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75 getting there c To get to the hospital, take bus 500-2 from Gangnam Station, exit 7. The bus will be accessible from the bus stop in the middle of the street, just a short walk from exit 7. From there it takes roughly an hour and a half, or two hours with traffc. Get off at Gonjiam Bus Terminal stop, and track the coordinates 37.362433, 127.33474 with a GPS device to arrive at the hospital’s gate. Expat haunts Breaking through the murky atmosphere are the scribbles of expats who, like us, wanted to test how haunted this was purported to be. It seems that over the two decades that this institution has been closed, a number of people wanted to add to the rumors. Thus, the tour of graffiti fail: “KILL” is written in large red letters, the paint dripped in such a way as to make it appear like blood. Good effort, but that isn’t blood and “KILL” wouldn’t be written in English. “She sees you.” Tell her I say hi. “I can’t breathe.” Sorry to hear that, buddy. I hope your friend dialed 1-1-9. “Don’t go in room 108.” Is that kind of like “The Shining”? Will an old woman rise out of the tub and seduce me? Despite the obvious attempts, it’s a nice mood lifter to see the effort put into keeping the folklore alive. Not to mention that after the more-than-seri- ous encounter with room 222, we were in need of something light to occupy our minds. The trail ends We reach the end of our tour on the roof, where a recreational blacktop and basketball hoop have been set up. It is littered with the remains of soju bottles, partially evaporated half-filled cups of Coke and cans of Asahi and Hite. Whatever fear we had earlier encountered seems to melt away in these last few moments of sunlight. I look down at a Frisbee imprinted with a very old children’s logo and wonder how it had gotten there. What had happened to this place? Why is a broken phone from the mid-’90s with the cord still attached lying up here? Why are children’s toys strewn about? The results aren’t actually as mysterious as the fame of being an abandoned mental facility sug- gests. Poor financing and irreparable conditions forced the hospital’s closure. The staff moved on, patients were transferred or simply released and the owner moved out of the country. The place was abandoned in every sense of the word. What happened in those post-years of aban- donment is where the real mystery lies. A lot of untold stories occurred here in the past two de- cades. Not all of them are sadistic in nature; most are just stories like this one — curious travelers stumbling upon an old building and observing the many artifacts left there over time: calendars, pa- pers, beer cans and toys, but no knives or medical instruments as horror movies suggest. The only horror to be found here is the kind that plays with your mind. For one previous visitor, it was room 108; for us, it is room 222. Curiously enough, on our return down the stairs we discover that the doors on the second floor that were previ- ously ajar are shut tight. “Coincidence,” logic would say. Perhaps, but who knows what untold story occurred there that would have managed to intertwine our present-day visit with some unexplained phenomenon from the past?