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I went to the haunted house at Yeongdeok.
The ghost there was playing a prank on me.
I love stories like this... ghost stories.
- Yeah, they'd done a lot of torture at the place, lots of people die there.
- We heard a voice.
...about places we're not supposed to go.
We're warned not to go.
But I'm not a ghost hunter.
The fear, superstition,...
always hides a bigger story.
A true story.
What really happened here?
And if you knew, would you still go there?
I WOULDN'T GO IN THERE transcript by chochancuuDuc (subscene.com)
I'm Robert Joe, blogger and urban explorer.
Korea is my home country.
And I recently came across a concentration of ghost stories
in an abandoned house located in a remote Korean East-coast fishing village.
I don't believe in ghosts.
My theory is places that attract large numbers of paranormal sightings
often have something in common, a true horror or tragedy that took place there,
buried somewhere in its past.
And this was an investigation I couldn't resist.
So infamous was this house
that did have attracted a constant stream of amateur ghost hunters.
I wanted to know why.
I found a shaman, a practitioner of ancient mystical rituals,
who claimed to have seen ghosts in the Yeongdeok house.
I've been a shaman for more than 20 years.
When evil spirits want to take revenge or hunt people,
I carry out rituals to stop them.
A television station wanted to make an episode about unexplainable stories
and I was invited to appear on the show.
I heard an extreme sound, like a woman pleading
and I followed the sound.
It really shocked me, I think it was a woman in her middle and late 20s.
Her face looked weird, and her eyes were filled with a light so bright
it was hard to make out her peoples.
They look like a beast in the dark.
I could tell that she had experienced to some terrible injustice.
I had a pain in my head,
she hated people entering the place and she was very disturbed.
So I started to speak to her.
She didn't answer me.
A crew member said a lady kept touching her shoulders.
She was in shock and her whole body frozen with fright.
There had been dozens of rumors of ghostly encounters in this house on the hill.
What really happened at Yeongdeok house?
Even though the shaman claimed she contacted a ghost, I needed to find out about its history
to see if that might help explain its notoriety.
I made my way along the winding Eastern coast.
The house was located in an otherwise-unremarkable fishing town.
On my walk up the hill, I noticed something: every corner I turned, there was no one.
A guesthouse with security was right beside the house of haunts.
It seemed an odd place to expect paying guests to stay.
What kind of rumors are there about this house?
Whether a suicide took place here, or whether that was just part of the haunted house's legends,
made no difference to the neighbors.
They capitalized on it either way.
So this is the Yeongdeok house, I have just arrived.
Time to take a look inside and see what I can find out.
Alright, someone has painted a lot of "4"s along this top part here,
"death" in Korea.
And this is the Yeongdeok house's proper.
I'm about to take a step inside. Let's see.
That sign says: "Seriously, don't come in here".
Oh, wow.
And that is a dead chicken.
Ew, it's kind of stuck though.
That looks relatively recent.
I don't know if this means there were some sort of rituals performed here,
I mean maybe this might be something to do with the shamans here.
So maybe this was where
a witness started getting headaches, started feeling something.
The dead bird could have been a recent shamanistic offering,
an indication of recent ghost sightings.
I wanted to track down a shaman who could tell me more
about the superstitions surrounding the house.
I'd come to Yeongdeok, a town on Korea's East coast,
to investigate a house on the hill, said to be one of the most haunted in the country.
A Korean shaman had said she'd encountered a female ghost with glowing eyes.
And a neighbor said there had been rumors of a girl committing suicide.
On my first exploration of the house,
I found strange graffiti and a dead chicken
which looked like a recent shamanistic sacrifice.
I wondered if the shamans could tell me about what might have happened here.
Shamans were believed to be very powerful here in Korea.
Around 300000 of them still practice this ancient beliefs of reconciling
the death and the living.
And these shamans believed they still had an important role to play in modern society.
I tracked down the shaman who said she came face-to-face with the ghost at Yeongdeok house.
I hoped she could give me an explanation to the alleged-persistent hauntings there.
What is shamanism?
The dead can't pass a message to the living themselves.
We play a part in connecting them and allowing them to communicate with each other.
We come in and play the role as middleman.
People would prepare food on the table as offerings to their parents
or siblings who had passed on.
And why is shamanism relevant in Korea today?
Like how filial piety is practiced in Korea,
where parents practice Confucianism and pay respects to the ancestors.
All these beliefs are carried down to shamanism.
In Korea, ceremonies like this gut were held for many reasons:
to ensure good fortune, to communicate with ancestors, to pacify the dead.
Madam Lim decided to then show me how a ritual was performed.
She set her body became a vessel for the dead to communicate with the living.
And she wielded her sharp knives to demonstrate her power and her fearlessness
to any lurking evil spirits.
I participated in the ceremony,
but I must admit: I found nothing spiritual or paranormal.
What I really wanted to know was why she thought
so many in the country considered Yeongdeok house to be one of the most haunted places in Korea.
The reason why there are so many ghosts at Yeongdeok
is because Yeongdeok is a place where the Yin energy is strong.
That's why they end up gathering there.
They don't have their own burial ground or a place to rest,
because of that, they harbor a lot of resentment
and they hang around.
Madam Lim went on to explain that the Yin-Yang energy were the light and the dark forces of the universe.
Yin was the dark, Yang was the light.
At the Yeongdeok house, they are out of balance, causing spirits of the dead to exist in limbo.
So I just finished a 2-hour ceremony,
which was kind of tiring for me, I can't even imagine how tiring it was for the shamans who performed it,
uh, and that's only a fraction of what can be up to a 8-hour ritual.
And it really is sort of a tour de force
display of Korean traditional culture elements, all at once.
Madam Lim was no ordinary witness.
She was a shaman. She had theories that's to why it was haunted.
She told me that in Korea,
one of the most common reasons was that these spirits were trying to reconnect with family members
over something unresolved.
Who had lived in that house?
Could this story have been inspired by something that happened to them?
It was a small fishing village.
I figured if I ask around, someone would know who used to live there,
and what might have happened in the house.
I found Mr. Ahn at the harbor.
- Mr Ahn, I... I hear you know about the building known as the Yeongdeok house.
Could you tell me about it?
- My uncle cleared the ground of stones and built this house on top of the hill.
From the house, you could see the sea. The view was beautiful.
He decided to set up a seafood restaurant there and lived with my grandfather.
He would stay over at his house quite often.
I couldn't believe it, I had found someone who actually lived at Yoengdeok house.
It had been built by his uncle 50 years ago.
- So it was a restaurant from the beginning?
- Yeah. He sold the house after about 4-5 years and moved away with his family.
Mr Ahn didn't speak of any tragedy that befell on his uncle
or others that lived there, other than business failures and bad luck.
- The next owner rent the house for restaurant business.
But every new tanent had a trouble with this location.
Their business would fail, and they would leave with nothing.
About 4 families came and rent.
- So when you were young, there were no rumors about ghosts?
- I know the rumors, but they're just rumors that people spread.
Eventually, the house became so famous that was known as the ghost house all over the country.
They may have been just stories,
but in my experience ghost stories don't just arise out of thin air.
There's usually some real events hidden beneath the superstitions.
Oh that was interesting.
Uh, it turns out that Mr. Ahn did live in the house as a boy.
He didn't seem to believe in any of the ghost stories.
But something happened were 4 other families came through afterwards
weren't able to run successful businesses.
So something about that house wasn't working out for them.
Was this simply a case of a bad business location?
If Mr. Ahn was right, then the reason for the house's reputation
had nothing to do with what happened to the families that once lived there.
And that would mean the shaman's theories had no bases in actual events.
I decided to head back to the house
and see if I could pick up more clues.
Maybe there was something I missed the first time.
This was here where the people who come and visit this place stay.
You can see why someone would wanna build something here, the view is...
it's quite amazing.
That's interesting.
That sign says "Under construction".
then there's a phone number, and the name of a monk, it looks like.
That's relatively a modern phone number, actually.
So I think this might be it,
the rumor being that there was a young girl here, for some reason she killed herself
apparently by hanging.
I'm not exactly feeling the presence of ghosts here, but, uh, it still feels pretty creepy.
I've searched the upper floors, but maybe the secret laid beneath.
It was time to hit the basement.
It was eerie, and there was evidence people slept here,
like it was some kind of bedroom.
Ok, so as I said, here is the basement...
More ghost hunters.
I hear people moving around outside, or something.
And I guess I'm not supposed to be here, so I think we're supposed go now.
I was running out of ideas.
I'd hit the proverbial brick wall.
A shaman claimed the house was full of lost, lingering souls.
I had hoped to find a real connection between the people who had live there and the hauntings.
but Mr Ahn, whose uncle had built the place, had said there was no connection.
So I took a shot in the dark and called the phone number I'd seen at the house.
There's a phone number, and the name of a monk, it looks like.
It turned out the phone number really did belong to a Buddhist monk.
I needed a new lead, and I hoped he had some answers.
Monk Ji Woo, I understand you have a connection with the Yeongdeok house.
Could you tell me about it?
A giant snake in the basement?
This sounded like far-fetched superstition,
nothing that could help me find out what really happened.
What kind of spirits did you see there?
Student soldiers?
The monk believed these spirits of people who died in unjust circumstances were haunting the house.
But they weren't connected to the families who lived there.
He mentioned some student soldiers had fought nearby.
But he also mentioned a giant snake, which made me think it was all pure fantasy.
Still, if there was an actual violent battle,
this could be a major break in my investigation.
I now had a sense of the stories as they saw it, the shamans and monks.
It was time for me to try and separate fact from fiction.
- I'm trying to find information about a place called the Yeongdeok house.
Do you know anything about it?
- Yes, I have heard about it.
The haunted house in Yeongdeok was called Woosuk Garden.
A restaurant ran by a retired public officer.
Were there any incidents of murders or suicides there?
There were no violent incidents.
And was there anything that might explain some of these stories?
The chief investigator began telling me
why he believed the house had gained its infamous reputation.
Surprisingly, it actually backed up some of what the monk had told me.
During the Korean War, in 1950,
the Allied Forces carried out a landing operation at the beach on Jangsa.
Many student soldiers died in the operation.
The North Korean Army and our own Army lost many men.
All of them were buried at that area.
Ok, so I just talked to the police,
and despite all of the rumors surrounding the house,
there doesn't seem to have been any record of a *** or a suicide,
or anything particularly violent,
except if you go back to the Korean War.
Now apparently, there were some sort of a battle that happened
right across the street from the house, on the beach itself.
And that battle was very bloody and a lot of people died.
This was huge.
There was no evidence of any violent deaths in the house.
But apparently, numerous student soldiers died near where it was built
in a battle during the Korean War.
And according to the police, they were also buried there.
I found another shaman who actually lived in the house
and said she had ncountered ghost soldiers.
At the time, I was about 38.
I didn't know much about spirits.
When after I prayed, Buddha told me that I should go and live in the haunted house,
but I asked him: "why do I have to go to that sort of place,"
"I just wanted to live peacefully!"
Somehow, for some weird reason, I ended up going there.
There were many student soldiers there.
They said that they would look out for me, honor me and help me.
After that I went into the bigger room next door.
There were male student soldiers there.
They said they would honor me if I stay.
The shaman said she saw the spirits of dead student soldiers.
And the monk had mentioned soldiers and people who had died unjust deaths.
What kind of army would be made up of students?
My search for any evidence of a domestic tragedy linked to Yeongdeok's infamous haunted house
came up empty.
But then I discovered a bigger story
that had nothing to do with the house:
a bloody battle in the Korean War had been fought here,
on the beach overlooking the house.
Some locals believed restless souls had been left behind.
They also said there were bodies buried on the hill
where the Yeongdeok house now stood.
All of them were buried at that area.
I wanted to know why students would have been involved in a war
and whether there were really bodies buried on the hill.
To find out what really happened at Jangsa,
I tracked down an eyewitness who could take me back to that fateful day.
Park Seok Jin, a local village head, was only 11 during the Korean War,
but told me both he and his family had witnessed the horrors of Operation Jangsa.
It was September 14th 1950.
I was at home with my father and grandfather.
Early that morning, ships were firing cannons and while planes were flying overhead.
The landing was on the other side of that hill, at Jangsa Beach.
The student soldiers captured the hilltop there,
and the North Korean soldiers ran up to the other hill over here.
When the bullets hit the rocks, sparks flew,
it was like the warm-simmered beans, the "pop" "pop" "pop" sounds.
It was a heavy battle,
the student soldiers and the North Korean soldiers shooting at each other.
We could see with our own eyes,
back then, there are few trees and no forests.
So we could see people moving and crawling.
The alive soldiers had to temporarily bury the dead soldiers there,
at the bottom of the haunted house.
My investigation had turned from an urban myth and superstitions
about what happened in Yeongdeok house
to what really did happen in that area more than 50 years ago.
There had been a battle on the hill where the house now stood,
and some locals said that high school student soldiers that had been killed in the battle
had been buried on the hill.
Who were these high school students?
This was no haunted house tale,
this was the Korean War
that split a country in two.
More than 2 million died.
Why were such young men fighting as soldiers?
Were they conscripts or volunteers?
I contacted Colonel Donald Boose, an expert on the Korean War.
Initial, North Korean attacked, they managed to capture Seoul.
The Republic of Korea forces and other United Nations allies
went on the offensive, uh, to push the North Koreans out of South Korea.
General McArthur realized that he could land on the West coast at Incheon
and cut off the North Korean lines of communication.
What about fightings specifically in the Yeongdeok region at the time?
As part of the attack to the North,
it was decided to make a... a landing on... into the center of, uh, Jangsa
in order to cut off the North Korean lines there to facilitate the attack by the 3rd Rock Division.
That also would, uh, be a deception operation to confuse the North Koreans,
as to where the main attack was going to come.
It was intended to take place at the same time as the Incheon landing.
Chaos is often the state of things in the fog of war.
I wanted to know if that was true that high school students were used as soldiers.
It was a very difficult time for the Republic of Korea
and they were looking for soldiers everywhere.
The unit that conducted the Jangsa Operation
was a unit of about 800 young men. Some of them are high school age.
High school student soldiers on a mission to save their country.
This seemed remarkable, but why did so few people know about this?
The Incheon Operation was so large and successful,
and other things were going on at the time.
So the Jangsa Operation was kind of forgotten.
The disastrous Jangsa Landing Operation near Yeongdeok's haunted house
was shadowed in the history books by the much larger and successful Battle of Incheon
on Korea's West coast the same day.
But I did find one account of what had happened here.
This person said that when they were sent off, the surgeon said to them:
"Go home, get some rest, and get two of your favourite books
and I'll see you tomorrow, at 8 in the morning."
There's a lot of these little details, and it... it gives you a sense that,
uh, they were quite unprepared and it's some sort of rushed off to battle.
Uhm, and apparently, some of them are still alive.
I tracked down two survivors
who had been high school student soldiers in the Jangsa Landing Operation.
They could tell me what I couldn't find in books.
The survivors believed they were used as a decoy.
They thought they had been used as part of a strategy
to divert the North Korean military leadership's attention
from a larger attack on the West coast, at Incheon.
At Jangsa, their group of untrained and underarmed student soldiers
was the only one taking part.
The 1st Marine Division moved through Incheon.
This city is recaptured against relatively-light resistance.
Allied casualties are few.
The weather turned out to be a fatal turning point.
The student soldiers had planned to land just before dawn.
Instead, they arrived weak and unprepared in daylight,
in full view of the North Korean army.
Some drowned before they even reach the shore.
There's no cover on the beach, how did you protect yourself?
Do you have an idea of how many of your people died that day?
- Do you know where they are buried?
The difference between speaking with the living witness
and reading something out of a history book is just huge.
The amount of detail and the vividness of what happened really comes out.
Usually in these investigations, you hear about bodies buried under a hill and it's
always an urban legend, but in this case, it might actually be true.
I had discovered the true tragedy of the story.
Student soldiers, woefully undertrained, sent them to battle only to be slaughtered.
There was a mission they could no way have been ready for.
Some bodies remained, buried upon the hill at Yeongdeok.
Why had they been left there?
The dead, unclaimed?
I was in Korea to investigate a haunted house on a hill.
It turned out that it wasn't the house that was the story,
but unclaimed bodies that laid beneath it.
The bodies were of high school kids
thrown into war in a desperate attempt to take back South Korea from the North.
The operation was called the Jangsa Landing Operation.
How many died in the battle
is still a mystery.
The survivors I met wanted closure,
an exhumation of their fallen brothers,
some of whom they believed were still buried on the hill that Yeongdeok house was built on.
It turned out that the survivors' stories just got worse.
As students, they weren't even listed as soldiers,
and that meant there were no official records as to who served and how many died in battle.
Everything was stacked against the unrecognized veterans.
So this is it. The story is the hill,
not the house.
Somewhere around here, uh, 63 years ago, a huge battle took place.
People died and they might be buried right here, although I really can't find any evidence of it.
I'd contacted the Department of Defense.
I want to know why the bodies of these young student soldiers were left upon that hill.
But they preferred to not discuss the matter,
and didn't take an official position.
So, for those who died here, it does seem like a peaceful enough place to be buried,
but the survivors, uh, they want official recognition
for their pain, their suffering, their sacrifice.
You'd think that, uh, burial in a veteran cemetery would be appropriate,
Even so, I guess we'll never know just how many people are buried here.
The more I found out,
the more I realized why the survivors continued to be haunted by the horrors of war.
They believed the authorities did not want to exhume their fallen brothers' bodies.
When they fought at Jangsa landing,
these school-aged soldiers were not officially recognized as part of the South Korean army.
Clearly, the event of that day had been so traumatic that emotions still ran high.
The Incheon landing changed the war.
But the forgotten attack,
the Jangsa Operation that diverted the enemies' attention from Incheon,
played a crucial part.
Like any registered soldiers,
these student soldiers contributed no less
to the freedom of South Korea.
I asked them why they thought the official casualty count was lower than they believed.
South Koreans had recaptured Yeongdeok!
We've had our foothold.
Now we are on the offensive.
And it was the beginning of the end for the Communist invasion of South Korea.
- Looking back, how do you feel about Jangsa now?
Seoul was liberated in fierce, street-to-street fighting.
This capital city, once with a population of 1500000 people,
had suffered terribly during its week periods under Communist rule.
Many people claimed the house on the hill was haunted by ghosts,
spirits of those who died from unjust causes.
But the real truth about Yeongdeok had nothing to do with these urban myths and superstitions.
And nothing to do with the house itself.
There was a true tragedy here that unfolded on the hill the house was built on.
And the real unjustice was one of undertrained student soldiers
sent to their deaths against battle heart in North Koreans.
A story that history largely overlooked
and one that continues to haunt the survivors today.
English subtitle by German Shepherd (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/user/AngryBirdsLikeThis Thanks for watching.