Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries

Dark Korea

The crimes and mysteries Korea won't talk about — deeply researched and respectfully told. Each episode reconstructs a Korean true-crime case, unsolved disappearance, cult, or disaster: what happened, how, and why.

  1. 17h ago

    Episode 39: Iri Station Explosion

    Thirty tons of explosives sat in a freight car in the middle of a Korean city for a day and a half. It should never have stopped there at all — the rulebook said explosive cargo passes straight through a station, no waiting. But it did wait, and Korean investigators concluded it waited because of an envelope: the informal fee that made trains move in 1977, and that the man guarding this one could not pay enough of. On the night of November 11th, 1977, that man went into the dark freight car, lit a candle, stood it on a box of dynamite, and climbed into his sleeping bag. At 9:15 p.m., the middle of the city of Iri stopped existing. Fifty-nine people died. And for the first few minutes, everyone who survived thought the war had started again. Iri Station Explosion · 1977-11-11 · Iri Station, Iri City, North Jeolla Province (now Iksan Station, Iksan, Jeonbuk State)

  2. 1d ago

    Episode 38: Korean Air Flight 801 Guam Crash

    It is twenty minutes past one in the morning, over the Pacific. A Boeing 747 is coming down through the rain toward an island runway, and the man flying it says three words into the dark cockpit: "eh… really… sleepy." Behind him, two hundred and fifty-three people are asleep, or watching the lights of Guam come up out of the water, or thinking about the beach in the morning. In twenty-one minutes, most of them will be dead. What makes this crash so hard to look away from is that nothing about it was sudden. The airplane was fine. The engines were fine. Three qualified men sat in that cockpit and watched it happen — and by the time one of them finally said the plain sentence that would have saved everyone, the airplane was seven seconds from the trees. Korean Air Flight 801 Guam Crash · 1997-08-06 · Bijia Peak, Nimitz Hill, Asan-Maina, Guam (flight from Gimpo, Seoul)

  3. 2d ago

    Episode 37: West Sea Ferry Disaster (Seohae Ferry Sinking)

    October 10th, 1993. A gray Sunday morning on Korea's west coast. A small white ferry pulls away from a fishing island, packed with weekend anglers heading home — so packed that people are standing shoulder to shoulder on the deck, sitting on crates of fish sauce, wedged between gravel sacks and fishing gear. The boat is licensed for 221 people. It is carrying 362. Thirty minutes later, it is upside down in the Yellow Sea, and 292 of them are dead. And then the country does something almost as cruel as the sea: it turns on the captain. Newspapers say he swam away and fled. Prosecutors put him on a wanted list. For five days, police hunt a dead man — while his body waits inside the sunken ship, in the one room that proves he never left his post. This is the story of the Seohae ferry. West Sea Ferry Disaster (Seohae Ferry Sinking) · 1993-10-10 · Off Wido Island, Buan County, North Jeolla Province, South Korea

  4. 3d ago

    Episode 36: Daeyeonggak Hotel Fire (대연각호텔 화재)

    Christmas morning, 1971. Seoul's Daeyeonggak Hotel is full — more than three hundred guests and staff inside a gleaming twenty-two-storey tower in the heart of the city. At ten minutes to ten, a propane gas cylinder in the hotel coffee shop explodes. Within about ninety minutes, fire has climbed all the way to the sky lounge on the twenty-first floor. The tallest fire ladder in the country reaches the seventh. The rooftop door is locked. Before the day is over, at least 163 people are dead — and more than half a century later, it is still the deadliest hotel fire in recorded history. This is the story of the day Korea watched a skyscraper burn on live television, and what that day exposed. Daeyeonggak Hotel Fire (대연각호텔 화재) · 1971-12-25 · Chungmuro, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea

  5. 4d ago

    Dark Files: When the Clock Ran Out — Cases Korea's Law Can No Longer Touch

    For most of modern South Korean history, murder came with a deadline. Fifteen years, and prosecution became impossible — no matter what was found, no matter who confessed. This Dark Files compilation brings together four cases that deadline swallowed. We begin in Hwaseong, 1989, where an eight-year-old girl vanished walking home from school. Months later, police found her belongings and a fragment of bone — and hid it, leaving her family to search for thirty years. When her killer finally confessed in 2019, the law could no longer charge him. Then Seoul, January 1991: a nine-year-old boy taken from a Gangnam playground, and sixteen days of calm, meticulous ransom calls made for a child who was already dead. That voice is still preserved, still being analyzed — and has never been matched to a name. Then Daegu, two months later: five boys who went up a hill to look for salamander eggs and were found eleven and a half years on, in a case forensic experts concluded was murder. And finally Daegu, 1999: a kindergarten-age boy attacked with acid, who survived forty-nine days and named the man he knew — on some three hundred minutes of tape. No one was ever charged. His name, Kim Tae-wan, is now written into the law that abolished Korea's statute of limitations for murder. It reaches none of the families in this collection. These are the cases the clock beat — and the reason the clock no longer exists. In this compilation: • Episode 9: Hwaseong Elementary School Girl Case (Kim Hyeon-jeong) • Episode 21: Lee Hyung-ho Kidnapping and Murder (이형호 유괴 살해 사건) • Episode 2: Frog Boys (Seongseo) Disappearance • Episode 34: Daegu Child Acid Attack (대구 어린이 황산 테러 사건) — the Kim Tae-wan Case and Taewan's Law

  6. 4d ago

    Episode 35: Sealand Youth Training Center Fire (씨랜드 청소년수련원 화재 참사)

    On the last night of June 1999, more than five hundred people were asleep inside a summer camp on Korea's west coast. Most of them were children. Many were five, six, seven years old — kindergarteners on the first overnight trip of their lives. The building they slept in looked like a proper three-story lodge. It wasn't. It was a stack of shipping containers dressed up in thin steel panels and styrofoam. Shortly after midnight, a fire started in a third-floor room full of sleeping children. By morning, twenty-three people were dead — nineteen of them kindergarteners. And when investigators asked how a building like that was ever allowed to hold children, the answer wasn't an accident at all. Sealand Youth Training Center Fire (씨랜드 청소년수련원 화재 참사) · 1999-06-30 · Baekmi-ri, Seosin-myeon, Hwaseong County, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea

  7. 5d ago

    Episode 34: Daegu Child Acid Attack (대구 어린이 황산 테러 사건) — the Kim Tae-wan Case and Taewan's Law

    On a spring morning in 1999, a six-year-old boy left his house in Daegu to walk to his after-school lesson. It was around eleven o'clock. Broad daylight. In an alley near his home, a grown man took hold of him, forced his mouth open, and poured concentrated sulfuric acid over his face. The boy survived forty-nine days. In that time, blind and burned, he told his parents — clearly, and by every account consistently — who had done it. A man he knew. A neighbour. His family recorded three hundred minutes of him saying it. No one was ever charged. And in July 2015, a courtroom clock ran out, and South Korea's legal system declared the case closed forever. Two weeks later, the country abolished the statute of limitations for murder — in a law that carries the boy's name, and could do nothing for him. Daegu Child Acid Attack (대구 어린이 황산 테러 사건) — the Kim Tae-wan Case and Taewan's Law · 1999-05-20 · Hyomok-dong, Dong-gu, Daegu, South Korea

  8. 6d ago

    Episode 33: Kim Gil-tae Case (김길태 사건) — Busan Deokpo-dong Schoolgirl Abduction and Murder

    In February 2010, a thirteen-year-old girl in Busan was home alone, a week away from starting middle school. When her brother got back that night, she was gone. For eleven days the police searched a neighbourhood of half-demolished houses, printed twenty thousand flyers, and put thirty thousand officers on the ground — and the man they were looking for never left. He was sleeping in the empty houses around them. At one point an officer's torch beam found him at five in the morning, fifty metres from the girl's front door, and he went out of a window and off a wall three and a half metres to the ground and vanished again. And the girl was already dead, in a water tank on a roof, fifty metres from her own home. This is the case after which Korea wrote into law that it would show a violent suspect's face. Kim Gil-tae Case (김길태 사건) — Busan Deokpo-dong Schoolgirl Abduction and Murder · 2010-02-24 · Deokpo-dong, Sasang-gu, Busan, South Korea

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The crimes and mysteries Korea won't talk about — deeply researched and respectfully told. Each episode reconstructs a Korean true-crime case, unsolved disappearance, cult, or disaster: what happened, how, and why.

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