The Corner Man Ghost Story
Choi Eun-ha's rampage, brought on by the evil spirit's possession, was officially written off as a bout of confusion triggered by trauma from witnessing an apparent suicide.
It was a fabrication far removed from the truth, of course, but I was there at the scene to testify to it. And with the security footage capturing Eun-ha raging around all by herself as the decisive piece of evidence, nobody raised a single doubt.
Fortunately, the damage to the convenience store was compensated by Eun-ha's parents. Her mother, who bowed her head in apology over the great trouble her daughter had caused, was a Westerner. So Eun-ha's yellow hair hadn't been dyed after all — it had come from her mother's side of the family.
A few days after the evil spirit incident, I went to visit Eun-ha in the hospital.
"Amnesia and a panic attack... I really did all that?"
"Yep. You saw the CCTV footage yourself, so you know. Ah, mind if I eat this?"
"Go ahead."
She cracked open one of the bottles of Bacchus I'd brought as a get-well gift and downed it.
"Ugh... the more I think about it, the weirder it seems."
"What does?"
"Well, sure, actually watching someone jump to their death right in front of me was a shock. But going into a sudden panic and losing my mind days *later*? That doesn't add up at all, does it?"
Sound reasoning. In reality, Eun-ha's rampage had nothing to do with amnesia or panic — an evil spirit had possessed her, plain and simple.
"Sharper than you look. Fine, then I'll tell you the truth. An evil spirit showed up at the store that day. A hideous thing made entirely out of hair. I smacked it down with a body full of Daoist spiritual power, but apparently one hit didn't finish it off. The surviving spirit possessed you and came at me for revenge."
"...Was it weak?"
"Otherwise, it was shock from witnessing the suicide scene throwing me into a panicked frenzy."
"Those are two *insanely* extreme options..."
Despite her grumbling, Eun-ha nodded as if she'd accepted it.
"Anyway, I'm off. Get better soon."
As of today, Eun-ha had quit her part-time job at the store. Her parents apparently wanted her to rest for a while and focus on psychological treatment.
We'd only just started getting close, so it stung a little.
"Um, hey..."
"Hm?"
"C-could I have your... phone...?"
"Lend you my phone?"
"No, that's not it! I'm asking for your number!"
"My number?"
"Then who else's would it be? Is there anyone else here?"
She glanced around the room.
"Nope, doesn't look like it."
"Then hand it over already!"
Pushed along by her momentum, I punched my number into her phone. A moment later, my phone rang — a call from Eun-ha.
"Save my number too, Yi-yeon oppa."
"Uh, sure... although."
"Although what?"
"Is this flirting?"
"Oh, for—!"
"Kidding, kidding! Anyway, I'm really leaving now!"
Not long after Kim Yi-yeon left the hospital room, Choi Eun-ha took off her fur hat and ran her hand over her head.
Stubble. Stubble.
"Phew, thank god."
Her hair had fallen out in such a bizarre way that she'd worried it simply wouldn't grow back. Thankfully, the worry turned out to be for nothing.
Stroking the prickly stubble, Eun-ha called up her hazy memories of that day. Memories she hadn't told her parents — or even the doctor who diagnosed her.
"That thing that day... it was one of *those*, wasn't it?"
The truth was, she remembered the incident in fragments.
Something stealing her body and chasing after Kim Yi-yeon, hell-bent on killing him. That mysterious power-infused chant she'd heard from the bathroom, and the thing wearing her body writhing in agony at its sound. And then Kim Yi-yeon ripping the wicked presence out of her and destroying it.
All of it, burned hazily into her memory.
"...Not a shaman, I don't think. Some kind of... exorcist?"
Face flushed, Eun-ha rolled around on her hospital bed, muttering to herself.
"They're real... people like that actually exist...!"
Despite her delinquent exterior, Eun-ha was, in fact, a closeted occult maniac.
"Oh, right — I have to tell her about this...!"
She fired off a text to the only friend who knew about her secret hobby. If anyone could share in this joy, it was her.
The reply came almost immediately.
On the way back from visiting Eun-ha, I found myself in an unfamiliar part of town, so I navigated with a map app. The problem was that the app kept routing me along the shortest path — straight through the back alleys.
Peek.
Every time I rounded a corner, I'd sneak a look ahead to scout the next stretch of alley. All to avoid running into another evil spirit.
"I really should've swallowed my pride and stuck to the main roads, even if it took longer..."
The evil spirit at the convenience store had come straight for me even while pretending I couldn't see it. Judging by that experience, evil spirits could probably identify people with strong spiritual energy. The classic trope — ghosts get drawn to those with psychic ability.
"Which would be a real headache..."
An ordinary ghost could be handled with a single Daoist punch, but evil spirits were another matter. Like the hair spirit, they didn't go down in one blow, and they could possess the people around you and attack through them. I'd mastered the Six Jia Secret Chants, but that alone wasn't enough. On a main road I could at least run, but if I ran face-first into one the moment I turned a corner, I'd have no options. And of course, I couldn't avoid alleys for the rest of my life.
"The answer's still this, isn't it..."
Dongbin's Dao Study Room
[Collection of Links: Various Exorcism Methods of Daoism]
"Excuse me, are you a Corner Man?"
"Huh?"
The one who'd spoken was a boy who looked to be in the lower grades of elementary school.
"Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I'm not an ajusshi, I'm an oppa. Early twenties, just discharged from the military!"
"Oh, you fell off a wall, then? So you're not a Corner Man. But if you're out of the army, doesn't that make you an ajusshi?"
Seriously... No, calm down. At that age, I probably called anyone fresh out of the military an ajusshi too.
"Anyway, what's a Corner Man?"
"What? You seriously don't know what a Corner Man is, ajusshi? It's super famous right now! There are tons of videos on YouTube, and it's even in Cublox!"
"Yeah, but what is it?"
"Okay, so, a Corner Man is..."
The kid, it turned out, loved this kind of scary story. I'd asked without thinking, and now I was subjected to a rambling lecture with zero consideration for the listener, the way only kids can deliver.
"And so! So! A Corner Man is fused with the alley itself, which means he always has to be stuck to a wall..."
"Got it, got it! That's plenty! So a Corner Man is the ghost that appears when you look back in an alleyway, right?"
"It's not a ghost...! Ah, I'm gonna be late for academy! I gotta go, bye ajusshi!"
"For the last time, I'm not an ajusshi...!"
Sorry, kid, but for all his earnest effort, his explanation was so rambling that I barely understood half the story.
"Oh, here it is."
The Corner Man was apparently a reasonably famous urban legend — he had documents written up on several wikis.
"Let's see..."
True to its name, the Corner Man is a being that appears primarily in narrow alleys. Anyone who enters an alley inhabited by the Corner Man will walk the same stretch of alley over and over, no matter how far they go.
To escape the repeating alley, one must play a kind of spot-the-difference game. If the street looks exactly as it did the first time, move forward. If anything has changed — or if some anomaly is present — turn back.
Succeed at this spot-the-difference seven times in total, and you can leave the alley. Here, moving forward is safe even if you answer wrong. Turning back is not.
If nothing is wrong and yet you turn your head to go back, in that instant you will see a man peeking out from around the corner. An unnaturally tall frame, wearing the features of a human face — and yet somehow, subtly wrong.
He is the Corner Man.
The Corner Man studies the one who answered wrong for a long while, then comes sprinting along the wall at monstrous speed and takes one part of their face. Any part taken this way is lost forever, even if you escape the alley.
But this only applies if you actually escape. Fail all seven times — losing both eyes, both ears, the nose, the mouth, and finally the skin of the face — and you can never return to reality again.
"......Did someone just mash a bunch of legends together here?"
Face-mutilation was the Red Mask's thing, or the Hong Kong grandmother's Parkuri. And the face in the attached image was a dead ringer for DissMan, from the urban legend about the man who appears in many people's dreams.
"No idea who made this thing up, but it's kind of sloppy."
The moment I said it, it dawned on me.
"Isn't this the alley I just walked through?"
I turned my head without thinking. And I saw it.
An alien face, staring straight at me from around the corner of the street.
"......Ah...!"
The Corner Man. And his appearance meant there was nothing wrong with this stretch of the alley — no differences, no anomalies. Which meant only one thing was going to happen next.
Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
The man who'd been peeking out from the corner twisted his body into a grotesque bend and began scuttling along the wall toward me like an insect.
"Sh—!"
Horrifying as his approach looked, what really got me was how damn fast he was crawling along that wall!
"Lin Bing Dou Zhe Gai Zhen Lie Qian Xing!"
"Lin Bing Dou Zhe Gai Zhen Lie Qian Xing!"
"Lin Bing Dou Zhe Gai Zhen Lie Qian Xing!"
⟨ Six Jia Secret Chants ⟩
I chanted the Six Jia Secret Chants on pure reflex.
Skreek! Groan! Crack!
But the man only froze for a split second each time I chanted — then kept crawling along the wall toward me.
"Shiiiiiiiit...!!"
Whoosh!
His hand shot out, reaching for my eyes. Instinctively, I swung my own hand to knock it away.
Thwack!
FWOOOOOOSH!
In that instant, flames erupted from the point where my hand met the Corner Man's. The fire was on a completely different scale from when I'd sent the woman's soul on its way from Eun-ha's shoulder, or when I'd burned the hair spirit.
Kieeeeeeek!
Aflame in an instant, the Corner Man scrambled back up the wall and fled.
"Ha, hahaha! What was that? Turns out you're no different from any other evil spirit! Daoist power is invincible and reverse-abdominal breathing is god! All you self-proclaimed exorcists out there, drop dead by my hand!"
While cooling my terror with whatever nonsense came out of my mouth, I suddenly realized something.
"...Oh, crap."
The warmth filling my dantian — my Daoist spiritual power — had dropped by more than a third.
"...So driving him off like that, if I'm being generous, I can pull it off twice. Worst case, once?"
And once my spiritual power ran dry, from that point on it would be spot-the-difference with my face parts on the line, just like the legend said.
Cold sweat trickled down my back.
"This is genuinely insane..."
For now, I looked around the alley I was standing in. This was an alley district near a busy commercial area. On a weekday afternoon there should have been at least one or two people about — but right now, not a single soul besides me was on the street.
"...Great. Just great."
I felt like Alice falling into Wonderland.
"No wait, in this case it'd be 28 days later, wouldn't it?"
No — the metaphor wasn't the problem. The real problem was that this alley network was far too complicated to memorize. The alleys were packed with shops, and there were stalls everywhere with goods laid out. If even one item on one stall changed, would I actually notice?
"Not a chance, dammit...!"
All the derivative versions of the legend had the same setup, too — hotel corridors, underpasses, subway stations, tiny rooftop rooms. Confined, limited spaces. The reason was simple: the wider and more complex the repeating location, the difficulty of clearing it rose exponentially.
So what should I do?
Turning back carried risk; moving forward didn't. So did I just keep walking forward until I got lucky and hit seven clean rounds in a row?
"Like hell."
On pure probability, it wasn't a hopeless gambit. But this Corner Man legend carried an unmistakable, overt malice baked into it. If my hunch was right, the odds of getting seven clean rounds with no anomaly were exactly zero. The thing was almost certainly rigged to force a few anomalies or changes somewhere in the middle. And in the worst case, those anomalies might be hostile to me — or outright lethal.
So what should I do?
"...I exploit the rules."
The rules of the Corner Man legend were simple. Memorize the repeating alley; if nothing has changed, go forward; if something has, turn back. And if you turn back when nothing has changed, the Corner Man takes a part of your face.
In other words, the rules applied only to forward and backward — sideways was completely undefended.
I scanned the surrounding buildings and picked the one best suited for climbing. Thankfully, there was a two-story building with plenty of handholds. I scrambled straight up it.
"Hup!"
Just like when I'd escaped the cult compound — ever since spiritual power had taken root, my health hadn't just improved, my physical abilities across the board had shot up. Thanks to that, without a single climbing lesson, I scaled the building barehanded with ease, and made it to the rooftop in no time.
But...
"So it's not that loose, huh?"
Beyond this building there was supposed to be a main road. But what met my eyes was yet another alley. Past that, and past that, no main road appeared anywhere — just narrow streets stretching on and on in every direction.
"Is all of this the Corner Man's territory?"
Then everything I was looking at was his hunting ground. As I swept my gaze across the sprawl of alleys, my eyes snagged on one of them.
"A person!?"
Someone else was here. Seven alleys over from mine.
I decided to head there first.
"Hup!"
Over and over the alleyways, until at last I reached the spot where the person was. It was a woman in a business suit, crouched beneath a utility pole, face buried in her knees.
"Excuse me..."
"Huh?"
When I spoke carefully, she lifted her head. The moment I saw her face, I took several steps back before I could stop myself.
This woman — she had no eyes.
Where her eyes should have been was pure black, as if painted over with ink. And not just her eyes; one of her ears had turned black as well.
"I-is someone there!?"
Waving her hands blindly, the woman tried to stand and missed her footing.
"Are you all right?"
I caught her before she fell, studying her blackened eyes and ear. Even with my face right up close, she still acted as though she couldn't see me at all.
So this is what happens when the Corner Man takes your face...
My resolve hardened all over again: absolutely, never follow that thing's rules.
"Ah — are you a civilian caught up in the anomaly?"
"An anomaly? And civilian... are you police, or military?"
"Ah, forgive me for the late introduction. Normally this would be strictly classified, but given the circumstances, I'll make an emergency disclosure. My name is Yoon Soo-ah, of the Paranormal Administration Bureau, under the Ministry of Land and Security of the Republic of Korea."
So that's how it goes, huh?
Well, fair enough. If ghosts and psychic phenomena were real, a country would have some department managing them. It made sense.
"I don't really follow, but you're from the department that handles the freaky stuff happening right now?"
"Yes, that's correct."
"Then is there a way out of here that doesn't involve gambling my face on spot-the-difference?"
"There is... no, to be precise, there was..."
Yoon Soo-ah drew a talisman from inside her jacket. The problem was that the talisman was scorched pitch-black.
"Under normal circumstances, I intended to exorcise the Corner Man with this talisman... but the anomaly was far stronger than anticipated."
Yeah, figures. That's what happens when a state agency handles it.
Sighing inwardly, I asked what I'd been wondering.
"Where exactly is this place? From the top of that building, I could see alleys stretching on forever, ignoring the actual terrain. This doesn't feel like reality."
"Spaces like this are commonly called Inner Spaces. They're a kind of barrier created by anomalies — a separate world, cut off from the present one."
"You keep saying 'anomaly.' What exactly does that word mean?"
"'Anomaly' is the collective term for supernatural phenomena — ghosts, yokai, urban legends, that sort of thing."
"Doesn't the Paranormal Administration Bureau send backup?"
She shook her head.
"Phone calls don't go through."
I pulled out my phone and checked. It was true. No signal whatsoever.
And yet, somehow...
Dongbin's Dao Study Room
Why was this site the one that loaded? I checked whether the internet worked at all, but no other site would connect. Only Dongbin's Dao Study Room was operating normally.
...I figured it wasn't an ordinary site, but... what the hell is it, really?
"Still, it's a great blessing that you came, citizen."
"What do you mean?"
Could it be — was this woman planning to use some method to make me the sacrificial lamb and escape this place? Wary, I put a few steps of distance between us.
"I have lost two eyes and one ear, but one ear, my nose, my mouth, and the skin of my face remain. I will shoulder the risk of the Corner Man myself. So please — escape with me."
"......Are you being serious right now?"
Even if you escaped the alley with your face taken, the stolen parts' senses were lost forever. In other words, having lost both eyes and an ear, Yoon Soo-ah would be leaving here blind and half-deaf. And that was the best case. In the worst case, she could lose her sight, hearing, smell, taste — even her sense of touch. And she wanted to make herself the sacrifice and tell me to escape?
"I am serious."
"......"
Yoon Soo-ah had proposed the exact opposite of what I'd expected. Honestly, it was a little embarrassing. Which was exactly why I ended up making a suggestion that didn't suit me at all.
"You said you tried to exorcise the Corner Man with that talisman. How, specifically?"
"This talisman was given to me by an extremely powerful psychic who cooperates with the Paranormal Administration Bureau. The method of use is simple — you only need to touch it to the Corner Man's body."
"But it lacked the output?"
"Yes. The Corner Man's rank was far higher than we estimated..."
According to Yoon Soo-ah, anomalies were classified into four grades. From the lowest: Spirit Disturbance, Spirit Calamity, Spirit Disaster, and finally, Spirit Annihilation.
The Paranormal Administration Bureau had estimated the Corner Man at upper-tier Spirit Disturbance. But if the talisman prepared to match that grade couldn't exorcise him, then the Corner Man was at the very least Spirit Calamity rank.
"I don't really get ranks and all that, but... bottom line, experts judged this talisman to be the best possible tool for taking down the Corner Man, right?"
"Yes. In the end, it failed due to insufficient output, but..."
"Then... if the output was insufficient, why not just increase the quantity?"
"I'm sorry?"
"I'm saying I'll try using the talismans."