Welcome to the Ghost Gallery
It was just another ordinary day. I came home, tossed my coat and bag aside, washed my hands and feet clean, then threw myself onto the bed. Lying there comfortably, I picked up my phone and tapped the familiar app.
A white loading screen appeared and quickly vanished, replaced by the familiar community layout with its signature navy and white color scheme.
I should check out the recommended posts today.
I clicked the gallery I always visited. For some reason the refresh rate seemed unusually high today. After scrolling through a bunch of shitposts, my head started to spin, so I quickly tapped the Best tab at the bottom of the screen.
“Fucking nothing here…”
Unfortunately there weren’t any best posts that actually delivered. The page was flooded with fap threads and arena spam, and I let out a long sigh.
“Ugh. The mod bastards are all working together to stir shit, so of course the gallery ends up like this.”
I hit the back button. One press returned me to the all-posts tab. Normally I would have tapped back again and left the gallery, but one title stood out.
“...Ghost Gallery?”
The post that caught my eye was titled Do You Know About the Ghost Gallery? The polite language and the unfamiliar term gave off a strong newbie smell.
Drawn by that fresh scent, I unconsciously clicked on it. And just as quickly, I lost all interest.
“It’s just a gallery for roleplay losers.”
What kind of name was Ghost Gallery anyway? Usually that term meant an empty, dead gallery with no activity. Using it as an actual gallery name was… well. It was probably just a handful of people jerking around with their concepts.
Just like my instant disappointment, the single comment on the post wasn’t exactly polite either. I lost interest immediately and moved on to other galleries.
For a while I wandered through various galleries, checking out recommended posts. There were plenty of interesting threads and plenty that weren’t my taste, but it was still a decent way to kill stress.
Once I was done lurking, I went to close the app, but something in the real-time rankings made me pause. The gallery I had just seen was sitting there on the list.
“A weird roleplay gallery, yet it’s more popular than I expected?”
The world really was wide and full of strange people. Normally I would have shrugged and closed the app, but an inexplicable curiosity tugged at me.
Following that curiosity, I tapped the name Ghost Gallery.
The screen immediately began glitching. It wouldn’t display properly and kept fracturing into blocky artifacts.
“...What the hell?”
It was about time to upgrade my phone, but the screen had been perfectly fine moments ago. The sudden weirdness threw me off.
“I still have contract months left.”
While I was worrying I might need to replace it early, the glitch thankfully subsided. In its place, a new message appeared.
“Huh?”
I hadn’t restarted the app or anything. I had simply entered a gallery, yet the login window popped up again.
“What is this?”
That was when the bad feeling really hit. I tried pressing back, but the app was frozen and the screen refused to change.
“Ah, why is it doing this?”
The login message lingered, then something shifted.
This is the community for yokai, apparitions, and ghosts—
‘GHOST GALLERY’
Welcome.
With that strange announcement, the app closed itself. On my home screen, a new application I had never installed appeared.
“Ghost Gallery…?”
I stared at the icon, doubting my own eyes. The mysterious phenomena that had started a few minutes ago. Supernatural events that couldn’t be explained with logic. Any normal person would have broken out in goosebumps and freaked out, but for me the chills meant something else entirely.
Yokai. Apparitions. Ghosts.
I had run away from home five years ago because I was sick of hearing those words. All I could do was let out a hollow laugh.
“So it really existed?”
This phenomenon couldn’t be explained by logic or science. Anyone could see it was the work of a spiritual being.
“If I had known this would happen, I should have listened to Mom…”
My name is Yoo Se-hwan. I was a twenty-four-year-old ordinary returning student and a homebody. Or rather, that was the life I wanted to live. But I had a destiny forced upon me. My parents often spoke of “heavenly mandate,” the idea that every person had a predetermined path. And my heavenly mandate was the path of exorcism.
As if to prove it really was my fate, I had seen ghosts often since childhood, but…
“What kind of exorcism?! Is this real life The Black Priests or something?”
If I at least looked like Kang Dong-won I might have accepted it. But I didn’t, so why was exorcism supposed to be my calling?
I couldn’t accept what my parents said. I first heard the story when I was nineteen, a high-school senior preparing for the college entrance exam. That made it even harder to swallow. If that was true, why had I studied so hard all those years? It meant throwing away the university life I had been looking forward to.
So the moment I graduated high school, I left home. Using the allowance I had saved for college and the money I earned from part-time jobs after the CSAT, I rented a room near campus and started living alone.
That was how desperately I had tried to deny my destiny.
Yet that same destiny had circled back like a recurring chorus after five years.
“Yokai……”
But I still couldn’t accept it. No—before accepting it, I couldn’t even believe it. A community for yokai and ghosts? Did that mean those beings were living among ordinary people in modern society?
To figure out whether any of this was real, I started digging through the gallery.
It read like something a forty-year-old uncle would write. After skimming the review of what might have been bestiality or who-knows-what, I immediately hit back and looked for another post.
It looked like a classic troll post. The replies below were even worse.
Talisman pics?
The original post had said “hate pics flood,” and the comments mentioned talisman pics. That meant in this gallery, talisman images were apparently treated as hate material.
‘…Is this actually real?’
I still couldn’t believe it. I decided to dig a little deeper.
The post refresh rate was insanely fast. A new thread every three seconds. With a sour expression I scrolled past the flood of garbage until I found something written by a fixed-nick user.
If someone was bold enough to use a fixed nickname here, they probably knew a lot. I tapped it.
It was still a worthless shitpost, but one word jumped out at me.
Spiritual energy.
It was the vital force yokai needed to grow stronger and survive. In every legend and folktale, yokai harmed humans to steal that energy.
I read the comments in disbelief.
The thread was chaotic, but one word stood out to me even through all the usual gallery nonsense.
“...Gumiho?”
After staring blankly for a second, I posted a comment.
The IP next to the anonymous nickname looked a little strange, but I ignored it. The moment I posted, replies flooded in.
I read the replies and thought for a moment. Then I realized this fixed-nick user could tell me whether the gallery I had stumbled into was genuinely full of yokai and ghosts, or just a playground for concept trolls.
Using every bit of trolling skill I had learned from years of gallery browsing, I decided to provoke her.
I had deliberately stepped on a landmine. In any internet community, the word “net-kama” always caused an explosion. It carried heavy negative connotations. And the Ghost Gallery was no exception.