This wasn't a typical 'vacation'. Normally, I would've just gone to Hawaii or Japan... or somewhere else. But I suppose I was feeling... adventurous at the time.
What a mistake.
Now, I never ran into trouble with the government. That wasn’t what made this trip horrific. I just stayed within the boundaries outlined by our tour guide, and there were no problems in that regard. Although... maybe I would've preferred the alternative.
I went with two of my friends, and first few days of the trip essentially consisted of us marveling at how surreal this whole situation felt. The tour was obviously propaganda. The sights, shows, food, we all knew that it was meticulously planned. Not like it really bothered us. We weren't there to start some kind of revolution. And we never felt explicitly unsafe.
That was until the 3rd day of the trip. We were in a theater, watching a performance. It was kids, singing and playing instruments.
And it was boring as hell.
I was about to doze off before my buddy Jeff nudged me back into reality.
I groggily stared at him, before asking what he wanted. I was expecting him to warn me about falling asleep during the performance, but his actual words caught me off guard.
"Over there." He told me. "What the hell?"
My eyes tracked to where his finger was pointing. It took me a second to realize what he was referring to. But when I did... I nearly jumped.
There was... a person up a couple rows from us. A person with their head completely down in their lap, almost as if they were sleeping. But they were too still. As in their shoulders were not moving at all. And that was another thing. Their shoulders. I've never shoulders that wide before. It was borderline inhuman.
I looked at the people sitting beside this oddity, but none of them seemed to notice. Well... upon further inspection, it looked more like they were trying not to notice. Every few moments or so, they'd turn their heads, and I could see a demeanor of tension on their faces.
The show went on for about five more minutes before a man in a suit abruptly ran onto the stage and signaled for the children to stop. Everybody was ordered to leave soon after. As I was heading out the door with my tour group, I looked back, only to see that the person with their head down still hadn't moved an inch. Everybody else was leaving.
I contemplated asking our tour guide about this, but decided against it. I'm not even sure how many people out of our group noticed it. Surely, it was more than just Jeff and I. But I suppose that they didn't really want to think about it.
Safe to say, this kinda put a pit in my stomach.
Fast forward to that night at around 9 PM, and Jeff and I are in our hotel room. There wasn't a whole lot to do. The local Television was rather dull, and we were too paranoid to make an attempt to access the internet.
We were free to roam around parts of the hotel, so that's what we decided to do. We met up with our other friend Jin (A Korean-Canadian), and began wandering around the place. Leading up until midnight, it was mostly uneventful. We swam in the pool, ate some late dinner, and watched a movie on my laptop in our room.
Well… it wasn’t completely uneventful. This next incident was why I even included this part in the story. While roaming the hallways on one of the upper floors, we found an obscure door number. This is how it went:
715, 716, 717… 71X.
At first, we assumed that this was just some kind of error. This assumption was admittedly somewhat of a stretch. I mean, how do you confuse the number 8 with the letter X?
We stood out there for about five minutes, discussing to ourselves what this was supposed to mean. That was until I felt something tapping my shoe.
There was… a finger poking out from underneath the door. It was long and pale, too much so for my rational brain to comprehend.
Needless to say, we immediately went back to our rooms. Now… it’s not like there wasn’t a cogent explanation for this. Some person was pissed off that three assholes were standing outside their door at midnight, so they devised a way to make us leave. A really… tall and pale person.
In any case, this wasn’t some kind of breaking point for us. Weird shit has been happening, but hey, we only had a couple days left in the tour.
However… what happened later that night nearly got us there.
At around 2AM, I felt Jeff tapping me on the shoulder.
“Dude… fucking hell.” Was all that he said. He gestured me towards the window and I followed.
At first glance, it appeared to be some kind of military personnel marching by himself in the field in front of our hotel. I suppose it was funny for the first few moments. And then you really start thinking about it…
Why was this happening?
I wasn’t sure how long this was going on for, but there was no way that this would’ve been acceptable behavior under North Korean standards. Even if the guy was a bit gone in the head… I felt like somebody would’ve stopped it by now.
This went on for about ten more minutes, before a vehicle finally pulled up near him. Two soldiers got out and started walking towards rouge marcher. They stopped within about three feet of him and appeared to exchange a few words. And a few moments later, they took off running. They were out of there as abruptly as they came. At this point, all bets were out the window. Something was going on here. Something that we didn’t quite understand. We continued watching for some duration of time afterwards. It was only when the man stopped in his tracks and turned his head towards us where we looked away. We closed the blinds, made sure the doors were locked and tried to fall asleep.
Tried. There was no chance of that happening.
The next morning was a bit of a blur. We heard a knock at our door at around 7AM. Tired as hell, I got up and looked through the peephole. It was our tour guide. And he looked confused.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“I don’t know.” He told me. “But we’re switching hotel rooms. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know.”
I refused to believe the connection between what we saw last night and what just happened there. But deep down, I knew that they had to be related. This suspicion was only bolstered when I saw multiple ambulances parked at the side. They sure weren’t there last night.
We got onto the bus and started heading towards the new place. Jeff and Jin managed to fall asleep, but I simply couldn’t. At some point, I started up a conversation with the Swedish guy – Henrik, sitting next to me. I’ve spoken to him a bit beforehand. Apparently, he was somewhat of a veteran in NK. This was his fifth trip. He was actually hoping to put together a documentary some point down the line. Pretty cheery guy, usually. But not that day.
Like me, he had bags under his eyes and his expression held what I can only describe as explicit confusion.
“Did you see it last night?” He asked me.
It was pretty obvious what he was referring to. So I nodded. “Yeah. Weird as shit.”
He dug around in his bag and pulled out his video-camera. “Bet you didn’t see it up close.”
He was right. The guy was relatively far away, so I couldn’t make out any intricate details. But did I even want to know?
Henrik pulled up the video that he’d taken last night and I began watching. It started out blurry, but soon focused on the same thing that I’d seen last night. The marching man. But Henrik kept zooming in. And zooming in. Eventually, we were close enough to the point where we could see the face.
At that moment, I just wanted to run back home. It couldn’t have been a mask. It looked too real. The triangular mouth lined with razor-teeth and the singular, beady eye that seemed to be pulsating with every movement.
What the fuck is this?
The video ended right there. Couldn’t blame him for not wanting to film more. He shoved the camera back into his bag and sighed.
“Four times I’ve been here, and haven’t seen shit. Why now?”
The rest of the trip was tense. I don’t know if it was just me, but I could’ve sworn that there were people staring at us from outside every few minutes. Actually no… it wasn’t just me. There were people standing perfectly still in the most obscure places, simply staring at our fucking bus. I counted about 14 in total.
When we got to the new hotel, I ran up to my room and stayed there. Thankfully, it was a 3-person accommodation, so Jin and Jeff were both with me. Jeff and I refused to go any more ventures outside the hotel. We simply sat there and waited for this trip to end. But Jin never saw what we did. He was still spooked from that finger incident earlier, of course. But he still decided to go out.
The two of us watched about six movies that day. Morning became afternoon. Afternoon became evening. The only time we really left the room was for dinner.
When we walked into the dining area, we noticed that about a quarter of the group – including Jin, still weren’t back yet. We were dolt that they’d gone to see some sporting arena or something.
During our meal, I overheard a rather peculiar conversation between two men with American accents. They were talking about… strange things. Things that seemed pertinent to what we’d been seeing. I overheard words like “Anomaly” and “Dimensional” and “Gateway.” The word “Ocean” also seemed to pop up a lot.
The two were friendly enough, and welcomed me into the discussion. I waited for them to tell me their own stories about what they'd seen here… but apparently they hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.
“Oh no, nothing’s happened to us.” One of them said. “We came here hoping that it would, though.”
Apparently, their own trip to North Korea was sparked by a thread that they’d come across on a website that discussed paranormal occurrences and where people could find them. They didn't delve into too many specifics about it, though. Just that the site wasn’t really “accessible” to the public. That it contained information that could be deemed sensitive by some governments around the world.
You all know what that means. I won’t elaborate further on that.
Anyhow, there was some kind of leaked document circulating that site regarding anomalous occurrences that were supposed to take place during one specific week in North Korea. As it turns out, that was the week that we’d decided to go. Now, most of the document was actually unreadable, so they could only gleam a few key details. The date of the week, obviously, but also entities that were referred to as “Abstract beings” and something about the yellow sea connected to the Pacific.
However… what was really going on remained unknown. All that the Americans knew was that there was a good chance of seeing some freaky shit if they came.
Fortunately for them, that hadn't come to fruition yet. I ended up telling them about what I saw, and this seemed to get them rather excited. Crazy ass Americans.
It was later that night where shit hit the fan. It was around 7 PM, and Jin still wasn’t back. This was… getting a bit too late. However, somebody knocked on our door about 15 minutes later.
Well, he’s back. Is what I was thinking to myself. But before I could get up, Jeff stopped me. His face was dead serious.
“Jin has a key. Why would he knock?”
I froze, lingering on those words. Even if he’d lost his key, he would’ve tried calling out for us to open up. Slowly, I got up and made my way towards the peephole. I looked through, but was met darkness.
Somebody or something was blocking our view. It wasn’t soon after when I felt something touching my toe. In the back of my head, I already knew what it was. I just didn’t want to look down. But I had to.
It was the fucking finger.
I scrambled backwards, watching the appendage retract as I did. I went to the phone and called the number they gave us for emergencies.
I told the man over the line that somebody was trying to get into our room, and they assured us that they’d be sending somebody up there.
We waited in agonizing silence for what felt like an hour. Eventually, we could hear multiple pairs of heavy footsteps coming down the hall, towards our room. But here's the problem… we also heard them coming to an abrupt halt as they got closer. Interlocking voices shouted in Korean before fading away. Back down the hall. These guys were running away.
What the fuck was out there?
At about 10 PM, it sounded like reinforcements came. There was a small battalion out there. A lot of harsh, but frightened-sounding yelling ensued before whatever entity was out there spoke up himself.
A subterranean, guttural amalgamation of demonic-sounding tones started echoing throughout the entire place. The most bizarre thing was that no gunshots were ever fired. I mean, you'd think that they’d shoot at the fucking thing, right?
A tense struggle elapses right outside our door for the next few hours. It finally ends with a clusterfuck of shouting and banging on the floors and walls.
It was at midnight when a voice called out to us, saying that "they were coming in." We braced ourselves for the worst, but when the door finally opened, it was just two tall men in suits that greeted us. One White, one Asian. We assumed the Asian to be Korean, but his English was tinged with a noticeable Chinese accent. The other man had a Russian one.
They apologized for what we’d ‘experienced’ and said that a bus was waiting outside to take us to the airport. In addition to that, we were to be refunded for our entire trip.
Nothing that they told me could’ve made me gladder. I didn’t even bother asking any questions. I mean, there was no chance in hell they were going to get answered, so fuck it. We were getting outta here.
I’d nearly forgotten about Jin when we finally boarded the vehicle. He was sitting at the back… and he looked like hell.
“Where have you been, man?” Jeff asked him.
Jin simply shook his head. “I… don’t think I fucking know.” Was his only response.
It was hard getting words out of him afterwards. When we finally left, I noticed that there were two empty seats on the bus. I scanned everybody, and it became obvious to me who was missing.
The paranormal-seeking Americans from earlier.
I tried not to think about it for the rest of the ride. I tried not to think about it while we boarded the flight. I tried not to think about anything. I just sat back and prayed we’d get to Beijing soon for the connecting flight home.
Spoiler alert… we did. We stayed here for two days. And I’m in the airport now, about to board my flight. The bustling metropolitan nightlife of this city was absolutely a welcome change compared to the dark, spine-chillingly empty streets of North Korea.
I can’t tell you what happened. In all honesty, I’ll probably never find out. I’m going to upload this soon. For now I’ll sign off. This guy next to me won’t stop staring at my screen and it's getting annoying.
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