WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ How to Rewrite Ghost Stories ◈
Episode 67: Imyeonsan Basement (1)
──────
“Is there really anything in a place like this?”
“I’m telling you, there is. Why does a young person like you have no stamina for hiking? Build up some endurance.”
“...”
This was unfair. Who had been climbing nonstop for an hour, like elders using some divine walking technique? Had they dug up wild ginseng from a ghost story and chewed it?
If I hadn’t been the one in a hurry, I would’ve sprawled on the ground and demanded a thirty-minute break.
“We’re here.”
Seon-u In and Seo Taegyeom, who had gone ahead, snapped off a few branches. An abandoned building appeared beyond them.
Peeling paint. Broken windows. Overgrown weeds half-blocking the entrance. The two-story building had the strange shape of a detached house fused with a retreat center.
One side bore signs of fire damage. On the other, pink water mold had grown so thick that it had dried black.
“...What exactly happened to this building?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was it burned down, or did it drown? Either way, it looks like several people must’ve died here.”
It looked like I’d be cursed the instant I stepped inside. There were thousands of abandoned-house ghost stories like this on my blog. Korea’s three most notorious haunted houses would look cute by comparison.
“If this is a resolved ghost story... why is the building still here?”
“Distortions can manifest through resemblance as well. In particular, location-based ghost stories like this tend to move elsewhere when the original site is demolished or disappears.”
I looked up at the building once more and walked around it. Several deep holes had been dug around the structure. They were probably traces of searching the area to reach Mok Inha’s coordinates.
“Was there at least a well or something?”
“There isn’t even a water pipe running through here. No luck. It’s really just dirt beneath us. It would be better if Chief Mok’s head were simply buried in the ground, wouldn’t it?”
Finding a head after digging up the ground was somehow a better situation than a ghost story. I’d never get used to jokes that grim.
I opened the file again and flipped through it. The ghost story file, “H-Pl-exd-1982: The Basement That Does Not Exist,” which I had read dozens of times, contained an old ghost story along with very old testimony.
‘It would’ve been nice if I could just be happy about this.’
I might have cheered over a new ghost story. I would’ve planned how to post it on my blog and wondered how people would react.
But people’s lives were at stake now, so I became cautious every time.
I didn’t want to fail again. The feeling that someone could die because of one choice I made was terrible. The pressure was on an entirely different level from disposable supporting characters dying in a horror movie.
Flip, flip.
[True Horror] There’s a really old abandoned building on the mountain behind my neighborhood. My uncle used to work at the local police substation there, and when he drinks, the stories he sometimes tells are seriously creepy...;;
Apparently, it used to be a hospital? A sanatorium? Somewhere they locked up homeless people and people without family, or something like that -_-;; You know, back when people were told not to go out at night. Then times changed, so it had to close, but the director or whoever supposedly herded everyone into the basement to erase the evidence, poured cement in, buried the whole thing, and fled overnight.
But when people went up there to tear down the building, my uncle was there too, and apparently there was no basement... They searched all the way down to the floor, but there was nothing. They swore up and down that there had never been a basement ㅡㅡ;
But the really scary part is that when he went up the mountain on patrol sometimes, he said he could hear people there. I went up there once and heard someone crying too, but I got chewed out like hell and never went back.
Title: Repost) My friend ended up in a psych ward after visiting a haunted house [shivers]
Date: 20XX. 08. 02 | Views: 45,911
This is 100% true, and it happened to my absolute best friend. I’m getting pissed off writing this, so I’ll speak casually. Please understand;; Leave the source when reposting.
About two summers ago, two friends and I, A and B, were hanging around with some older middle school guys when we got the urge to do a courage test at an abandoned building. Back then, you had to do stuff like that to be recognized as a real man lol. Sorry.
We argued our asses off about what time to go, then decided on midnight. But when we got there, only one of the older guys showed up besides us... Those sneaky bastards, seriously.
Anyway, we had come all that way, and we thought we’d look scared if we didn’t go in, so we waited a little and decided to go in by ourselves.
At around one in the morning, we turned on our flashlights and started checking the first floor. Then A, who had been walking ahead, suddenly stopped.
“Hey, there are stairs going down here?”
B and I got scared shitless. But there really were open stairs at the end of the hallway;; A stale smell was drifting up from below.
We grabbed at A’s clothes and told him not to go, but A had always been pretty bold. He just snickered and went down alone.
Fuck, thinking back on it, maybe he had already been possessed by then.
Ten minutes passed. Then thirty. But he didn’t come back up;;
And from below, we kept hearing a strange metallic scraping sound, mixed with Thump... Thump... and what sounded like a woman laughing.
We were terrified, crying and begging the older guy to help. He went downstairs too, trying to act tough.
Then he disappeared too, lmao.
We were shaking like crazy. About five minutes after the older guy vanished, we left him and A behind, ran down the mountain, and called the police right away.
(Don’t curse me for leaving A behind. You’d piss yourself if you were there tooㅠㅠ)
When we went back with the police, the stairway entrance had been sealed off by a cement wall... Enough to leave even a ghost baffled.
But this is what really drove me crazy.
A, who had gone missing, was found in the first-floor hallway of the abandoned hospital three days later. The older guy was never found. He was probably dead...
A looked fine on the outside, but his eyes were completely unfocused. He was drooling like an animal and talking to empty air.
A is still in a locked psychiatric ward. When I visit, he sometimes goes wild scratching at the floor, saying there is something he has to find in the basement.
I don’t even go into underground parking garages now.
Anyway, that was the story.
Now it was time to put the puzzle together.
I had to find the common points and connections between the “old basement building” ghost story, which had been resolved over twenty years ago and turned into a fake ghost story, the “Lost and Found Center advertisement” ghost story I had seen on TV yesterday, and Chief Mok Inha’s coordinates.
1. Chief Mok Inha’s head is at the Lost and Found Center.
2. The coordinates of Chief Mok Inha’s head point to the basement of an abandoned building.
3. That abandoned building is a place that once had a basement ghost story.
In other words, Mok Inha had fused with the people on the train. Something went wrong during the process of returning, and only her head fell off and was “lost.”
And for reasons I couldn’t understand, the Lost and Found Center ghost story seemed to randomly collect and store things that had disappeared in other ghost stories.
A Lost and Found Center was basically a warehouse. The advertisement had said it rented out space like self-storage units. I still had no idea who used it.
“If the resolved ghost story is location-based, and the site is vacant, then there is a high possibility that another ghost story has settled beneath it.”
Whether ghost story ecosystems really worked that organically was a separate issue. We were forcing the pieces together in a way that made sense from a human perspective.
Ghost stories were fiction, after all. They could only occur and recur if they sounded plausible.
That was why we had come all the way here and were debating every kind of argument and deduction under the pretense of holding a meeting.
We were here. We believed in the ghost story. So open for us.
Open sesame.
“Assuming this ghost story made a successful real estate investment, what do you think connects the two?”
“The ghost story about forgotten basement stairs and the Lost and Found Center that finds things both share the keyword ‘disappeared.’”
“If someone has lost something, they might be able to enter through that entrance.”
“That’s right. If someone who meets the conditions enters the ghost story at the right time, they should be able to enter the Lost and Found Center ghost story.”
“That seems impossible.”
“If the chance isn’t exactly zero, we have to try what we can, Section Chief Seo. We can’t just leave Chief Mok’s head rolling around in there.”
Seon-u In jabbed Seo Taegyeom in the side, then tilted their head and whispered something. Seo Taegyeom listened without so much as twitching an eyebrow, then let out a soft sigh.
“Right?”
“It can’t be helped.”
“...Was that something I wasn’t meant to hear?”
“Want to work for the government?”
“I’ll hear about it later.”
Seo Taegyeom walked around the area once, thinking, before speaking.
“Fine. Let’s divide this into two entries. Assuming entry is possible, during the first entry, we will determine what we need to do to find the lost items and whether there is anything else lost besides Chief Mok’s head.”
“When a ghost story... a Distortion demands money as a price or an exchange, what do you usually do?”
“We create substitutes for currency, such as Talismans or small jade tokens. But this time, it would be best to collect their personal effects and take them in as representatives.”
“How many people should enter?”
“There is one person we absolutely need to call in. Choi Seongun. And Lee Gangrim as well.”
Seo Taegyeom tilted their head. As far as I knew, Haetae Section 1, led by Seo Taegyeom, consisted of Lee Gangrim, Choi Seongun, and one other person.
“Unfortunately, Archivist Lee Gangrim has been assigned to resolve another Distortion. It is an individual mission.”
“Why Seongun? He’s only a probationary intern Archivist. It’s not just because you rescued him, is it?”
“As I said earlier, there is no one more ideally suited to this ghost story’s entry conditions than Mr. Seongun.”
At the Twilight Market, Choi Seongun had lost a great deal to coercive trades called exchanges.
His legs, his eyes, his memories, his burned body, even his fingers.
And if those body parts had been exchanged at the market, then passed into someone’s hands or lost... there was an even higher chance they had ended up at this Lost and Found Center.
“Our odds of success will be higher if we put Mr. Seongun forward and claim that we came to find what he lost.”
“That sounds plausible, but what about Chief Mok? We can’t claim ownership of her head, can we?”
“It will be difficult unless the chief’s body claims ownership of her head. We don’t even have a part of her body, so we can’t act as representatives.”
“Good grief. We need to think about how to retrieve someone else’s lost property too.”
“Then I have one question. How are you planning to enter, Mr. Jaehyeon? You haven’t lost anything.”
“Oh, I’ll be fine. You know my particular constitution. And I did rescue Mr. Seongun, so I think it’ll work if we get our stories straight.”
After another thirty minutes of discussion, we reached a conclusion.
First, Choi Seongun and I would enter the abandoned building and confirm whether the Lost and Found Center ghost story was real.
If we definitely entered a real ghost story, we would use the horizontal coordinate system Seon-u In had given us to fix the coordinates and drop an anchor. Even if the first entry produced no results, we would withdraw quickly at that point.
During the second entry, Choi Seongun and I would enter first again. Then, using the new coordinates we had received, Ryu Hyeon-u and the rest of Haetae Section 1 would follow with additional equipment.
The personnel had been decided. So had the location. All that remained was to reopen a resolved Distortion.
Wouldn’t it be easier to open a lock without a key? Right now, we had to make a door in a wall that didn’t even have one, open it, and walk through.
And of course, I had an answer.
‘You’ll help me, right, Hertz?’
Of course, Partner. We already know very well how to enter a resolved ghost story, don’t we?
My phone buzzed with a notification. A blog push notification showed that a new tip had been posted on the Guestbook.
Author: Three A.M. PM
Hello, Gii Yadam. Lucky you, I have something I’d like to ask of you!
Please investigate the truth behind the “Imyeonsan Abandoned Building.” I hear there is a basement there that should not exist.
And according to the rumors, that basement connects to somewhere it should not connect to. I trust that Gii Yadam will “fact-check” it, so I’m leaving the address :)!
“...You’re the best, Hertz.”
My pleasure.
I gripped the tip-off, its warning glowing red, and turned to the others.
“I found a way in.”
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
