Odds and (Dead) Ends: Whistling Past the Graveyard

By Isaiah Winters.

Every six months to a year, I cobble together an assortment of misfit findings from my many odd experiences in the City of Light. Though each would be a research dead end unworthy of its own article, together they make for a decent miscellany of notable oddities. In this issue, I tack on more than a few worthwhile afterthoughts that didn’t get their day in the sun for varying reasons. These addenda range from scattered human remains and hidden cypress forests to semi-shuttered expat bars and urban army trenches – all within our fair city of Gwangju. There’s a lot to sift through, so let’s get right to it.

The Boneyard Stalker
In last month’s Lost in Gwangju, I mentioned the removal of thousands of corpses across the city’s urban parklands to make way for the Gwangju Private Park Special Project that’s gathering steam following the expiration of the sunset law protecting said parks. I didn’t think widescale exhumations would start quite so soon, but about a week after submitting that article, I came across a massive graveyard on the backside of Maegok-san, where roughly a third of the corpses had already been disinterred and removed as part of the special project. I decided to take a careful walk around the many hillside graves, both as a solemn gesture following the article I’d just finished and as a way of scrutinizing any signs of negligence during the hasty body-removal process.

To my surprise, it didn’t take long to find plenty of bones scattered about the area’s numerous burial mounds. I’m not exactly sure how gravedigging and body removals work in Korea, but the human remains and toppled gravestones I saw seemed like sloppy work. To get an idea of who was doing this work on behalf of the special project, I checked the calendar for what’s called a “ghost-free day” (손이 없는 날), which is traditionally seen as a day that’s good for moving house or changing gravesites, as ghosts are supposedly inactive then and therefore unable to cause the living any trouble. The weekend of April 10–11 was “ghost-free” according to the lunar calendar sites I found online, so I paid the graveyard another visit then hoping to see the process in real-time.

That Saturday, I saw no one at first, that is, if you don’t count the many fragments of people scattered about the freshly dug graves. In that regard, I found more and bigger bones than on my prior visit, not to mention many tatters of burial shrouds (수의), which was rather disconcerting. On my second visit that same weekend, I caught sight of a man sitting next to a grave in the distance. He looked a bit unsettled and out of place, much like myself. As I walked the rows above him, he spotted me, stood up, and slowly made his way over to where he’d anticipated I was headed. In response, I made a few erratic direction changes and then left, not wanting to strike up a conversation with another weirdo in a graveyard just before sunset. It’s actually not the dead I’m afraid of – it’s the living.

Urban Cypress Forest
On the opposite side of Maegok-san, just behind the Gwangju National Museum, there’s a large but little-known stretch of cypress trees that provide one of the city’s most convenient escapes from the bedlam of urban life. I used to think that the cypress forests of Hwasun and Jangseong were the closest, but this one’s literally a neighborhood away from home and quite impressive in size considering how deep within the city it is. There are pleasant, fern-lined trails from top to bottom that snake back and forth through all the incredibly tall trees, which helps slow visitors down to maximize their time among the serene setting. As you walk down, the trails eventually end at a thicket of Sasa bamboo
(섬조릿대), which gives you no other option than to return back up the lush, forested hillside to complete the circuit of meandering footpaths. Article-wise, there isn’t much else to say about this place except that it’s a must-see for anyone seeking tranquility without leaving the City of Light. Just remember to bring bug spray.

Belated Farewell to Speaks
I never really got to say goodbye to Speakeasy, one of downtown Gwangju’s longest-standing expat bars that struggled through the pandemic and sadly gave up the ghost last year. I’d gone there off and on since my arrival in 2010 and, although I never became a regular that anyone would remember, the place left an impression on me. I missed its farewell weekend because I figured it’d be packed and so stayed home, not wanting to contribute to any potential headlines the following week bearing words like “virus,” “bar,” and “foreigners.” I was also hosting a few friends from another, harder-hit region of the country that weekend, so I felt a little more of a burden to play it safe. From those who’d attended, I later heard that it was actually a fairly normal weekend and not all that crowded. It seems that so many well-established businesses across the globe expired in the same subdued way – without much hijinks or fanfare. It’s yet another example of COVID-19’s impact, which has quietly killed a lot more than just people. Ultimately, peripheral lurker that I was, I didn’t feel like the right person to write a proper eulogy for the place.

Though just a fly on the wall, somehow I still possess flashes of memory from Speaks that I fondly recall. For instance, my first memory there was going in with a wallet full of cash and then leaving in a vertiginous state with barely a single taxi fare left. (This would go on to be the ritual for practically every visit.) I later remember holding a lover’s hair back in the winter cold as her “technicolor yawn” flecked a nearby sidewalk – the result of that night’s overindulgence. On another night at Speaks, I remember having an extended chat with a pair of talkative guys who later invited me to a club, a veiled invitation that likely would’ve ended in a manly ménage à trois had I not turned them down. On a later visit, I ran into a higherup in the police force who used to be my student. That night, he was sharing drinks with his new teacher, probably the best-known pugilist of the local expat community, whom I’d seen get in a donnybrook over a game of pool some ten years back. As for my last visit to the living Speakeasy, it was during the fundraiser event for the Australian wildfires of 2019–2020, where I estimate half the night’s sales were to yours truly. Today, although Speaks is no longer officially open, you can see here that legendary bars never truly close.

Tracking Urban Trenchworks
Over the last month, my switch to more local, urban hikes within Gwangju has yielded surprising finds, the most interesting of which have been army trenches and dugouts. There must be lots of them because in a short time I’ve come across three separate entrenchments in different areas of the city. One is an extensive network of tire-lined trenches at strategic places along an otherwise uninspiring hilltop. The site seems to have been decommissioned for quite some time, given how overgrown and hard to spot it was at first. Although it’s a legit hiking trail that’s completely open to the public, I don’t feel comfortable naming it here due to its close proximity to highly sensitive military installations. In terms of an article, the thought of writing an entire piece about hiking a trench-lined urban hill and then not sharing the name and location seemed like too much of a tease.

On yet another urban hilltop, I came across a lonely dugout that alone wasn’t very interesting, though its location and orientation were intriguing. It was atop the hill nearest the Sandong Bridge (산동교) in Dongnim-dong. The December 2020 edition of Lost in Gwangju featured this bridge, which was the only site in Gwangju where fighting took place during the Korean War. (Long story short, the defenders detonated the bridge, took up positions in the nearby hills, and then fell back after an hour of fighting.) The little dugout I found atop this particular hill faces the bridge and, although it certainly doesn’t date back to the Korean War, it does suggest a postwar military presence on this strategically located hill. It makes you wonder whether the city’s defenders were ever nearby. Sturdy fencing and private property have prevented me from snooping around the hillside even more, though I suspect there’s more to see there. After digging around online, however, nothing came up, making any potential article dead on arrival.

By far my favorite trenches are along another sleepy hilltop within the metropolitan city limits. These trenches are particularly notable for the figures occupying them day and night: plastic cutouts of North Korean soldiers. Years ago, I’d found the exact same cutouts at a decommissioned military site elsewhere in South Jeolla, but after forgetting to mark the spot on a map, it took me years to relocate the cutouts. When I mentioned this to a friend, he said he knew of some right here in the city and helped guide me to them. I’m hugely grateful for that. In the end, the reason why I won’t write up more on this find is that I don’t want to be responsible for any dummies who go there in search of a souvenir. So, to keep our lads in top fighting condition, I’ll end this month’s miscellany of odds and (dead) ends here.

The Author
Originally from Southern California, Isaiah Winters is a Gwangju-based urban explorer who enjoys writing about the City of Light’s lesser-known quarters. When he’s not roaming the streets and writing about his experiences, he’s usually working or fulfilling his duties as the Gwangju News’ heavily caffeinated chief proofreader. You can find more of his photography on Instagram.
Instagram: @d.p.r.kwangju