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Haunted places in South Korea
What are the most haunted places in South Korea? The best-known are Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, Kuchisake-onna and The Vanishing Hitchhiker.
Korean ghost lore features the gwisin, spirits of people who died with unresolved grievances – most famously the cheonyeo gwisin, a young woman in white mourning clothes with long black hair. Shamanic tradition, in which mudang perform rituals (gut) to settle restless spirits, remains part of Korean religious life, and ancestral rites honour the family dead.
- 3 hauntings
- 6 recorded sightings
Haunted places in South Korea
Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital
An abandoned rural psychiatric hospital that CNN named one of the world’s freakiest places – built on rumours that the real record does not support. Hoax / debunked
Kuchisake-onna
A masked woman who stops children at dusk to ask “Am I pretty?” – the urban legend that swept Japan in 1979 and led schools to walk pupils home. FolkloreThe Vanishing Hitchhiker
A driver picks up a young woman by the road; she gives an address, then vanishes from the car – a ghost story told in a thousand towns. FolkloreThe ghost lore of South Korea
In recent decades the country’s ghost stories have increasingly been born online. The abandoned Namyang psychiatric hospital at Gonjiam became Korea’s most notorious ghost spot after CNN listed it among the world’s freakiest places in 2012 – yet Korean reporting found that its legends of patient deaths were false, and it was demolished in 2018, the same year a hit horror film made it famous. Schoolyard legends such as the “Red Mask,” a Korean version of Japan’s Kuchisake-onna, spread among children in the 1990s and 2000s.
Korean horror cinema, from A Tale of Two Sisters to Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, has made many of these stories internationally famous. Many reputed haunted houses are private property, and residents have repeatedly complained about trespassing thrill-seekers.
Ghost-hunting hotspots
- Gonjiam-eup, Gwangju
The town outside Seoul where the abandoned psychiatric hospital stood until 2018.
- Yeongdeok, North Gyeongsang
An abandoned seaside restaurant here was labelled one of Korea’s “three great haunted houses,” though Sisa Journal found its legends were invented.
- Jecheon, North Chungcheong
Home to Neulbom Garden, another of the “three great haunted houses,” whose stories were likewise shown to be rumour.
Timeline
- December 1992The hospital opens Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital
Namyang Neuropsychiatric Hospital begins treating patients in a new building on the hillside at Sindae-ri.
- 1996Closed for business reasons Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital
The hospital shuts in July after the founding director’s death and a dispute over sewage-system costs in a newly protected water-source area; patients are transferred to another hospital, and the building is left empty.
- 2000sThe Red Mask in South Korea Kuchisake-onna
Folklore collectors record a revival of the Korean “Red Mask” variant among schoolchildren, an adaptation of the Japanese legend that had arrived in the 1990s.
- 2012CNN’s freakiest places Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital
CNN Travel lists the hospital among the world’s freakiest places, repeating the legend of mysterious patient deaths and turning a local rumour into an international one.
- 28 March 2018Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital
Jung Bum-shik’s found-footage horror film opens after a court rejects the owner’s attempt to block it, and becomes one of the most-watched Korean horror films.
- 28 May 2018Demolition Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital
Following the sale of the land, the main hospital buildings and outbuildings are torn down, ending more than twenty years as a ruin.
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