My roommate, Jane, was born and raised in Korea, moved to Philadelphia for her high school, and to LA for college. I told her that I’m in a ghost story class and in need of ghost stories. I have asked her for stories several times, but every time I asked her, she always said she doesn’t have any along with a very scared expression on her face until one night, she finally told me the following.

“When I was a child, emm.. . I used to be able to see ghost. So… We had these two floors in our house which… in Korea, yea. There is two floors. It is my house. I have been living there for like… it’s almost like… emm… 80 years old house. I have been living there for like twelve years then, and emm… no! ten years because that’s when I experienced a ghost part. And then emm… so like, at night time, I was studying in my room, and I was at the ground floor, first floor, and then I have to go up the stairs to go to the kitchen to go get my water. And when I was going up stairs, in the corner of the staircase, there was a girl just like… dressed up in like… a white dress, and she had emmm…. Like black hair, and her hair was all down, covering her face. And I like heard someone wimping. And then, emm… I saw like the glimpse of her face. And then emmm… her face was all white and freaky so I cried. And I was really young, so I just told that story to my mom. And then my mom decided to call the priest and then she did like the… like the thing… like they blest the house with holy water. I still don’t know what was wrong with the house until these days. The other story was that I was playing with my brother. Actually I wasn’t. Oh ok so I was gonna scare my brother from the behind the door. And then emm… when I was just like about to sneak into like his like room, I saw like a really long hand with really long nails with bright red nail polish color. I thought my brother was just like emmm… playing with me with like the fake figure nails. But then when I like looked, like when I open the door and then like checked the behind the door like there is nothing there and my brother was actually not sitting like sitting all the way like in the corner like he couldn’t have possibly gotten to the door when I open the door, so emm…. And I asked my brother if he was playing with me, but he was just innocently drawing on his book and like playing so yea, I realized that was a ghost. They both happened when I was ten years old. The first one was during emm… close to winter, and the other one happened emm… during the summer. I don’t know what happened to me when I was ten years old, but it happened at the same year.”

My roommate was from South Korea, and Japan is one of the neighboring country which is normal to have ghost believes to be pass on to a neighboring country, Korea. From the story above, there were a lot of the same motives occured as in many Japanese ghost stories such as “stairs”, “white dress”, “red nails”, “long hairs”, “wimping.” She also experienced these when she was a child, and it was believe that child tend to be easier to have contact with ghost because they were closer to birth. Interestingly, her stories took place in nighttime of a summer and daytime before a winter which is unusual. She expressed disbelief by saying that she might be just “imagining things.” Jane is also a Catholic, so that might be the reason why she wanted to avoid talking about ghosts when I asked her, and also there are some religious aspect that they found a priest to “blest the house,” and she never saw the ghost again.