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The magistrate's daughter of Miryang vanishes one moonlit night. Soon every new magistrate who comes to the town is found dead by morning, until one man keeps his candle burning and waits for the ghost.
Two brothers find two lumps of gold on the road and share them. Halfway across the river, the younger one suddenly throws his into the water. When his brother asks why, his answer surprises them both.
A girl on a swing and a magistrate's son fall in love in a single spring afternoon. When he leaves for Seoul and a cruel new governor arrives, Chunhyang chooses prison rather than break her word.
A cruel stepmother, impossible chores, magical helpers and a lost shoe. Korea's Kongjwi and Europe's Cinderella share the same beginning. But Kongjwi's story keeps going long after the wedding, into murder, a talking flower and a fire.
A young man lost in the hills near Gongju is carried off by a she-bear who takes the shape of a woman. They have two children together. Then one day he sees his chance to run, and the bear follows him to the river.
A son of heaven comes down to a mountain, and a bear and a tiger beg him to make them human. Only one of them can wait in the dark long enough. This is Korea's founding myth.
A kind boy hiding in an empty house cracks a hazelnut at exactly the wrong moment, and a party of goblins runs for their lives, leaving their magic club behind. Then his greedy brother tries the same trick.
A white horse bows beside a purple egg. Six golden eggs come down on a crimson rope. A boy sails in from the sea in a chest. Three kings of ancient Korea, and the strange eggs they came from.
A traveller shoots a snake to save a nest of baby magpies. That night, in a lonely house in the mountains, the snake's widow wraps herself around his neck. He will live only if the temple bell rings three times before dawn.
A little tree frog does the exact opposite of whatever his mother says. When she dies, he finally obeys her, and it is the worst thing he could have done.
The weaver of heaven marries a herdsman, and they are so happy that they forget all their work. Her furious grandfather sets the River of Stars between them. Once a year, the crows and magpies of earth fly up to build a bridge.
Two sisters die because of their stepmother's lies. Their ghosts go to every new magistrate for justice, and every new magistrate dies of fright, until one brave man stays to listen.
Disguised as a messenger from heaven, a young wizard orders the king to hand over a beam of solid gold. He sells it, feeds the starving, and spends years tricking the powerful, until he meets a scholar whose magic is greater than his.
Hatched from an egg that dogs would not eat and birds kept warm, the boy who never missed grew up hunted by seven jealous princes. When the river blocked his escape, the fish rose to carry him across.
A kind younger brother saves a swallow with a broken leg and gets a magic gourd seed. His greedy older brother decides to break a swallow's leg himself.
A clever man from Pyongyang gets nowhere in Seoul because of where he was born. So he decides to beat the rich and powerful at their own game, starting with a chicken he calls a phoenix and ending with the sale of an entire river.
Born to a minister and a servant, Hong Gildong is brilliant, gifted in magic and forbidden to call his own father 'father'. So he leaves home, gathers a band of outlaws and takes from corrupt officials to give to the poor.
A man who never lifts a finger tries on an old craftsman's ox mask, just for fun. It will not come off. Now he must plough fields from dawn to dusk, and there is only one thing that can turn him back.
A girl with a cruel stepmother is given impossible tasks, helped by a cow, a toad and a flock of birds, and loses a shoe on the way to a feast. It is Korea's Cinderella, but it keeps going after the wedding.
A king owns a millstone that grinds out anything you ask for. A thief steals it, rows out to sea and asks for salt. It works perfectly. The trouble is, he never learned how to make it stop.
An old man with a big lump on his cheek sings to a crowd of dokkaebi in an empty house, and they pay him to take the lump off. His jealous neighbour, who has a lump too, decides to try the same trick.
A king teases his crying daughter that he will marry her to Foolish Ondal, the beggar boy everyone laughs at. Years later she holds him to it, walks out of the palace, and turns the beggar into a general.
The Dragon King under the sea is dying, and only a rabbit's liver can save him. A loyal turtle sets off to fetch one. The rabbit has other plans.
A grandmother so tall that she used Hallasan as a pillow carried earth in her skirt and built the island of Jeju. Then she made the islanders an offer: sew her a pair of underclothes, and she would build them a bridge to the mainland.
To pay for her blind father's promise of three hundred sacks of rice, a girl of fifteen sells herself to sailors who need a sacrifice for the sea. It is Korea's most famous story of a devoted daughter.
A tiger eats a mother on her way home, dresses in her clothes and comes knocking for her children. Their only way out is a rope from the sky.
A lonely farmer asks who he is working for, and a voice from the field answers. Soon a hot meal is waiting for him every evening. But the woman who lives in the snail shell has asked him to wait, and he cannot.
A man hides the robe of a heavenly maiden bathing in a pool, and she cannot fly home. Korea, Japan and China all tell this story. What happens next depends on where you hear it.
A tiger who fears nothing hears a girl quiet her crying baby brother with a dried persimmon, and decides the persimmon must be the scariest monster in the world.
A beast eats a mother or grandmother, puts on her clothes and talks its way through the door to the children. Korea's sun and moon siblings, Little Red Riding Hood and their cousins from China, Taiwan and Japan all face the same disguised monster.
A woodcutter saves a deer and is rewarded with a secret: where the heavenly maidens bathe, and how to keep one on earth. It is Korea's best-known love story, and one of its saddest.
Made from a pinch of rice and fed on sewing needles, the bulgasari grew until it swallowed every scrap of iron in the kingdom. Meet Korea's unkillable iron-eating beast.
Korea, China and Japan all tell stories of foxes that live for centuries, grow extra tails and take human form. They are cousins, not twins. Here is how the three fox spirits compare.
The nine-tailed fox of Korean folklore, a shapeshifter who can take the form of a beautiful woman, and the most famous monster in Korean storytelling.
Why do Korean ghosts linger? Meet the maiden ghost in white, the lonely bachelor ghost and the wandering dead, and learn what Korean tradition says they want.
A lion-like guardian with a single horn, said to know right from wrong. The haetae watches over Gyeongbokgung Palace, protects against fire, and is the official symbol of Seoul.
Korea's goblins are noisy, playful, easily fooled and sometimes generous. Born from old brooms and broken pots, they wrestle travellers, love a party and can make you rich, if you're lucky.
In Korea, a great serpent that waits a thousand years in deep water can become a dragon, if it wins the magic pearl. Meet the imugi, the yong, and the dragons of Korean kings, rain and the sea.
Feared as a man-eater, worshipped as a mountain god, mocked in folktales as a gullible fool. Meet the tiger, the animal at the very heart of Korean folklore.
When a life ends, the messengers of the underworld come to collect the soul. Meet the jeoseung saja, the figures in black who inspired K-dramas, films and the Saja Boys.
Look at the full moon and Koreans will tell you there is a rabbit up there, pounding away under a tree. Meet the jade rabbit, from Goguryeo tomb paintings to Korea's best-loved children's song.
Beneath the waves stands a palace of seven treasures, and in it sits the Dragon King, lord of fish, storms and rain. Meet Yongwang, the sea god Korean fishing families still pray to.
A traditional Korean house was never empty. A god lived in the roof beam, a goddess in the kitchen, a spirit under the yard and a bad-tempered goddess in the outhouse. Meet the gasin, the gods of the Korean home.
Red marks on yellow paper, pinned above a door or tucked into a wallet. Bujeok are Korean talismans meant to chase away evil spirits and bring good fortune. Here is what they are and how they were made.
Bulging eyes, a fist of a nose, a grin that reaches the ears. Carved wooden and stone guardians once stood at the entrance of almost every Korean village to keep out disease and evil spirits.
Thrown away at birth for being the seventh daughter, Princess Bari walked into the underworld to save the parents who rejected her. Her story is sung at Korean funerals to this day.
She decides when a baby will come, helps it into the world and watches over it as it grows. Meet Samsin Halmeoni, Korea's grandmother goddess of birth, and hear the Jeju myth of how she won her job with a flower.
In almost every Korean temple there is a small shrine to a white-bearded old man leaning on a tiger. Meet Sansin, the mountain god, Korea's guardian of peaks, villages and kingdoms.
Drums, bells, fans and bright robes. The mudang is the Korean shaman who calls the gods, feeds them and sends them home. Meet the people at the heart of Korea's oldest religion and learn what happens at a gut.
A goofy, cross-eyed tiger sits under a pine while a magpie scolds him from a branch. The tiger-and-magpie painting is the best-loved image in Korean folk art, and it hides a joke about power.
After death, a Korean soul faces a long trial before ten kings, with King Yeomra the most famous of them all. Here is how Korean tradition imagined the underworld, its judges and the people who came back.
Our first stop. Tigers, impossible journeys, and a little everyday magic.