Exorcism (1): An Unwelcome Touch
The girls’ dormitory at Busan National University’s Freedom Hall housed Se-hwan’s best friend, Jeong Se-a. After her very first café shift left her exhausted and with a morning lecture the next day, she had gone to bed early. It wasn’t long before her eyes fluttered open again, right around dawn.
It’s still… night….
The room was pitch black. Still tired and half-asleep, she decided she could drift off again. The instant she closed her eyes—
“Hik!?”
A strange sensation jolted her fully awake. It felt exactly like a hand slowly stroking her calf. She froze. Her roommate had gone home for the weekend and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, which meant Se-a was supposed to be alone in the room. So why did it feel like someone was touching her leg?
At first she thought the blanket had brushed against her, but that wasn’t it. The blanket lay neatly over her body, not tangled around her legs at all, and the feeling was completely different. It was unmistakably the touch of a human hand gliding across her skin.
Se-a tried to move, but her body refused to obey. Every muscle had gone rigid, as if she’d been turned to stone. Her legs simply would not respond. As the bizarre realization sank in, she rolled her eyes downward, the only part of her she could still control.
“…….”
Something was there. Its hair was patchy and thin enough to show the scalp in places, yet the strands that remained were unnaturally long. The skin was deathly pale, drained of all color, and the hand now caressing her calf was grotesquely slender.
Se-a’s eyes widened in horror. Before she could look away, the thing suddenly whipped its head upward.
“Hello.”
The golden weekend had vanished faster than I could believe. I’d spent the entire two days helping spirits resolve their grudges, barely catching a moment’s rest. Still, I felt surprisingly good. Even though I’d blown a perfect weekend, the cheer in my chest was real. Strange, but true.
“Hehe.”
A silly laugh slipped out before I could stop it. The number glowing on the auto-transfer app made it impossible to hold back. All that, just from two days of wandering around.
“Four hundred thousand won!”
That was the weekend wage Baek Seol-hwa had paid me. The moment the stock market opened this morning she had withdrawn cash and sent it straight over. Two weeks of my usual part-time earnings in a single weekend. Even without this month’s café paycheck, last month’s leftovers plus that deposit left me with money in my account after rent, maintenance fees, and everything else.
Damn. So this is what it feels like to live like a normal person.
“Whoa, look at Mr. Yoo Se-hwan, the guy who’s always broke and scraping by, suddenly swimming in spare cash. Shouldn’t you be calculating rent and bills right about now?”
“…When the hell did you get here?”
Bae Ju-hyuk—the only person in my otherwise quiet college life I could call a friend—grinned at me.
“From the moment you started muttering ‘four hundred thousand won’ to yourself like a lunatic.”
…That was a little embarrassing.
“But seriously, where’d four hundred thousand won come from? Did you do Coupang deliveries or something?”
“Coupang doesn’t pay like this.”
“True. So where?”
You don’t need to know. Your best friend just landed the sweetest gig you’ll never hear about.
“There’s this thing.”
“Hmm… Then buy me lunch.”
“Do I owe you meals now?”
“No, but with four hundred thousand won you can at least spring for the school cafeteria, right?”
He wasn’t wrong, but why did the thought of treating him always feel so painful? Was I just stingy? …No. No matter how I looked at it, the real problem was that this guy constantly tried to mooch off me.
“You buy sometimes.”
“You know I live on two hundred thousand won a month.”
“You’re in a dorm, what—”
“Even in a dorm two hundred thousand is tight! I’m looking at cup ramen for lunch today!”
“Then get a damn part-time job, you idiot!”
“Ah, here we go…”
Just then, another person entered the lecture hall where only Ju-hyuk and I had been sitting. The moment she saw me her face crumpled and she came running.
“Se-hwan…!!”
“Jeong Se-a?”
It was her. She didn’t even have classes in the engineering building, yet here she was, sprinting toward me with tears in her eyes. She looked ready to tackle me in a hug, so I quickly stuck my hand out and stopped her forehead.
“Halt!”
“You’re so mean… You could’ve just let me hug you.”
“Why would I—”
“Hey, Se-a.”
“Hi… Ju-hyuk…”
Even in the middle of her panic she still managed to greet him. At least her manners were intact. Since I was already confused about why she was here, I asked the obvious question first.
“More importantly, don’t you have a morning class? Why are you at the engineering building instead of—”
“Se-hwan!”
“Whoa, did I say something wrong? Why are you yelling all of a sudden?”
“Save me!!!”
“Huh?”
Ju-hyuk jumped in. “Oh, Se-a. Did you forget an assignment? Our departments are different, so I can’t really—”
“It’s not that!”
“…Sorry.”
I had thought she might be joking too, but one look at her face killed the urge to tease. She looked exhausted. The girl who was always smiling brightly and laughing had an expression I hadn’t seen in years. The last time was back in our third year of high school, right after I got hurt. This was the first time since then.
Jeong Se-a didn’t wear a face like this unless something was seriously wrong. I dropped the playful tone.
“What’s going on?”
“There’s… there’s something weird in my room…!”
“Something weird?”
If she meant her room, then it was the dormitory.
“Bugs?”
“If it was bugs I would’ve told the dorm supervisor…”
Fair point.
“Then what—”
“Why would I come all the way to the engineering building looking for you without telling any of my other friends?”
…Ah.
I’d been slow on the uptake. She hadn’t told any of her usual crowd. She had specifically come to find me. That meant it was something she didn’t want anyone else to know about—something she could only tell the friend who had been by her side for years.
“Relationship advice?”
Of course that’s what you bring to your best friend.
“I’m kind of curious… Wait, no, that’s not it!!”
“Then what the hell is it?”
“A ghost!!”
“……?”
Jeong Se-a grabbed my shoulders, shaking me as her voice cracked.
“I saw a ghost! A ghost!”
A ghost? I calmed her down and listened to the full story. It sounded like classic sleep paralysis.
“It kept stroking my calf! With these long, bamboo-like fingers… it was so creepy!”
It must have been a horrible memory; she shuddered the whole time she spoke. As an exorcist, there was only one thing I could say.
“Sounds rough.”
“Yeah…!”
“But you came to the wrong guy, Jeong Se-a.”
“…Huh?”
“That’s a hospital problem.”
Sleep paralysis isn’t a spiritual phenomenon. It’s a common sleep disorder—technically called “sleep paralysis”—that roughly half the population experiences at some point. It doesn’t usually need treatment, but if it’s causing real distress, proper medical care can help. It’s science, not spirits.
So why do people see ghosts during it?
“That wasn’t a ghost.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve heard it since you were little, right? When you get sleep paralysis, you see ghosts.”
“Uh… yeah.”
“That idea is planted so deep in your head that your brain already expects it. So when the paralysis hits, your terrified mind creates a hallucination and you think you’re seeing a ghost.”
“You’re saying what I felt was just a hallucination?”
“Exactly. Your brain, scared because your body wouldn’t move, made it up.”
The unconscious belief that sleep paralysis equals ghosts is what triggers the illusion. There’s no need to stick talismans on your door or do any weird rituals. If it’s really bad, just go to the doctor. Spiritual objects won’t do a thing.
“No!!”
Jeong Se-a shouted, frustrated.
“It wasn’t a hallucination!”
“The person experiencing it often feels—”
“Look at this!”
She suddenly rolled up her pants leg. The smooth, pale skin of her calf was exposed. Bae Ju-hyuk let out an involuntary whistle of appreciation. I smacked his shoulder; he quickly cleared his throat and looked away.
But why was she showing her leg—
“It left a mark this clear.”
The moment I saw it, I could no longer brush the incident off as ordinary sleep paralysis.
“This is…”
“A handprint, right!? You have no idea how shocked I was when I saw it this morning…”
“…….”
I tapped the necklace at my throat. My vision flickered, the world shifting. When it cleared, I could see a faint but unmistakable spiritual trace hovering over the handprint on Jeong Se-a’s calf.
This was no sleep paralysis. As I had explained earlier—well, I’ll skip repeating it. One thing was certain.
“Jeong Se-a.”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve run into a pretty nasty one.”
It was the mischief of an evil spirit.
Since both of us had classes, I calmed her down and sent her off. We agreed to meet after lectures. The moment she left I pulled out my phone and opened the group chat.
Yoo Se-hwan: Gather.
Baek Seol-hwa: ?
Jang San: Why, Se-hwan?
I immediately got replies from both of them. We had made this group chat because I needed a way to contact them while I ran around doing exorcisms. Jang San had ended up in it too, but having a spiritual beast around was surprisingly convenient, so I didn’t mind.
Seeing that they were both online, I got straight to the point.
Yoo Se-hwan: There’s an evil spirit in the school.
Jang San: That school of yours is always noisy.
Baek Seol-hwa: You caused trouble there last time too. You said lots of spirits gather.
Jang San: Those were young, harmless ones.
Yoo Se-hwan: Anyway, my friend seems to have run into a nasty one.
Baek Seol-hwa: Friend? That Bae Ju-hyuk guy?
Yoo Se-hwan: No, not him.
Baek Seol-hwa: Ah, Jeong Se-a?
Yoo Se-hwan: Yeah. She says it stroked her body at night. There’s a handprint and a clear spiritual trace. It’s real.
After I confirmed Baek Seol-hwa’s guess, Jang San asked:
Jang San: Being tormented by an evil spirit… Does she have that kind of constitution?
Constitution? Now that I thought about it, it was strange. As far as I knew, Jeong Se-a had never experienced anything like this before. I answered no.
Yoo Se-hwan: No.
Jang San: Then did something happen that suddenly changed her constitution? Evil spirits usually only cling to people they want to possess or people they hold grudges against. They rarely harass someone just for fun.
She had a point. Most of the time when an evil spirit approaches a human it’s to possess them, take revenge, or—in the case of the worst ones—simply to kill for entertainment. But the spirit that attached to Jeong Se-a had only touched her calf. It hadn’t tried to harm her further. At the very least, it didn’t seem to bear a grudge or want to kill her.
There was one possibility: some people naturally attract spirits. Most exorcists fall into that category. Because we can see souls, spirits don’t feel as wary around us. In fact, they tend to like us. The trauma I got as a child came from exactly that kind of constitution—spirits kept approaching me.
Yoo Se-hwan: That is strange.
Baek Seol-hwa: Check the gallery.
Baek Seol-hwa: Lots of them write pointless posts like diaries. Remember how the Tiger King of Mount Baekdu kept posting about whose corpse tasted best?
Jang San: Why are you bringing that up? And I feel like there’s a hidden meaning in your words.
It wasn’t a bad idea. The odds that the evil spirit harassing Jeong Se-a used the Ghost Gallery were actually pretty high. I’d heard that most spirits these days hung out there.
Yoo Se-hwan: Got it. I’ll look. Both of you come to school when my classes end.
Baek Seol-hwa: Okay.
Jang San: Four o’clock, right?
Yoo Se-hwan: Yeah.
I closed the app and opened the Ghost Gallery. The board was as active as ever. I typed in search terms: leg, calf, woman’s leg, and so on.
…Just looking at my search history made me feel like a creep, but it couldn’t be helped.
‘Hm?’
One post caught my eye. It was written by an anonymous user, and the content was eerily similar to what Jeong Se-a had described.
Title: Woohyo~!
Posted by: Anonymous(2000.0915)
Touched the calf of an early-20s super pretty girl lol so lucky~! She was a total coward so I couldn’t do more, but next time should I try something else?
The post used an old “woohyo” meme from three or four years ago, but that wasn’t important. Early twenties, beautiful girl. Touched only the calf. “Next time.” It matched Jeong Se-a’s situation perfectly. Objectively she wasn’t a “girl,” but she was certainly beautiful enough that no one would argue. The calf touching and the “next time” line were identical.
Still, I couldn’t be sure. Without knowing where it happened, it might not be the same spirit. I needed confirmation. I immediately left a comment.
A suitably provocative comment. Nothing that would interest anyone except the actual poster. The reply came instantly.
Luckily there was no reaction about my IP. I kept pushing.
The moment I read “Busan National University,” a smile rose to my lips on its own.
It’s you.