Yongma Land: Trace of the Cold

Yongma Land is an abandoned amusement park in Seoul. The urban legends surrounding it are less about fantastical ghost stories and more about quiet, ominous disappearances. Online communities, especially those focused on urban exploration and photography, are rife with reports of individuals who entered Yongma Land and subsequently lost contact. In late 2017, one incident, heavily discussed on the DC Inside 'Horror Stories' board, centered around an anonymous photographer known as 'Ghost Lens'. He consecutively uploaded increasingly distorted and dark photos from inside the park, with the last one being an extremely blurry image seemingly from inside the Goblin House, featuring an indistinct, elongated shadow in the foreground. His final text message, sent just before losing communication, read: "The music... it's strange. And it's so cold." His camera was later found near the rusted Ferris wheel, but all data had been deleted, and no trace of 'Ghost Lens' was ever found. Authorities dismissed it as an accident or a planned disappearance, but the incident left a deep scar on online communities, amplifying suspicions about what truly resides in Yongma Land.

One quiet autumn afternoon, driven by a documentarian's compulsion to archive and analyze digital traces, I entered Yongma Land. The moment I stepped in, something felt different. The distant hum of the city was replaced by an oppressive silence. The skeletal frames of rusted rides clawed at the sky, surrounded by overgrown weeds. The carousel, with its faded horses frozen mid-gallop, stood as an eerie centerpiece. My equipment was minimal: a high-resolution recorder, a thermal camera, and a portable seismograph calibrated to detect subtle anomalies. My goal was to locate the Goblin House, believed to be 'Ghost Lens''s last known position, and verify the environmental peculiarities mentioned in his final message. The ground was uneven, a mix of broken asphalt and dirt. The decaying smell of metal mingled with damp earth, a uniquely pungent scent. Each step I took created an oddly echoing sound, as if absorbed by the stillness, only to return from an unexpected angle.

The initial oppressive silence transformed into more subtle, chilling phenomena. Inside a collapsed souvenir shop, a single, old child's shoe on a shelf faced directly towards me. I initially dismissed it, but a strange chill ran down my spine when I realized it had been upside down just moments before. Deeper within the park, near an old bumper car ride, my recorder began picking up extremely faint, distorted static. Occasionally, it mixed with what sounded like discordant carnival music. The slow, off-key melody continuously varied in intensity, not loud enough to pinpoint its source accurately, yet too clear to dismiss as imagination. The seismograph detected irregular, weak ground vibrations from an unknown source. As I neared the dilapidated Goblin House – a small, pagoda-like structure with peeling paint – the air became noticeably colder despite the late afternoon sun. My breath began to mist. A faint, sweet, and sickly smell, like rotten cotton candy, permeated the cold air. The light from my headlamp, reflected in a murky puddle near the Goblin House, seemed to momentarily lag, a flickering, unstable delay. The heavy wooden door was firmly shut but vibrated subtly, emitting a low, resonant hum that I felt in my chest.

As I pushed open the heavy Goblin House door, the chill intensified, becoming arctic. The putrid smell was overwhelming. Inside, rusted Korean goblin figures lay strewn, some headless, others staring blankly with painted eyes. In the center, a large, ornate music box lay tipped over, its gears rusted solid – the source of the faint melody. As I recorded my surroundings, the thermal camera suddenly spiked, detecting an intense cold emanating from behind the music box, despite no visible source. The faint, distorted carnival music abruptly amplified into an ear-splitting cacophony. It wasn't coming from the music box; it seemed to erupt from everywhere simultaneously, the vibrations through the floorboards rattling my teeth. My ears began to ache.

Then, silence. Not radio silence, but an overwhelming white noise that momentarily deafened me. This was followed by an incredibly loud, wet gasp. It sounded as if it erupted right behind my head, yet there was nothing there. The main entrance to the Goblin House, which I had left slightly ajar, slammed shut with the force of a sledgehammer. The sound unnaturally echoed, stretching and distorting. Simultaneously, the rusted music box in the middle of the room slowly began to rotate on the floor, scraping against the broken concrete, moving against the motion of its rusted gears. In that instant, with a horrid, grating moan, one of the headless goblin figures closest to me, a heavy iron form, slowly tilted, then suddenly accelerated, toppling towards me at an unnatural speed. I lunged sideways on pure instinct, but the heavy metal arm of the figure, detached from its torso, grazed my left leg with immense force. It was a searing impact despite the severed connection. Sharp pain erupted instantly, tearing through my trousers and leaving a deep gash. The ground beneath me vibrated violently, a chaotic, impossible tremor. I scrambled towards the window, the structure's only weakness, but the moment my hand touched the frame, the thick, grimy glass shattered inward. Countless shards rained down, propelled by an invisible force from outside. There was no wind. Something was pushing. I felt a massive, unseen pressure pressing against my back, pushing me further into the room, towards the fallen music box. I tasted blood. The pressure was immense, physical, tangible. I thrashed desperately. With my remaining strength, I forced myself through the broken window frame, but the unseen pressure held my ankle coldly, persistently, trying to drag me back. I tore myself free, collapsing onto the damp earth outside. The moment I was out of the confined space of the Goblin House, the cacophony abruptly subsided, and I gasped for breath, my mouth tasting of blood.

I escaped Yongma Land with a deep laceration on my left calf, a sprained ankle from the fall, and small glass shards embedded in my hands. The recorder, dropped just outside the Goblin House, was partially damaged, but one segment contained the raw, impossible cacophony I had experienced – the mingled music, the silence, the wet gasp, and the impact of the falling figure. All layered and distorted in a way no natural phenomenon could replicate. But the thermal camera revealed the most unsettling detail. In its damaged final frames, a clear, intense cold signature radiated not only from the location of the music box but also from the exact spot on my back where I had felt the immense, unseen pressure. It was not a diffused chill. It had a distinct, inhuman form. The wound on my calf, though professionally cleaned and stitched, never healed properly. It remained unusually cold to the touch, and often, in quiet moments, a phantom sweet and sickly smell emanated from the scar tissue. Sometimes, in the dead of night, in the deep silence of my archival room, I hear it. A faint, distant, off-key carnival melody, just below the threshold of true sound, accompanied by an impossible cold that seems to seep not from the air, but from within my very bones. The files on 'Ghost Lens' and the other Yongma Land disappearances are now kept in a separate, uncategorized folder on my encrypted drive. They are no longer mere rumors. They are warnings. And the silence, once a comfort, now feels like a prelude.