Life 2.0: mostly sweet short M2F TG stories

귀신 (Gwisin)

Dedicated to bigbabylover1
for your comments and insights into how one reader sees my stories. Thank you for your support.

This story is different in that it revolves around a supernatural spirit or ghost from Korean folklore, a "Gwisin".

These spirits may be found in many places, but most commonly in abandoned buildings, houses, cemeteries, forests, and schools. When a person dies without completing something that they must do (e.g. revenge or staying longer with their family), their spirit remains on earth to complete the task before going on to the underworld.

Appearances of Gwisin often occur in high schools, a concept popularized by Korean horror movies, however, not always as you will see in this story.

This is my take on the legend.

◽ ◽ ◽ ◽ ◽ ◽ ◽ ◽ ◽

It was in the pre-dawn twilight of an early August morning.

A warm breeze blew in through the window, causing the curtains to flutter. A shadow moved across the wall in contrast to the reflection of light from the full moon shining in through the window.

In the bed, an eleven-year-old Korean boy, Kim Chong Won, stirred.

With a gasp, he awoke, drenched in sweat. Something had awakened him. He looked around the room, straining his eyes to see whatever or whomever it was.

He was overcome with sheer terror over the possibility that he was being visited by a supernatural being, maybe the spirit of some tortured soul whose life had been violently ended many moons ago.

A Gwisin is what his mom had always called them, a spirit that has died but has not passed on to the afterlife, typically remaining on earth to complete some unfinished business.

He knew all the stories of how Gwisin were often in the form of a female with long black hair covering her face and that's exactly what he expected to see.

Gwisin were all too familiar to him since you couldn't have a good Korean horror film without one.

Pretty soon he realized there was no one else in the room, physically or otherwise. But that couldn't be, he was sure he had been awakened by a touch moments earlier.

As he lay there, paralyzed with fear, he began to notice that something just wasn't right. His body felt strange, in a way he couldn't rightly find the words to describe.

He lay there unmoving for several more minutes while feeling strange, prickly sensations all over his body.

What's happening, he wondered, attributing the sensations to extreme fear.

Finally, after several minutes, the paralyzing sensations stopped and although he still felt strange, he gathered his courage and moved.

Something hit his bicep when he turned over on his side and leaned forward to switch the lamp on.

The light from Chong Won's bedside lamp began to illuminate the room and he carefully scanned from the bedroom door to the window on the other side of the room.

In front of the open window, he saw something that made his body hair stand on end when he caught sight of it, but it only took a second for him to realize the four foot shadowy figure was nothing more than the pedestal fan that stood in the corner, unplugged because his mom forbid him to run it during the night.

This was due to her belief that stories of the death of a person from a fan left running for many hours in a closed up room, known as fan death, was real.