episode_0003

One child asked a question to the teacher who was staring intently at the attendance record.

“Teacher. Who is Park Eun-seo?”

Only then did the teacher look embarrassed and tell the children what had happened.

“Oh, sorry, guys. I think the teacher was tired and called attendance incorrectly. There is no Park Eun-seo in our class.”

“You called me wrong?”

“Yes.”

The moment attendance was called, the teacher said he had seen something wrong.

The twenty-fifth name, which was clearly unlikely, appeared briefly on the attendance sheet and then disappeared.

The name Park Eun-seo was not on the attendance list.

That’s when strange things started to happen.

Speaking of elementary school students, didn’t they play around a lot? Like poking the kid sitting in front of you and pretending not to do it, or throwing a ball of eraser powder from behind.

One by one, kids who were being pranked began to appear in our class.

When it’s time for class.

There was a time when a child who was sitting and listening to class suddenly became irritable.

━━Kukkukkuk!

“Oh, really… . Don’t do it.”

“What?”

“Stabbing me from behind.”

“I didn’t do it?”

“Damn.”

The children spoke in quiet voices at first.

But the prank kept repeating itself.

The prank was so severe that the kid who was pranked screamed.

“Don’t do it!!!!!!”

The child who was pranked got up from his seat and screamed at the child sitting behind him.

Because it happened during class, everyone in the class and the teacher who was teaching the class stared at the child who had screamed.

“Teacher! Hocheol keeps touching me from behind!”

“Oh, no! I really didn’t do anything.”

“Then who else is behind me besides you?”

The child sitting in the back seat just had an aggrieved expression on his face.

The children around him cautiously opened their mouths, as if he really meant it that he wasn’t playing pranks.

“I watched from the side and Hocheol didn’t do anything.”

“That’s why! Hocheol was quiet, but you were making a fuss by yourself.”

“No one touched you.”

It is said that no one played a prank.

The child who was pranked looked around while fussing, and eventually had no choice but to sit back down after hearing a word from the teacher.

“Take a seat!”

“Yes… .”

There were not just one but several children who were the victims of such pranks. A prank where someone secretly touches you behind your back during class time. However, when I turned my head and looked back, the person playing pranks was nowhere to be found.

━━Kukkukkuk!

It was truly a bizarre prank.

Also, during recess, when the kids are gathered together and playing.

After being engrossed in the game and talking loudly for a while, someone heard a girl’s voice.

━━I want to do it too.

━━Let’s play together.

A girl’s voice echoing in my ears.

To be precise, it was an auditory hallucination.

When I looked towards the direction where the voice was heard, there was no one speaking.

As if it wasn’t enough that someone was playing pranks on them, some of the children even had auditory hallucinations.

Approximately 3 weeks since school started.

For three weeks straight, the children in our class had to experience strange phenomena. Around that time, the children began to sense that something was strange. There are children who are afraid of coming to school.

“I’m scared… .”

“This classroom is strange. I feel like there’s a ghost.”

“You know what? Someone said they saw a girl they didn’t know in our class after school. When I got closer, it disappeared.”

There were ghost stories floating around in our class.

It was a ghost story about an unidentified girl hiding in our class.

There was even a rumor floating around that a girl I didn’t know was seen in my class after school.

“Hmm.”

But that’s it.

There is one really sad thing.

The truth was that I had never experienced so many strange phenomena as I had.

‘Why don’t ghosts touch me? ‘You don’t even hear hallucinations?’

Like hearing someone touch you from behind or hearing hallucinations telling you to play together.

For three weeks, I did not experience a single strange phenomenon.

It was disappointing.

I was an elementary school student interested in mysteries. Something mysterious happened right around me, but I couldn’t experience it myself. It was quite disappointing.

‘Try to touch it.’

Still, every time I attended class, I opened my eyes and focused on the feel of my back.

There is a saying that opportunity comes to those who are prepared.

In fact, there was one student who knew the answer to what was going on in the classroom.

It was Sarah.

Because Sarah can see ghosts. You would have seen for yourself what was going on in this classroom.

You probably already know what the ghost looks like and who it is.

But Sarah rarely told ghost stories to her children.

Even when I asked him, he only gave vague answers.

“Sera. Do you know who is playing pranks in the classroom?”

“Well.”

“Are you a ghost? That pitch-black thing I saw at the window last time?”

“It may be so, it may not be.”

Sarah actually tended to keep quiet about ghost stories.

On the first day of school, when children flocked to ask about ghosts, he gave half-hearted answers.

That silver-haired girl showed me the ghost on a simple whim.

“Hey, don’t pretend like you don’t know.”

“I don’t want to go into detail. If you talk about ghosts, ghosts come out.”

The story goes that when you tell a ghost story, ghosts become interested.

Sarah seemed to care about that old superstition.

Instead of telling a story, Sarah did something special in the classroom.

His behavior was bringing candy to school every day.

This is not candy you brought to eat.

The purpose was to put it on an unoccupied desk at the back of the classroom.

‘table’

When Sarah came out of the classroom on the first day of school and started talking about ghosts.

It was that desk that Sarah was staring at at that time.

A desk without an owner because no children are sitting there.

Sarah kept putting candy in her desk drawer every day. In the morning, I put in new candy and collected the candy I put in yesterday.

I asked Sarah, who was acting strangely.

“Why are you putting candy there?”

“I’m doing this to stop strange things happening. Something like someone playing a prank or having auditory hallucinations.”

“How do you stop by adding candy?”

“You can stop. This is the most peaceful solution, so don’t worry.”

I didn’t really get a specific answer.

Still, I could roughly guess what was going on.

Because I had knowledge about this mysterious phenomenon that I had picked up here and there.

‘This is food that ghosts eat, right?’

The candy is actually an offering to ghosts.

Offerings are made to appease the ghosts that are causing trouble in the classroom.

Just as food that the deceased liked while alive is placed on the ancestral rite table, candy is probably a ghost’s favorite food.

Slowly my head started to spin.

The identity of the ghost in the classroom was pictured in my head.

She is a girl of similar age to us.

I want to play with the kids.

There is a high probability that he was a student at our school. If you see that I don’t bother leaving this classroom.

‘Is that desk where the dead girl used to sit? So, you stuck with me because you were obsessed?’

There were several speculations floating around in my head.

In the past, there may have been students at our school who suffered an unfair death.

I decided to do some research to see if my guess was correct.

The girl who saw ghosts did not open her mouth. I had to look for information on my own.

Suddenly a good idea occurred to me.

There was a better way than Googling.

It was just a search through the school newspaper.

Lunch hour.

I ate early and went to the elementary school’s newspaper department.

━━Drurling

When I entered the newspaper club’s club room, I saw older students.

The seniors, who were around 5th grade, looked at me and looked at me with puzzled looks.

“Huh? Who are you?”

“Hello. My name is Jinwoo Kim.”

“Jinwoo Kim? Why did you come here?”

I came to get to the bottom of the mystery by looking through the school newspaper.

This was the original goal, but sometimes lying is necessary.

If you honestly say you are here to uncover the identity of the ghost, who will cooperate with the investigation?

So, I gave it a try.

“I’m very interested in newspapers. My future dream is to be a journalist, so I’m contemplating whether or not to join the newspaper department.”

“Ah. Are you planning to join? Also, is your future dream a journalist?”

“Yes.”

“Oh… .”

When I heard that I wanted to join the newspaper club, my seniors relaxed their guard.

I was able to talk to the older members of the newspaper club without raising any suspicion.

“Can I see some old school newspapers? I’m curious about how you wrote the article. I want to see my brothers and sisters’ posts.”

“It’s cute. You can look. There’s everything by year on the bookshelf over there, so take it out and look at it.”

Our school published a school newspaper twice a year. It is issued once in the first and second semesters. It was thin as it was an elementary school newspaper. This means that it doesn’t take that long to research.

“Thank you.”

I immediately took out my old school newspaper and looked through it quickly.

I started with last year’s newspaper and went back one year.

How much time has passed?

At the end of my lunch break, I was finally able to find a clue to the case.

In the school newspaper from 10 years ago.

[May the late Park Eun-seo rest in peace.]

There was a large memorial article on the front page of the newspaper.

It was an article commemorating a dead girl named Park Eun-seo. When the accident occurred, Park Eun-seo was in the third grade of elementary school, just like us.

There is a long crosswalk in front of our school.

Ten years ago, unfortunately, a triple collision occurred at a crosswalk.

It was Eunseo who was crossing the crosswalk at that time. There was a young girl in the middle of three large cars tangled together.

The cars were also horribly crushed.

It is natural that a child involved in a collision died.

It is said that Eunseo’s body was so gruesome that it was impossible to open one’s eyes to look at it.

In the memorial article, Eunseo’s photo was printed in black and white.

It was a photo of a girl with short hair looking straight ahead with an expressionless face.

‘This is Park Eun-seo.’

I found out everything I wanted to know.

“Seniors. I’m going now.”

“Okay, come again.”

I just left the newspaper department and went back to the classroom.

But it was when I had just arrived at the classroom.

“Hey… !!”

Sarah’s shout rang out.

For some reason, the classroom was very noisy. Everyone in the class was standing up and looking toward the back of the classroom.