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Winter is cemetery season in Korea.

With the grass dead, snakes gone, and sightlines open, this is when Korea’s hillside cemeteries quietly reveal their stories. In this episode, Joe and Shawn talk about what they see every year while wandering through Korean burial grounds: traditional mounds and stone guardians, Christian symbols mixed with Confucian motifs, rare Western-style graves, pet burials, collective graves, and the occasional unsettling sign of vandalism.

This isn’t a guide to death rituals. It’s an exploration of how memory, belief, class, and modern pressure quietly reshape how Koreans remember the dead.

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Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey

Music by Soraksan

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South Korea became a super-aged society in 2025. The effects are showing up everywhere, but nowhere more visibly than on the roads.

In this episode, Joe and Shawn talk about the sharp rise in accidents involving elderly drivers, including several deadly incidents in Seoul and beyond. They dig into the numbers, the government’s largely ineffective license return programs, and why simply telling seniors to stop driving ignores deeper issues like poverty, work necessity, and isolation.

This is not a blame episode. It’s about how Korea went from automatic respect for elders to open ageism, and how fear-driven policy risks making the problem worse instead of safer.

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Credits

Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey

Music by Soraksan

Top tier Patrons

Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Ron Chang
Mackenzie Moore
Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
Josephine Rydberg
Devin Buchanan
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Our 300th episode!

Pojangmacha didn’t disappear by accident.

In Part 2 of Where Have All the Soju Tents Gone, Joe and Shawn trace how Seoul’s soju tents went from survival spaces to cultural nuisances, then to nostalgic props. From Olympic-era crackdowns and hired enforcers to violent evictions, gentrification, and sanitized “sensibility pocha streets,” this episode looks at how modernization erased a vital part of everyday life.

This isn’t a story about food. It’s about power, class, gender, and who gets to stay visible in a global city.

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Credits

Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey

Music by Soraksan

Top tier Patrons

Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
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There is no Waffle House in Korea.

For decades, the pojangmacha was the last line of defense against going home hungry, broke, or blackout drunk. It was cheap, social, messy, and human. And then it slowly disappeared.

In Part 1 of Where Have All the Soju Tents Gone, we trace the origins of the pojangmacha from Japanese yatai and Joseon-era taverns to its explosion after the Korean War. We talk about why these tents mattered, who ran them, what people ate there, and why they became one of the most important informal social spaces in modern Korean history.

This is not just a story about street food dying. It is a story about how Seoul systematically removed the spaces that ordinary people built for themselves.

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Book a tour of The Dark Side of Seoul Ghost Walk at https://darksideofseoul.com

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Credits

Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey

Music by Soraksan

Top tier Patrons

Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Ron Chang
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Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
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Christmas is often framed as a moment of peace, forgiveness, and reflection. But in Korean history, Christmas Eve has repeatedly been chosen for violence, punishment, and erasure.

In Part 2 of Christmas Nightmares, we examine three chilling cases tied to the holiday. We begin with the Seokdal-ri Massacre of 1949, when South Korean soldiers burned a mountain village and executed dozens of civilians on Christmas Eve — a crime buried by the state for decades. We then move to the execution of Park Heung-suk, remembered as “Mudeungsan Tarzan,” hanged on Christmas Eve in 1980 after a violent confrontation born from forced eviction and extreme poverty. Finally, we revisit the Daejeon bank robbery and murder of 2001, a Christmas-season killing that remained unsolved for over twenty years.

These stories expose how Christmas, rather than symbolizing mercy, was repeatedly used as a moment of finality — when the state acted, and history tried to move on.

Korea's #1 ghost and dark history walking tour. Book at DarkSideOfSeoul.com

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Credits

Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey

Music by Soraksan

Top tier Patrons

Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Ron Chang
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Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
Josephine Rydberg
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Christmas is supposed to be a time of warmth, safety, and reunion. But history doesn’t always cooperate.

In Part 1 of our two-part Christmas Nightmares series, we explore some of Korea’s darkest stories tied to the holiday season. We begin with the Heungnam Evacuation of 1950, remembered as the Miracle of Christmas, when nearly 100,000 refugees escaped North Korea by sea. But behind the miracle were impossible choices, brutal exclusions, and families torn apart in the freezing cold.

From there, we move to modern tragedies. A massive Christmas Eve pile-up on the Cheonan–Nonsan Expressway that turned fog and black ice into chaos. A chilling Christmas Day murder rooted in online obsession and jealousy. And a violent armed robbery that shattered the illusion of holiday safety.

These are stories where celebration collided with fear, and survival mattered more than tradition.

Korea's #1 ghost and dark history walking tour. Book at DarkSideOfSeoul.com

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Join our Patreon to get more stuff

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Book a tour of The Dark Side of Seoul Ghost Walk at https://darksideofseoul.com

Pitch your idea here. https://www.darksideofseoul.com/expats-of-the-wild-east/

Credits

Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey

Music by Soraksan

Top tier Patrons

Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Ron Chang
Mackenzie Moore
Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
Josephine Rydberg
Devin Buchanan
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Shawn and Joe dig into Korea’s crumbling cybersecurity myth and the Coupang leak that exposed almost every user in the country. Korea sells itself as an IT powerhouse, but behind the fiber optics sit outdated servers, neglected government systems, weak regulations and a corporate culture that treats security like a box to check.

From the SK Telecom and Lotte Card breaches to the government’s own embarrassing hacks, the episode breaks down why Korea keeps getting hit, why companies keep failing upward and how a single leak at Coupang nearly shut down parts of the small business economy. Plus, a side tour through xenophobic blame games, delivery driver exploitation and the weird reality that the country with the fastest internet once clung to ActiveX like a family heirloom.

Korea's #1 ghost and dark history walking tour. Book at DarkSideOfSeoul.com

Get your comic at DarkSideOfSeoul.com

Support the show

Join our Patreon to get more stuff

https://patreon.com/darksideofseoul

Book a tour of The Dark Side of Seoul Ghost Walk at https://darksideofseoul.com

Pitch your idea here. https://www.darksideofseoul.com/expats-of-the-wild-east/

Credits

Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey

Music by Soraksan

Top tier Patrons

Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Ron Chang
Mackenzie Moore
Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
Josephine Rydberg
Devin Buchanan
Ashley Wright
George Irion

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Shawn and Joe trade war stories from the front lines of Seoul’s tour scene. Influencers melting down in costume, drunk guests apologizing between vomit breaks, bathroom disappearances, oddball actors who steal the show, couples who arrive mid-argument, and reviews born from pure misunderstanding.

The episode digs into what really derails a tour, how guides survive it, and why some guests treat history like fan fiction. Add a little wildlife drama, a clown fight, a Kenny G busker and a heron named Bob, and you get a solid snapshot of what it means to guide people through this city. It is messy, funny, awkward, exhausting and sometimes unexpectedly sweet.

Korea's #1 ghost and dark history walking tour. Book at DarkSideOfSeoul.com

Get your comic at DarkSideOfSeoul.com

Support the show

Join our Patreon to get more stuff

https://patreon.com/darksideofseoul

Book a tour of The Dark Side of Seoul Ghost Walk at https://darksideofseoul.com

Pitch your idea here. https://www.darksideofseoul.com/expats-of-the-wild-east/

Credits

Produced by Joe McPherson and Shawn Morrissey

Music by Soraksan

Top tier Patrons

Angel Earl
Joel Bonomini
Devon Hiphner
Gabi Palomino
Steve Marsh
Eva Sikora
Ron Chang
Mackenzie Moore
Hunter Winter
Cecilia Löfgren Dumas
Josephine Rydberg
Devin Buchanan
Ashley Wright
George Irion

Facebook Page |
Instagram