WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
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◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 50: Radio Mountain Lodge Murder Case (1)
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【Ech】 Want to collect real stories that scared you half to death? 1272 441: Name: Anonymous [2006/02/16 (Thu) 21:50:22] ID:vBv8Rz0gh290
This happened twenty or thirty years ago. Someone may remember the incident or have experienced it, so I will use pseudonyms for every place and name.
At the time, G belonged to an intercollegiate club and enjoyed hiking. He used to boast that he had climbed every famous mountain in South Korea before enlisting.
Naturally, he took on a leadership role in the club. Later, a few people whose schedules and interests aligned formed a hiking club that climbed mountains every weekend.
“There are no more mountains to climb in Korea, so let’s go somewhere higher.”
Their characteristic university-student confidence coincided with the beginning of independent overseas travel, and they went abroad to hike for about a week.
For some reason, they decided to climb a mountain in winter, without even hiring a local guide.
Nothing happened in the early morning, but around noon, the weather abruptly worsened without warning. By lunchtime, they faced a blizzard so fierce they could barely see ahead.
It was dangerous to keep walking like this.
Fortunately, C, who spoke some English, had heard beforehand that there was an emergency mountain lodge nearby, used by herb gatherers. Since it was used by people who often went up and down the mountain, the group decided it would be best to go there. With broken communication and vague memories of what they had heard, they somehow found the lodge.
Calling it a mountain lodge was generous. It was practically a shabby temporary wooden structure.
There was no electricity, of course. It was a two-story building, but the heating did not reach the second floor, which was more like a storage space. Naturally, the group gathered on the first floor.
“This is just like that Four Corners ghost story.”
“Oh, I know that one. The ghost story where one person stands in each corner, and you take turns moving around to tag each other.”
“We’re split between where we sleep and the fire, so we can see everything from upstairs anyway. It probably wouldn’t work.”
They could head down the mountain in the morning. They had brought plenty of emergency rations for the trek.
“The lights work in here.”
“There’s no running water, but there’s a jar outside where we can collect rainwater.”
Fortunately amid the misfortune, the lodge had cooking equipment. When they dragged the kitchen stove into the living room, there was enough warmth. Thanks to the blizzard outside, they could secure drinking water as well.
“Who wants meat?!”
The herb gatherers had left behind herbs, knives, and things like dried, salted meat.
No one, including G, considered their situation terribly urgent anymore. They covered the windows with their clothes to stop the wind from leaking in, then sat together around the stove. Before long, their sense of danger faded. With the recklessness typical of university students, they spent the night telling scary stories and having deep conversations.
The blizzard did not stop on the second day.
At first, the group had taken it easy, but now they began to worry how many days a blizzard in a high foreign mountain range could last. Tension slowly filled the lodge.
“I heard some places get blizzards that last two weeks.”
“They never even said this area would get snow. It’ll stop in a day or two.”
“Just in case, let’s ration our food as though the blizzard will last more than three days. We need food for the trip down the mountain too.”
The group carefully divided the food. There were five of them in total, and if they rationed the food in the lodge to the minimum, they could barely fill their stomachs.
On the second day, they ate thin porridge made by boiling a little meat and herbs with a handful of grain.
The blizzard still had not stopped by the third day.
Now the group was anxious. It was a hair-trigger situation, one where they seemed ready to explode if anyone said even one word of blame.
“Since this is a herb gatherer’s lodge, if we can get a few hundred meters down, we should reach a village.”
H spoke. Being the biggest person in the group, he must have been the hungriest.
“I’ll go down while I still have strength.”
“It’s too dangerous. Let’s wait until tomorrow.”
“If it doesn’t stop tomorrow, we’ll all starve.”
H shook off the others and headed down the mountain.
G apparently thought it worked out well in the end, since there was now one more person’s share of food.
That evening, searching for anything else to eat, the group went through the lodge again.
“Look. Isn’t this a radio?”
D found an old crank radio that looked as though it had been used during World War II.
“It’s ancient. Does it work?”
“They might have used it to communicate with the bottom of the mountain. There are signs it was used recently.”
D and G, both engineering students, began taking the radio apart.
“Do you think it’ll work?”
“It’s in better condition than I expected. I don’t know if it’ll get a signal in this blizzard, though...”
After fiddling with it for a long time, something finally began working. When D turned the dial, the radio began making noise.
None of them truly expected it to connect to a rescue team. Still, they were full of hope that they could survive if they could connect with anyone at the foot of the mountain, perhaps a nearby guide or local.
Crackle... Bzzzzzt...
Then the radio found a signal.
It was a woman’s voice.
“One came back and froze to death.
Standing horizontally, lying vertically.
Cold, cold, so cold.
Send them back inside.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Hello! We’re in a mountain lodge, and people are trapped in a blizzard!”
They shouted into the microphone, but no answer came.
Around then, C screamed.
“Outside! H is outside!”
It was hard to believe, but when the group looked outside the door, H was there.
Just like in the radio broadcast, his lower body sat on the snow, while his upper body had turned ninety degrees to the side, standing horizontally.
H’s wide-open eyes were blue with cold.
“What do we do? Should we bring him inside?”
“What? Are you crazy?! How are we supposed to bring him in?!”
Even if H had been a friend they had shared years of hardship with, keeping a frozen corpse inside was another matter.
G argued that they should at least take the body in below the lodge, as the radio broadcast had said. But the others adamantly refused, so the corpse remained there.
Bzzzt. Bzzzt.
“Cold, cold. You won’t let them inside?
Then someone must hang themselves.
Warmly over the fire.
Freeze to death nice and warm.
The longest hair.
Tie a noose around your neck with your hair, swaying back and forth, nice and warm.”
C was the only one in the group with long hair.
“You think I’m crazy enough to hang myself?! I’ll never do that!”
That evening, C died.
While going up to the second floor to change clothes, the floor collapsed. C’s long hair tangled like a rope around the neck with terrible precision. Dangling there, C swayed and spun above the fire.
G and D barely managed to cut the hair and bring C down.
“We need to destroy this thing.”
D threw the radio outside.
The blizzard continued on the fifth day.
Only G, D, and E remained.
Around the time they boiled the food that had originally been H’s share, the radio began making noise on its own again.
“Why is that here?”
The radio was in the exact spot where it had made noise the day before.
It began speaking again.
“One is still outside.
One is below.
One is crispy.
Roasted and on the bed.”
It was immediately clear whom it meant.
Perhaps D panicked. D struck the radio with the pole they had been carrying.
The coil broke, something crackled and burned, and D screamed before collapsing.
It was electrocution.
When E saw D’s body lying face down directly atop D’s sleeping bag, E completely lost their mind.
The blizzard blew on the sixth day.
It blew on the seventh day.
It blew on the eighth day.
It blew on the ninth day.
On the tenth day, the radio began working.
❖ ❖ ❖
“Look at this. Someone died here again.”
A rescue worker grumbled.
“I keep saying this lodge should be torn down. I don’t know why they still leave it here. How many are there this time?”
“Five. There are always five.”
The five foreigners were all dead, curled around the stove.
Every cause of death was a heart attack.
“Whenever people die here, one of them always gets burned, and another cuts their own hair all up...”
“Still, it’s better than last time. You know...”
“Let’s not talk about that. We might bring bad luck back from the dead.”
The funerals were held overseas, and they all returned to their home countries.
G’s body has still not been found.
The salty smell of blood and the damp scent of mold stung Chaeyeong’s nose.
Chaeyeong groaned and opened their eyes. Above was a ceiling so soaked with grease that mold and grime were impossible to distinguish.
The light fixture, which seemed as though it had once been a chandelier, had all its bulbs shattered. Only two or three bare bulbs still hung from it, swaying precariously and flickering irregularly.
“Where... am I...?”
A rustling sound came from nearby.
Chaeyeong flinched and curled up. A young man in a suit sat up from the sofa.
Beside him, a blond-haired young man who looked like a university student and a student in a school uniform lay collapsed on the floor.
Near the dining table, a man in a shabby jumper held his head and let out a low groan.
“W-Who are you?”
“Who are you?!”
Confusion showed on everyone’s faces as their eyes met. Then each person began feeling over their body, checking for injuries.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s hurt...”
“Were we... abducted?”
Only then did they take in the state of the mountain lodge.
It was not merely old and dirty.
The wallpaper was covered in marks where it had been clawed and torn again and again. Black stains resembling bloodstains clung here and there.
The door still bore the marks of boards that had been nailed up and later torn away. Yet enough boards remained that they could not see outside.
“W-Who brought us here?”
“Call the police. We need to call 112...!”
The student in uniform held up their phone in every direction, stepping anxiously from foot to foot. Then their face crumpled.
“There’s no signal! What is this? Let me out of here!”
“W-We can just go through the door! It’s right there!”
The man in the shabby jumper ran to the front door. He twisted the handle like a madman, but the door would not budge, as if it were secured with a massive lock.
“It won’t open... We’re trapped. We’re trapped!”
A heavy silence followed.
Keeping some distance from one another, they sat down on the floor or the broken furniture.
“...May I ask where everyone is from?”
Breaking the silence, the man in the suit cautiously spoke, introducing himself. He was trying to find some point they had in common.
“I’m Hwang Dogeon. I’m an investment analyst, and I live in Pangyo. I was on my way home after a meeting.”
Of the people still hesitating, Chaeyeong gathered their courage.
“I’m Park Chaeyeong. I live in Gyeonggi Province, and I just work for a company.”
“I-I live in Iksan. I’m Lee Eunseong. I was waiting for the bus home after cram school.”
“...Kim Minjae. I go to Gukyeong University. I just got discharged from the military, and XX, I was on my way home but ended up somewhere that isn’t home.”
“I’m Im Hojun, and I live in Gangwon Province. I went to see whether the feed had been put in the barn properly, but after I opened the barn door, I can’t remember anything.”
They had all come from different places.
They had nothing in common.
They even checked their phone books and contact lists to see if they might share some kind of grudge, but found nothing.
“Damn, is this really the twenty-first century?! What kind of asshole abducts people and dumps them somewhere like this?! These days, even murder-game dramas make people sign consent forms.”
Kim Minjae burst out.
Bzzzt, bzzzzzt.
“Ah, ah. Microphone test.”
“?!”
“W-What was that?”
“Hello. Hello. We’re together again today.
Let’s tell stories.
Let’s eat delicious food.
One goes bubble, bubble.
One goes tap, tap, tap.
One is enough.”
Im Hojun pulled back the blanket covering the source of the sound, revealing an old-fashioned radio.
“It isn’t even plugged in...”
“It is now mealtime. Mealtime. Prepare the meal.”
The laughter-like static from the radio vanished.
“This door is open!!”
Chaeyeong called out to the others, almost screaming.
One of the doors that had been securely locked was now open as though it had never been locked at all.
“What is this?”
“It looks like a hotel buffet...”
An incongruously clean tablecloth covered a huge round dining table.
Instead of food, there was only a single sheet of paper, neatly placed on a wide plate.
Chaeyeong picked it up and read it.
Identify the uninvited person before the banquet begins.
The banquet will begin when the bell rings three times.
Before the bell rings, the uninvited person must disappear from the mountain lodge.
All tools needed to exclude the uninvited person are provided in the kitchen.
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