WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 39: Jangsalgot Submerged Site (1)
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I’d had a terrible night’s sleep.
It was so bad that, never mind the quality of my sleep, even while Director Lee spouted nonsense during the meeting, I couldn’t think of a thing. I just nodded mechanically.
“Then we’ll be counting on Assistant Manager Seon alone this time too!”
Director Lee left amid a spray of laughter.
Section Chief Chae clutched a dented file binder, trembling with rage.
And I had no idea what work Director Lee had just dumped on me.
“...First, let’s get you two something to eat!”
Associate Im picked up Section Chief Chae and me, both half dead, and sat us down at a gukbap place in front of the office. Only when steaming bowls of sundae gukbap were set before us did I start to feel grounded again.
“Uh... What did Director Lee say earlier?”
It must have been something enormous. Section Chief Chae lifted the boiling stone bowl and drank half the broth in one go, then let out a lion’s roar from the depths of their diaphragm.
“Piggybacking on our work is one thing, but now they want us to tag along on some stranger’s project we don’t even know anything about. It’s ridiculous.”
“No one knew Director Lee had connections there...”
“Sowwy...”
Associate Im wilted, stuffing a cube of kkakdugi into their mouth.
“It’s not your fault, Associate Im. Should we order more dumplings?”
“Then I’ll have kimchi dumplings...”
“Excuse me, one more mixed plate of dumplings, please.”
While Section Chief Chae ordered, I quickly leaned close and whispered to Associate Im.
“Where did Director Lee say we were going?”
“Jecheon.”
A flash of unease ran through my head. The same strange unease I’d felt when I got caught in Mangnyang Tunnel on the way to the Popup for The Mirror of the Otherworld...
“It isn’t Jangsalgot, is it?”
“Assistant Manager, you really didn’t hear anything earlier...”
“...I guess I was more out of it than I thought.”
It was a pathetic excuse, but the two understood. The conversation began with polite consolation about how bad things must have been for me, then ended with trash-talking Director Lee. Put together, it went like this.
This year had been especially dry, and the news was full of reports that dam water levels had fallen several meters, the lowest they had been in decades.
As the water receded, several flooded villages had emerged. Apparently, visitors could even take boats in and look around them.
So former residents of the submerged sites had expressed their wish to visit their hometowns, and the local government had happily started planning something like a hometown-visit event...
“Who would’ve known the county governor of Jewon County knew Director Lee? They brought it in out of nowhere, saying they’d take on something that won’t even make money.”
“So the people are ready and all we have to do is prepare the event? Are we supposed to make the banners from Director Lee’s pulled-out hair?”
Section Chief Chae and Associate Im took turns adding their complaints. My thoughts, naturally, were somewhere else entirely.
“I think I can handle it alone, so Section Chief Chae can keep working on what you were doing this time.”
That was the conclusion I reached while staring down at my half-tilted stone bowl. With spoons in their mouths, both of them looked at me.
‘How can I bring them when this is basically a guaranteed ticket into a ghost story?’
Rather than struggle to save the two of them after they walked into a doomed event of their own accord, it was clearly better to make an excuse and leave them behind.
“How are you going to do that alone, Assistant Manager?”
“Director Lee got the job through connections, right? Then I can run it through my own connections. The county will probably like that, too.”
“Do you know someone there?”
No. Not at all. But I thought I might know the people buried beneath Jangsalgot in Jewon County.
Instead of saying that aloud, I only gave them a meaningful smile.
After lunch, I sent Section Chief Chae and Associate Im back to the office first, then headed to a café a short distance away.
‘If I don’t know anyone, I can just make some connections.’
I pressed a number from my phone contacts. After exactly three short default rings, a calm voice came through the phone.
[This is Seo Taegyeom. What is it?]
“Section Chief Seo Taegyeom, would it be all right if we met for a meal today?”
[? I don’t mind, but what is this about?]
I sent a video link by message.
“I think I have something to ask the Corporation for help with.”
[...I’ll come over now.]
Good. Hooked.
After submitting an application for an outside assignment through the company messenger, I hurried to the meeting place.
❖ ❖ ❖
“This way.”
I had no idea whether I’d eaten with my mouth or my nose. Seo Taegyeom had definitely taken me to a restaurant specializing in Seoul-style bulgogi and Pyongyang naengmyeon, then ordered everything on the menu, but I couldn’t remember what any of it had tasted like.
As soon as the meal was over, Seo Taegyeom headed beneath City Hall. We passed several doors marked Authorized Personnel Only, took an elevator down, and found ourselves in a gloomy corridor that looked as though it had not been renovated since the 1990s.
Before long, an enormous iron door like a prison gate appeared. Seo Taegyeom pushed it open.
“Wow.”
It was nothing like the place where I had first woken up at the Corporation. The café where I’d met them to entrust Choi Seongun to their care had only been a simple cafeteria upstairs.
Bookshelves filled the high walls, perhaps three stories tall, from floor to ceiling, stretching endlessly inward.
“Am I really under Seoul?”
“That’s why we’re sensitive about digging. We almost hit one of our archives when someone dug in the wrong place near Dongdaemun.”
“Section Chief Mok Inha.”
When had Seo Taegyeom called them? Mok Inha and Ryu Hyeon-u, who always seemed to be together, were waiting where the voice had come from.
“Welcome to the headquarters of the Ghost Story Records Corporation. Since its founding, it has served as both the archive of records and the asset manager for every ‘Distortion’ occurring on the Korean Peninsula.”
Yellowed scrolls hundreds of years old, worn books, bundles of copy paper from before the 1980s, CDs, tapes, and Blu-rays filled the shelves. Old books and gossip sheets stood shoulder to shoulder with cutting-edge computers and equipment.
Employees wrestled with work between monitors and microscopes, while others ran about carrying books covered in name tags. The sight was almost awe-inspiring.
“This is your first time here, right? Don’t make such a dumbfounded face.”
“You never told me it was like this. I figured it was a fairly large building when I saw the freight lift, but...”
“You weren’t employed here then, and we thought your memories would be erased.”
“How big is it?”
“You can think of it as being so extensive that further underground development within Seoul’s old Four Great Gates area is no longer possible.”
It was more incredible than I had imagined.
Still slightly dazed, I followed Seo Taegyeom and Mok Inha into an office marked Haetae-Desaturation.
It looked like an ordinary company office, only more chaotic. Stacks of paperwork filled storage boxes like mountains, while the walls were covered with every kind of photograph, newspaper clipping, and copied internet material.
Section Chief Mok swept the papers scattered across the central table to one side, dragged over a huge whiteboard, and opened several file binders.
They were copies of ghost stories connected to Jangsalgot.
[Fishing Gallery] Don’t Go Night Fishing at Jangsalgot, Jecheon
ㅇㅇ(211.234) | Views 8,201 | Upvotes 156
Or go with someone. I think it only appears when you’re alone. I went night fishing by myself near Jangsalgot last week and almost passed out for real.
They say you’re more likely to catch a trophy fish at night, so I went, and after about 2 a.m., the water started glowing blue. I thought some idiot had thrown in glow-in-the-dark bait by mistake, so I reeled in my line, and there was a TV turned on underwater... It was showing something like an old Daehan News broadcast. Scared the shit out of me, so I ran right away.
[Have You Heard of the Jangsalgot Public Telephone?]
In the early 1980s, just before Jangsalgot Village was submerged, there was an old man who could not bring himself to leave until the very end. He would linger every day by the public telephone booth at the entrance to the village, saying that his son, who had gone into the army, had to come home.
Even after being told his son had died, the old man returned to wait again the next morning. Less than a week after the village was submerged, he surfaced near the reservoir.
Since then, strange calls are sometimes said to come through public telephones still remaining near Jecheon. Even models that can no longer receive calls will ring, and if someone answers, they will hear water bubbling inside the receiver, followed by the old man asking:
‘My son hasn’t come home yet.’
They say that if you answer, the old man comes looking for you.
[Free Board] People from Jecheon, Have You Heard the Jangsalgot “Underwater Mirror” Ghost Story?
Anonymous | 04/06 13:22 | Views 12,405 | Comments 42
I went down to my family home in Jecheon this time and heard this from my grandma. It gave me serious chills, so I’m sharing it.
Jangsalgot was completely flooded when they built the dam in 1982 or 1983, right? Back then, Grandma Cheong from the tile-roofed house, who had been the wealthy family in the village, had to leave behind the huge mother-of-pearl dressing table she had used all her life. She regretted it for years.
Sometimes she applies for those boat tours around the dam. She points out where the tile-roofed house was and where her own house stood from above the water, just to ease her regret and keep her mind active. But the last time she went, there was unusually thick mist over the water.
So she said, “Oh dear, I can’t see,” and leaned close to the water. Then, would you believe it, she saw a mirror underwater. The mirror from that mother-of-pearl dressing table was down there, huge, staring straight back at her. Inside the mirror, all the villagers were out in the yard, looking at her and beckoning like, “Why are you still standing out there? Get inside.”
It’s a good thing she was elderly and had other people with her, so she didn’t go in. Otherwise, she would’ve been completely screwed... If anyone else has had something similar happen, please share.
└ AnonymousAd1sd1: I’ve heard a story about hearing kids laughing by the reservoir when it rains ㅠㅠ!
└ Blue-Violet2921: The water at Jangsalgot is especially dark, so you can’t see below it well. But sometimes you really can see something in the water...
‘...Hi, Hertz. Read these and summarize them for me... That’s what I wish I could say.’
There were about three stories that immediately stood out, but beneath them sat literally a whole box’s worth of story binders.
As I groaned and turned over the papers, Seo Taegyeom spoke first.
“Under the Corporation’s classification, Jangsalgot is H-Pl type, a Distortion that occurs at random when someone approaches the area. It has occurred 134 times so far, and 87 of those cases involved stranded people. Thirty-one phenomena have been recorded, of which fifteen have undergone Closure.”
“Then where does the link I sent fall?”
“Nowhere.”
Mok Inha took over and elaborated on Seo Taegyeom’s explanation.
“All thirty-one recorded phenomena have something in common. They involve experiencing or witnessing the area before it was submerged in the 1980s. As long as you don’t get enchanted by a ghost, you won’t become a water ghost, so they’re easy cases to rescue.”
Mok Inha tapped a whiteboard. It displayed screenshots from the video I had sent, arranged second by second like a long strip of film.
“What that means is, no one has died and no missing person has failed to return in any Jangsalgot phenomenon we’ve recorded.”
“Then, based on that video, it means people who went missing months ago were found at the Jangsalgot submerged site.”
“Bingo. And if you look at the list of missing people who came in, none of them have any connection to Jangsalgot.”
According to ghost-story logic, this sort of instinct to return home usually called in people tied to that land first.
Mok Inha clicked their tongue once.
“There have been similar cases. A Distortion that hasn’t been able to eat people for a long time starts affecting reality indiscriminately, trying to eat anyone it can.”
“In such cases, we have observed the place suddenly going viral, or an event without context being held to recruit unspecified members of the public.”
“But there’s been nothing like that at Jangsalgot.”
At that point, I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or not. At least I had come to the right place, but when things got complicated, they really did come back around in strange ways.
“Um, there has been.”
“What has?”
“An event without context and something going viral.”
I pulled a crumpled company proposal from my pocket and tossed it onto the center of the table.
[Proposal for a Special Hometown Visit Event at the Jangsalgot Submerged Site, Jecheon]
“Our Director Lee happens to know the county governor of Jewon County. They’re planning to pick a good day and take in enough people to fill a sightseeing boat.”
It was like carefully delivering civilian prospective stranded people straight into the jaws of a ghost story, packaged like special buffet lunchboxes.
“Ha. What a lunatic.”
Mok Inha let out a disbelieving laugh.
Footnotes:
Daehan News was a Korean government newsreel series once commonly shown in cinemas.
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