No bus came to Seorigol before dawn.
The first bus did not arrive until 8:20 in the morning. Even then, it stayed away on days of heavy snow. It would stop in front of the township office at the foot of the mountain, and the driver would look once up the road toward the village before shaking his head.
On days like that, the people of Seorigol did not wait for the bus.
They knew better than anyone that there was no point in waiting for something that would never come.
Therefore, at 7:16 on the morning of January 18, the old man sitting at the bus stop by the entrance to the village had no reason to be there.
Nor was he alive.
It took several minutes for anyone to confirm that fact.
From a distance, he looked as though he were merely asleep. His hands rested on his knees, and his head tilted slightly in the direction from which the bus would have come. The zipper of his worn brown jacket was pulled all the way up to his throat, and the toes of his rubber boots were neatly aligned.
Snow continued to fall.
The first police officer to see him could not bring himself to approach immediately.
The snow in front of the bus stop was too clean.
If someone had walked to the bench, something should have remained behind.
Footprints.
Drag marks.
Tire tracks.
There was nothing.
Only the snow-covered bus stop and the old man sitting on its bench.
One of the officers lifted his radio.
“There’s someone at the bus stop.”
A reply came a moment later.
“Is he alive?”
The officer did not answer.
He stepped cautiously toward the shelter, leaving the first footprints in the snow. Each time his boot pressed down, the crust broke with a sound like dry paper tearing.
Before he reached out to shake the old man’s shoulder, someone else had already understood.
Han Jiwan stood below the police cordon with a camera in his hands.
Through the zoom lens, he studied the old man’s face. His eyelids drooped halfway shut, and his mouth hung slightly open. His expression was strangely peaceful.
He looked like a man who had fallen asleep while waiting for something.
Or like someone who had remained there even after learning that what he waited for would never come.
Jiwan pressed the shutter.
Then he immediately checked a photograph he had taken earlier.
5:42 a.m.
The same bus stop.
The same bench.
Empty.
Jiwan raised his head again.
7:16 a.m.
The same bus stop.
The same bench.
The old man was sitting there.
No one had crossed the police line in the intervening time. Snow had blocked the road, and a patrol car sealed off the village entrance. Apart from the tracks the officer had just made after the body was discovered, the snow leading to the bus stop remained untouched.
And yet the old man was there.
As though he had been sitting there from the beginning.
Jiwan had come to Seorigol that morning because of a video.
It was eighteen seconds long.
No one knew who had uploaded it first. It appeared on a local online forum, was deleted, then resurfaced on someone else’s social media account. Shortly after four in the morning, it began circulating through group chats used by reporters.
The filename was simple.
seorigol_0313.mp4
The image was blurry. The falling snow repeatedly smudged the view. The CCTV camera looked down over the entrance to the village. The bus stop stood on the left side of the frame, and a mountain road on the right.
For the first few seconds, nothing happened.
Then something black passed across the bottom of the screen.
It looked like a person.
No—it did not look like a person.
Either description seemed wrong.
One moment it appeared tall; the next, it seemed to be crawling close to the ground. It appeared to have arms, and then those arms looked more like strips of cloth fluttering in the wind.
But one thing about it was unmistakably strange.
It did not walk.
And yet it passed through the frame.
There was sound at the end of the video.
Whether the CCTV system had recorded it or someone had added it later was impossible to know. Between bursts of static like an old speaker tearing itself apart, a brief song could be heard.
Do not open the door.
Do not turn on the light.
The yaksha is passing by.
Then the video ended.
Jiwan initially assumed it was fabricated.
There were too many videos like it. Blurry footage. An unnatural figure. An old village. An unidentifiable song. Add the word disappearance, and people would believe almost anything.
But this time was different.
Not long after the video appeared, rumors began circulating that police had actually been dispatched to Seori-myeon in Hanul County, Gangwon Province. Someone had reportedly made an emergency call from a small village called Seorigol, after which all contact with its residents had been lost.
Nothing had been confirmed.
But too many unconfirmed stories were racing in the same direction.
Jiwan knew moments like that.
The moment something became a story.
The moment rumor reached the scene before fact did.
He pulled on his padded coat and did not go to the office.
He drove straight to Gangwon Province.
The sun had not yet risen when he reached the entrance to Seorigol.
The road had been blocked below the village. Snowplows had been unable to make it up the mountain, and the police had stretched a cordon across the middle of the road.
Several reporters and two YouTubers were already milling around below it.
Lights that did not belong in a mountain village before dawn flickered across the snow.
Camera lamps.
Phone screens.
The rotating lights of police cars.
Jiwan held up his press card.
“Han Jiwan, city desk, Daily On. I only need to verify the scene.”
An officer raised a hand to stop him.
“No entry.”
“Are the residents missing?”
“We’re still confirming.”
“How many?”
“We’re still confirming.”
“Was there really an emergency call?”
This time, the officer said nothing.
Jiwan did not press him.
At a scene like this, silence was not denial.
Usually, it meant they were not allowed to speak yet.
He stepped back below the cordon and took out his camera. At maximum zoom, he could just make out the entrance to the village through the falling snow.
The bus shelter had a blue roof. Its old timetable hung crooked on one wall, beside a landslide evacuation notice posted by the county office.
The bench was empty.
Jiwan took a photograph.
The time stamp read 05:42.
At the time, he did not consider the photograph particularly important. Taking pictures as soon as he reached a scene was simply a habit. Sometimes, something insignificant in the moment later turned out to contain a clue.
Most of the time, of course, it contained nothing.
He assumed this photograph would be the same.
A snow-covered bus stop.
An empty bench.
A dim predawn sky.
Nothing more.
The first sign that something was wrong came from the officers searching the village.
There were twelve houses in Seorigol.
Not all of them had their lights on. But televisions were still playing in several houses, and kitchen lights burned in others. In one home, a rice cooker remained set to keep warm. In another, a radio murmured quietly in the bedroom.
The houses did not look abandoned.
They looked as though people had been inside only moments before.
Two pairs of rubber boots stood in the entryway of the first house.
On the kitchen table in the second, half-peeled tangerines lay on a plate.
A phone remained connected to its charger in the bedroom of the third.
A bowl of dog food sat on the wooden floor of the fourth.
Only the people were gone.
An officer emerged from one of the houses and looked around.
There were no marks in the snow.
If the occupants had left their homes, there should have been footprints.
There were none on the village road.
None toward the mountain.
None leading to the bus stop.
It looked as though the snow had erased everything during the night.
Or as though no one had moved in the first place.
Then a brief burst of static came from the direction of the village hall.
Hiss.
Every reporter below the cordon raised their head at once.
Hissssss.
It was the old village loudspeaker.
The snow-covered speaker swayed slightly in the wind.
Then, for only a moment, the song played.
Do not open the door.
Do not turn on the light.
The yaksha is passing by.
It played only once.
Then it stopped.
The village fell silent again.
So silent that it was difficult to be certain the song had ever played at all.
Jiwan stood motionless, his camera still raised.
The local television reporter beside him swore under his breath.
“Shit… You heard that, right?”
Jiwan did not answer.
He switched on his camera.
By the time he pressed record, it was already too late.
A little after seven, the snowfall briefly weakened.
That was when it happened.
An officer inside the cordon suddenly began running.
At first, Jiwan assumed someone had slipped. Then other officers started moving in the same direction. A firefighter followed them carrying a stretcher.
They were heading toward the bus stop.
Jiwan raised his camera.
At first, he could not tell what had changed.
The roof.
The timetable.
The evacuation notice.
The bench.
Everything looked exactly as it had before dawn.
No.
It did not.
Someone was sitting on the bench.
Jiwan tightened the zoom.
An old man sat with his head bowed.
He wore no hat. A little snow had settled on his white hair. More rested on his shoulders, but strangely, it had not accumulated thickly.
He looked as though he had only just sat down.
One of the officers approached cautiously. His footprints sank deep into the pristine snow. Another officer stopped in front of the shelter.
A low voice came over the radio.
“Do not make contact. Don’t touch anything until forensics arrives.”
The words carried all the way down to the cordon.
Only then did the reporters begin to move.
Camera shutters erupted one after another through the snow. One of the YouTubers launched into an excited narration before a police officer ordered him to stop.
Jiwan did not take a picture.
First, he pulled out his phone.
He opened the photograph from before dawn.
05:42.
The bus stop was empty.
Then he looked at the image on his camera.
07:16.
The old man was sitting there.
There was no explanation between the two images.
Jiwan enlarged the earlier photograph and examined the space beneath the bench.
It was dark and indistinct.
Nothing unusual.
Then he magnified the live image.
The toes of the old man’s boots came into view.
There was no snow on the soles.
Jiwan stared at them for a long time.
In a snowbound mountain village, an old man sat at a bus stop with no snow on the soles of his boots.
One officer moved to circle behind the shelter, then stopped.
“There are no footprints.”
The radio transmission cut off abruptly.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then another voice answered.
“Say again.”
“There are… no tracks around the body predating ours.”
Only then did Jiwan press the shutter.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The old man did not move.
The bus did not come.
By that morning, the story of Seorigol had spread across the country.
At first, it was reported as Residents of Gangwon Mountain Village Unreachable.
Then it became Mass Disappearance in Former Mining Town.
By lunchtime, people were already calling it Yaksha Village.
No one knew who had coined the name.
But once a name attached itself to an event, it traveled faster and lasted longer than the event itself.
The police did not disclose the number of missing residents. They said nothing about the situation inside the village, the authenticity of the CCTV footage, or the song broadcast through the village loudspeaker before dawn.
Everything was still being investigated.
Jiwan opened his laptop inside his car.
It did not take long to write the first sentence.
Residents have disappeared from a small former mining village in Seori-myeon, Hanul County, Gangwon Province.
He deleted it.
He tried again.
Snow fell through the night, and there were no footprints in the village.
He deleted that sentence as well.
His fingers stopped above the keyboard.
He raised his head and looked beyond the cordon.
The police were placing another line of tape around the bus stop. The old man, now covered with a white sheet, remained seated on the bench. His posture made it awkward to transfer him onto the stretcher.
A corpse that had not been laid flat made the scene feel even more unnatural.
Jiwan placed the two photographs side by side.
An empty bench.
A bench with an old man sitting on it.
Two hours between them.
A field of snow that no one had crossed.
He began writing again.
No bus comes to Seorigol before dawn.
This time, he did not delete it.
Whether the sentence was right or wrong did not matter.
At least that morning, it described the incident more accurately than anything else.
No bus came to Seorigol before dawn.
And yet someone had been found at the bus stop.
At an hour when there was nothing to wait for.
Without leaving any sign of having walked there.
Jiwan was about to write the second sentence when he stopped.
An officer was crouching in front of the shelter. He was looking at the toes of the old man’s boots.
Then he shone his flashlight beneath the bench.
Jiwan raised his camera without realizing it.
The lens trembled.
The snow beneath the bench was wet.
Only slightly.
But it did not look as though it had melted from above.
It looked as though something had seeped upward from beneath it.
The officer kept his light trained on the spot for a long time.
Then he slowly backed away.
As though something beneath the bus stop were breathing.
Jiwan photographed the scene.
This time, the click of the shutter sounded unnaturally loud.
The snow was beginning to fall heavily again.
The village remained empty.
And the loudspeaker above the village hall stood beneath the snow as though nothing had happened.
The wind passed below it.
For a moment, it sounded as though someone were singing.
But this time, Han Jiwan could not bring himself to press record.
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