Korea's unwanted guests of past

Korean children circa 1905 / Courtesy of Robert Neff collection

• Published Oct 30, 2015 4:54 PM KST
• Updated Oct 30, 2015 4:54 PM KST

This is the fourth in a series of articles on “Korea’s Haunted Past.” ― ED.

By Robert Neff

For a child, late 19th century Korea was a land filled with terror. One American missionary claimed that nearly 50 per cent of Korean children died before the age of five. One of the reasons for this high mortality rate was the “Guest.”

The Guest cared little for social status or wealth and would visit the homes of the rich and poor, nobles and servants alike. Its visits frequently brought death but even those it spared it marked for life with pockmarks on their faces. Sometimes, almost mockingly, it robbed the survivors of their sight or, if they were boys, of their ability to sire their own children.

While the Guest was present, the household was careful not to annoy it. It was spoken to politely, offered small gifts and household chores were often postponed in hopes of placating it so that it would depart early.

Who was the Guest? It was, as many Koreans believed, the demon that caused smallpox. The demon, which was sometimes referred to as “mama,” was believed to have first entered Korea from China in the 6th century. It soon became a permanent resident of Korea and children were often not named until after they had survived its visit.

Sometimes, when children died from the disease in Seoul they were taken outside the gates of the city and laid in plain view to serve as a reminder to the Guest that it had already claimed a victim. Other times the corpses of children were wrapped in straw and placed in the boughs of trees in the belief that they should be exposed to the elements for three months before being buried so that the disease would not linger in the soil. Occasionally, people observed a straw bundle moving and on examination found that the child was still alive. What became of the child is unknown but more than likely they did not survive.

Sometimes, families who were too poor or unwilling to pay for treatment abandoned their sick children among the corpses or tied them to trees so that they could not wander back to their homes. It seems cruel now but to them it was a practical solution in a hopeless situation.

There were other guests equally fearful. When Dr. Hugh Cynn (Shin Hung-u), an early Korean Christian, was a boy in the 1880s, he recalled hearing horrible stories about Westerners:

“One winter day, when I was about four years old, I was overtaken with fright, because my playmates told me that a candy peddler had appeared in the village. I had heard the grown-ups talking among themselves about the incoming to our country of the terrible ocean-men (Westerners), who sent their agents far and wide, disguised as candy-peddlers. The peddlers were supposed to give out candy to innocent children who upon eating this mysterious mixture would lose their minds and follow the agents to the ocean-men. These ocean-men, according to the story, were cannibals, and they relished the tender flesh of the children better than any other kind of meat. So, when I was told of the coming of the candy merchant to the village, I, with my cronies, took refuge behind a haystack until sundown.”

Later, when Cynn moved to Seoul, he again heard rumors of Westerners eating children -- this time from the Paichai Hakdang School compound. It appears that a water-carrier had delivered water to the kitchen and being alone in the kitchen started snooping around. He “lifted the lid of one of the boiling kettles [and] lo and behold; there was the body of a little child whose eyeballs were cooked white!” Even the American legation was rumored to serve Korean babies’ hearts and eyes as delicacies.

Not all cannibals were foreign or human. Stories of lepers (sufferers of Hansen’s disease) roaming the fields in search of children were fairly common. The desperate sufferers, ostracized by society, believed that by eating the livers of small children they could be cured. One such incident took place in South Jeolla province in1917 when Sin Yung-syun and another sufferer murdered and ate two children.

It was once believed that the malignant spirit of the kumiho (nine-tailed fox) roamed the countryside. It was able to take on the form of a beautiful woman and would seduce young men so that it could kill them and then eat their livers. Sometimes it prowled about graveyards and dined on the hearts of recently dead men. But there were variations to the tale.

In 1918, a newspaper in the United States reported: “A nine-tailed fox appearing in the form of a woman roams at large in the evening telling children that she can foretell their future by licking their hands with her tongue. The Koreans declared that the children die suddenly.” The article concluded that “great consternation” had been caused in the Korean countryside by this tale and many housewives locked their gates before nightfall to prevent the kumiho’s visit.

Western children in Korea also lived in fear. “A lot of my memories of early childhood [in Korea] are not happy ones,” recalled Muriel Lewis. “I remember as a child being afraid a lot of the time.” Her Korean nanny used to warn her that if she misbehaved the half-starved Korean dogs or the beggars would get her. And, although her parents were missionaries and had assured her that there were no evil spirits, the “devil posts along the roads and the tiny huts with rags fluttering around them to appease the devils” caused her some doubts.

Robert Neff is a historian and columnist for The Korea Times. He can be reached at robertneff103@gmail.com.