The Record of the Colorless Stall

Case Name: S.J. Middle School Disappearance ("Silent Stall" Case)

Status: Permanently Unsolved, Corresponding Building Demolished

The genesis of this investigation was a post dated November 4, 2002, on the now-defunct online forum 'Seoul Mystery Online'. A user with the ID 'SilentStall7' claimed to be a graduate of S.J. Middle School, located in Seodaemun-gu. He questioned the official story regarding the disappearance of thirteen-year-old Choi Eun-bi, who vanished from the school grounds on a rainy Tuesday in October 1998. Police concluded their investigation, leaning towards a runaway scenario followed by potential abduction, but he asserted that the truth was already known among the students.

According to him, Choi Eun-bi never left the school. During the last period, she went to the third-floor girls' restroom and never returned. He described a strange rumor that had circulated in the school for years before Eun-bi's disappearance – a local variation of the 'Red Tissue, Blue Tissue' urban legend, specifically tied to the fourth stall in that restroom. He claimed that a week after Eun-bi vanished, a peculiar graffiti appeared on the inside of that stall's door, as if drawn with charcoal: "Not red, not blue, but colorless." Caretakers painted over it, but the story was already firmly entrenched among the students.

S.J. Middle School was closed in 2015 due to district consolidation policies, and its demolition was delayed by two years due to city administrative procedures. This was the last chance to document the location before it was completely erased. My goal was to photograph the third-floor restroom and search for traces of the graffiti mentioned in the 2002 post.

Gaining access to the school was not difficult. The chain-link fence surrounding the premises was rusted and broken in several places. The air inside the building was heavy and cold. The pungent smell of decaying paper, mold, and chalk dust mingled, stinging my nose. In the empty corridors, only my footsteps echoed with unnatural clarity.

The third floor was darker than the others, its windows covered by thick layers of dust. The girls' restroom was at the end of the hallway. The door hung precariously open on a single hinge. Inside, signs of decay were evident: broken tiles, rusted sinks, shattered mirrors. As described in the post, there were four toilet stalls. The doors of the first three stalls had fallen off completely, leaving only empty toilets exposed.

The door to the fourth stall was closed.

I pushed the door. The hinge creaked, scratching the silence. Inside the door, beneath layers of peeling beige paint, faint black lines were visible. Carefully, using the edge of a coin, I scraped away pieces of paint, revealing faint but clear black writing underneath: Not red, not blue, but colorless.

The forum post was true. Faint physical evidence existed. I raised my digital camera to document it. The moment the lens focused on the ghostly writing, I realized the 'stillness' of this space. It wasn't just quiet; it was as if all sound was perfectly absent, like a vacuum. Even the faint urban hum from outside the building had vanished.

Then, a single drop of water fell from a leaking pipe into the toilet bowl. The sound rang out sharply like a gunshot. Drip. And then, silence again. I held my breath, waiting for the next drop. But nothing happened. The water in the toilet bowl remained perfectly still, motionless.

From inside the stall, a voice was heard.

It wasn't a whisper, nor was it a human voice. It was a flat sound, devoid of pitch or emotion, like a corrupted audio file or a text-to-speech program with all intonation removed. The sound didn't emanate from any specific point; it simply existed in the air of that space.

“Do you want red tissue... or blue tissue?”

My heart nearly stopped. I'm not easily startled, but this sound defied physical sense. There was no echo. In this space, full of tiles and porcelain, sound should have reverberated. But the voice seemed to be absorbed by the space the moment it was uttered, leaving only a perfect, suffocating silence. I gripped the heavy flashlight in my hand and swept it across the restroom. It was empty. I was alone. This must be an auditory hallucination, a trick of the mind created by the suggestive environment.

I took a step back from the stall and turned to leave. The heavy main door of the restroom, which had been precariously open, slammed shut with a bang. The sound was immense – a deafening roar that finally, thankfully, reverberated through the space. And then, followed by a chillingly clear metallic click, the sound of a lock engaging, one that must have been rusted shut years ago.

Panic is unproductive. I assessed my situation. Trapped in a third-floor restroom of an abandoned building. No phone signal. No one knows my exact location. I approached the door and pushed, but it wouldn't budge.

“Do you want red tissue... or blue tissue?” This time, it sounded as if it were right behind my head.

I spun around. Nothing. The flashlight beam cut through the darkness, but all I saw were broken tiles. I stumbled backward and tripped over something with my heel. I looked down.

From the gap under the fourth stall door, a single sheet of toilet paper unspooled impossibly slowly. It slid across the dirty floor towards me with a smooth, unnatural will. The toilet paper roll inside the stall was turning on its own.

But the tissue wasn't white. It was an ashen, lifeless, dull gray. As I watched, the gray deepened, seemingly swallowing the light from my flashlight. Wherever the light touched the tissue, it simply vanished.

This wasn't a choice between red and blue. This was the answer to the graffiti. Colorless.

The end of the tissue touched the tip of my boot. I felt nothing. No pressure, no texture. But when I looked down again, the black leather of my boot where the tissue had touched was fading. It was turning a sickly gray. The color was being sucked out, erased.

I swallowed a scream and stumbled back, kicking it with my foot, but I felt a strange numbness in my foot. The tissue now advanced at a faster rate. I fell backward, and it slid up my leg. A sensation neither cold nor hot. It was a vacuum of sensation, a piece of absolute 'nothingness' touching my skin. Paralyzed, I watched helplessly as the blue of my jeans, and then the natural color of the flesh beneath, vanished. My skin turned a monochromatic gray, and the fine hairs bleached white and then disappeared completely. It was like watching a black-and-white photograph develop in reverse.

This entity was not offering a way to die. It was offering erasure.

Primal fear erupted through my analytical thought. I wasn't being haunted. I was being 'unmade'. I threw myself at the main door. With all my weight, I slammed my shoulder into the wooden door. It shuddered. Again. A crack appeared near the lock. On the third impact, the rotted wood around the lock splintered, and the door burst open. I stumbled out into the dark hallway, running. I didn't look back.

I never submitted a formal report. To whom could I send it? Two weeks later, the demolition crew leveled S.J. Middle School. The site is now the concrete foundation of a new apartment complex.

Choi Eun-bi's official file remains unsolved. But I have become a living appendix to this archive. On the outside of my left shin, there is a perfect gray patch the size of my palm. Completely devoid of pigment, utterly gray. Dermatologists call it an unusual case of localized vitiligo, but they cannot explain its sudden onset or unnaturally perfect borders. It doesn't tan or redden. No hair grows there. That area always feels faintly numb.

Sometimes, I look at the photos I took that day. The last photo on the memory card was taken at 16:42, just before the door closed. The graffiti on the stall door is clearly captured. In the foreground, out of focus, but clearly visible at the bottom of the frame, is the gray toilet paper resting on the tip of my black boot.

But the most unsettling part, the detail that keeps me awake almost every night, is what the camera captured. In the photo, my boot is black, and the floor tiles are dirty beige. And the exact space where I was absolutely certain the gray tissue rested... was simply empty. As if there had been nothing there from the beginning.