Should we come up too?”

And he went, “Nope~”

Then, after maybe one or two minutes, there was a splash.

The valley water turned into blood. No joke, it was really blood-colored.

We all cried and ran away, called the adults, and then a helicopter came, ambulances came, everything was chaos.

They found him a few days later. He had drowned, and they found him on the bottom of the valley.

Only the second-oldest among us, an older girl, heard it, but apparently his head had been smashed open, and they found him sitting upright underwater.

But there was no way he could have fallen there. They found him on the complete opposite side from where he had climbed up.

After that, my family never went near that valley again.

Even now, when I hear people playing in the water, I remember that day.

—Comments—

📌 [RE] Isn't this near Sanbong-myeon? They call it Bloodwater Valley there.

└Holy shit, that's right… People in our town act like that valley doesn't exist when you ask.

└└It was famous for people saying blood flowed there in summer.

└└└One of my relatives supposedly died there too. That place is real.

“…Going by the story, it looks like I have to get almost all the way to the valley before I can check anything….”

Slip.

“Oops.”

I almost slipped. It hadn't rained, but the hand I put on the ground was wet. Damp, with a fishy smell.

“Blood…?”

The hand covered in dirt was red. This wasn't just hardened mud. Bright red blood, the sort you might see at a livestock market, had soaked into the soil. There was far too much of it. Blood was running through the dirt.

You have left the service area.

Please check your network connection.

An ominous notice appeared on the phone I had raised to take a picture. A bead of cold sweat ran down the back of my neck.

Ah, no. Please.

Already?

The sound of my swallow rang behind my ears. My heartbeat, blood flowing through my veins. Things I should not have been able to hear pounded loudly, thump, thump.

“I don't think the ghost story mentioned anything like this… Aah!”

Something suddenly grabbed my ankle. I screamed on reflex, kicked away the dirt, and scrambled up onto a nearby rock.

“Fuck, what is that…?”

Blood welled up from the ground with a gush.

Several human hands with strips of flesh hanging from them crawled over the wet ground.

Some had decayed halfway, exposing bone. Others were ragged, as though their flesh had been stuck to something else for a long time before being torn free.

Some nails had fallen out, while others were flipped back and crusted with bright red blood. A few hands crawled around with their joints bent, broken backward.

Maybe because I had gone through this once already, seeing something strange made my mind calmer instead. Like with the elevator, the ghost story must have begun.

Holding back my revulsion and nausea, I began observing the hands. The endlessly flowing blood and rotting flesh gave off a sickeningly fishy stench. I wanted to close my eyes.

But I had to know what they were if I wanted to find a way out.

Hahaha! Hahahaha!

Come over here! I'll jump first!

Hurry up! Just come this way!

Suddenly, noisy voices carried from far away.

Splash. Splash. Children cackled, and there were sounds of people diving from high places into the water.

“…Sounds of water ghosts?”

I spoke without knowing why I did it.

The surroundings fell silent in an instant. There were no insects, no leaves rustling in the wind. The forest had frozen like a paused screen.

Then, the next moment.

Come this way.

Dozens of rotten hands, covered in blood, rose from the ground. Chunks of flesh endlessly opening and closing their fingers, trying to grab whatever they could. They swam through the earth as if it were water, scraped at the rock I was sitting on, then sank again.

Branches, leaves, and stones caught in their hands shattered with horrible sounds.

‘A type that can physically harm me….’

I took a deep breath. I kneaded my tingling fingers a few times and steeled myself. The ghost story had already begun. I needed to break down its contents and find an opening to escape.

‘The blog is accessible this time too.’

Thankfully, I knew which ghost story this was before coming here. Starting with the original post, I began checking every altered version that had been copied and quoted across various communities.

『When you approach the valley, you hear someone splashing around, laughing, talking, and playing.』

That common part matched in every version, but none of them mentioned hands.

‘But if those are part of the Bloodwater Valley ghost story too, maybe my trigger is different from the triggers of the “experiencers” in the story.’

I had lingered on this uphill slope for quite a while. But what if the children had run up as soon as they heard the voices? Those crawling hands might be a second gate meant to send people up toward the valley.

『The children saw someone who had fallen into the water and died. Shocked, they ran back down.』

For now, if I went to the valley and saw the water ghost, there would be a way back down as long as I did not die. My plan was simple. Follow the ghost story exactly, confirm the water, then come straight back down.

As long as there were no variables, I would be safe.

I let out a long breath and pressed the record button on the action camera attached to my chest.

Since I was here, it would be a waste of time and money if I did not at least make some posting material out of this. Of course, I would have to think about how to write a review saying the ghost story was real, but that was a happy problem for after I had gathered the evidence.

As a test, I pointed the action camera at the stream. When I played the footage back with a pounding heart, the crawling hands in the sea of blood were clearly recorded.

“…It recorded!”

The ghost story was real. Ghosts were real, and modern technology could create “evidence” of them. My heart raced, whether from excitement or fear.

I needed to make as much evidence as possible and return home safely. My collector's zeal had overcome my fear of ghosts.

‘All right, let's go. Since I'm doing this, I need enough material for three posts.’

I leaped over the hands and climbed up the slope.

Before long, the valley appeared before my eyes.

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