Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital

The Namyang Neuropsychiatric Hospital opened in December 1992 on a wooded hillside at Sindae-ri, in Gonjiam-eup on the southeastern edge of the Seoul metropolitan area. It had a short life. According to a 2018 investigation by the Korean weekly Sisa Journal, the director died of an illness and his children, who inherited the hospital, had little wish to run it; when the area upstream of the Paldang Dam was designated a water-source protection zone, they fell into a dispute with the building’s owner over the cost of a sewage-treatment system, and closed the hospital in July 1996. Its patients were transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Yongin. The empty building then stood derelict for more than twenty years.

Empty, it became Korea’s most notorious ghost spot. Online, a story grew that patients had died one after another in mysterious circumstances, forcing the hospital to close; that the director had died or vanished; and that a sealed Room 402 could never be opened. In 2012 CNN Travel included “Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital” in a list of the world’s freakiest places, repeating the local legend that patients had begun dying mysteriously. The listing brought a flood of visitors, many of them trespassing at night to film themselves, and villagers complained repeatedly to police about noise and litter.

None of the central claims holds up. Sisa Journal found that the hospital closed for business and regulatory reasons, not because of deaths; that the director had died of illness, not by his own hand as one rumour claimed; that the owner had emigrated to the United States rather than disappeared; and that the story of the site being a former prison was also untrue. The people treated there were ordinary patients who were moved to other care, not victims of a horror story.

In March 2018 the found-footage film Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum became a box-office hit. The owner sued to stop its release, arguing it would hurt the sale of the property, but a Seoul court allowed the film to open. Two months later, on 28 May 2018, after the land was sold, the hospital buildings were demolished.

Trespassers and online videos claimed screams and whispers, shadowy figures in the corridors, doors moving by themselves and equipment failing, especially around the supposedly sealed Room 402. Many of these videos were staged or edited, and none has been verified.

The two main hospital blocks and outbuildings on the hillside at Sindae-ri, Gonjiam-eup – all demolished in 2018. The site is private land.

The hospital inspired Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018), one of South Korea’s biggest horror hits, later remade in Indonesia, and a similar asylum appears in the TV drama Signal. It is a textbook example of how internet rumour, foreign media lists and film can create a haunted place.