The Guldok

Seoul, Korea. My maternal grandfather, whose eyes mimicked the blackness and shine of stag beetles, would light a cigarette and take my brother and I out of the apartment complex he lived in. We'd walk, hand in hand in hand, into the shadowy streets of his neighborhood, where the streetlights flickered yellow, and stray cats creeped, and stopped to look at any roadway tunnel or storm drain that came across our way. "That," my grandfather would say, while taking a drag of his cigarette, "is where the guldok lives".

And because my grandfather never exactly explained what a guldok was, my brother and I would clasp our tiny hands together and shiver in pleasant fright. I imagined the guldok to be a large, worm-like creature, with beady, nocturnal eyes and a taste for small children. I especially mulled over its supposed existence on hot summer nights, while pressing myself against the cool linoleum of my bedroom floor, wondering if the guldok was making its way underground, and if it was waiting for the cool monsoon season with equal fervor.

There were other monsters, too (and unlike the guldok, these were established as urban legends and are survived mainly through preteen girls' slumber parties). Like stretched mouth*, the demon with a grotesquely wide smile. Legend has it: a few years ago, an agashi (young woman) asked a plastic surgeon to shrink her lips. While the doctor was performing the surgery, he became distracted and accidentally cut too far along the sides of her face. The doctor watched frantically as the young woman began to bleed to death, and in his panic, he haphazardly stitched up her face in order to save her.

But it was too late. The agashi passed away with a hideously stitched "smile" on her face. Nowadays, her corpse is said to stagger along the streets of Seoul at night. If you were to encounter her, she is said to ask, "do you think I'm pretty?" If you say "no," she'll devour you alive. If you say "yes," she'll widen her smile and ask, "how about now?" And if you dare reply "yes" again, she'll rip your mouth open with a knife to make it look just like hers.

And then there's Scissors**, an evil ghost who is said to stand on and take the breath of an unlucky person who chooses to sleep in the middle of a row of people. In order to prevent such an attack, one must sleep with a pair of steel scissors underneath their pillow. I know of one grown Korean woman who religiously follows this auspicious method, and proudly claims to have never been visited by Scissors, to this day.


* Originally Kuchisake-onna, a popular urban legend in Japan. The version of the story that I am retelling is the way my Korean friends would narrate it.

** I'm fairly certain that Scissors is an urban legend that is perpetuated by those who suffer from sleep paralysis.