Ep. 66: History and Lore of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital

This week we travel to South Korea to the defunct Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, which was once named the third most haunted place in South Korea and one of the freakiest places in the world. Learn about the legends and myths surrounding the facility, as well as the very real history of mental health treatment in 20th century South Korea.

Sources will be listed at the end of the episode transcript.

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Transcript

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals! I’m your host, Dr. Sarah Gallup, and today we are headed from New Zealand to South Korea. This hospital has been on my short list of places to cover, but it stands out as an anomaly with the others I’ve discussed thus far. Unlike all the other hospitals I’ve covered, this one is fairly modern. But it just kept calling to me and begging me to learn more.

The problem that I discovered during my research is that (1) the language is quite a barrier. Most resources about this site are in Korean…which I definitely do not speak (so apologies in advance for the inevitable mispronunciations). And (2) Most of the Google searches are dominated by a 2018 film based upon the hospital, so there really isn’t that much information in English that I could find on the history of the site. But still, I had to learn as much as I could.

Trigger warnings for this episode include mention of patient abuse and death by suicide.

I used many different sources in this episode, and I’ll list them at the end of the episode transcript. Also a quick note to say that since I don’t speak Korean, some of my sources have been translated into English using AI, so the translations are not always…perfect. So bear with me.

For now, come on in and get comfortable as we go behind the walls of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital…

The stories go a little like this: In the early 1990s, patients at Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital started dying mysteriously, one by one. Staff became concerned, especially as patients’ family members also started dying. Perhaps it was some sort of communicable infection? Or something more nefarious?

As time went on, hospital staff also began disappearing. One by one, they would be found, dead, in some quiet corner of the hospital. Doctors at Gonjiam started to go mad themselves due to the extremely cruel treatment they were inflicting upon patients. The owner of the hospital was said to be holding the patients hostage, while killing them all one at a time in room 206. The hospital director, possessed by a vengeful spirit, was driven to the brink of insanity before dying by suicide. And as police started to investigate the mysterious deaths, the owner fled to the United States to avoid capture. And the hospital was left abandoned, yet still fully furnished, where it began to decay, as nature slowly reclaimed it.

…

At least, that’s what some people think. The truth is that Gonjiam was closed for much more mundane reasons that hadn’t been disclosed to the public. It just suddenly, almost without warning, closed one day, and the rumors about what people thought may have happened ran rampant.

So what is the real story of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital? As with all of our stories, the truth goes back long before it was ever built.

Prior to the late 19th century, illness, including psychiatric illnesses, were treated using traditional Korean medicine and shamanistic medicine (“Mental Health in South Korea”). Then, during the mid-1890s, missionary doctors arrived in Korea and introduced western medicine practices. By 1911, the first hospital set up under the Japanese colonial government was established. It had a section dedicated to patients with mental health concerns, but there was not yet a fully established mental hospital. Patients admitted to the hospital were brought in due to behavioral problems, such as habitual stealing, violent fighting, fraud, ward wandering, threatening, potential elopement, sexual deviation, homicidal tendencies, clothes ripping, and arson (Lee 13). Typical diagnoses included syphilis of the central nervous system and dementia praecox (13). An article by Jack Greenberg in The Korea Times says this about psychiatric care in colonial Korea:

Like in other countries, the Korean government’s favored solution for dealing with mental health patients has historically been isolation from the community. During the 1910-1945 Japanese occupation, Korea was unique among the empires colonies: no mainland laws regulating the custody and care of the mentally disabled were ever passed. Police, however, engaged in the surveillance of those suffering from psychosocial disorders. They maintained lists of people prohibited from wandering alone because of their symptoms and sent those without guardians to the Government-General Hospital in Seoul. Under the Minor Offences Act of 1912, police could arrest family members who failed to confine “dangerous” mental patients at home.

Korea remained under Japanese colonial rule until August 15, 1945. That same year, the Seoul City Mental Hospital opened (Greenberg). The primary form of treatment was Freudian psychoanalytic psychotherapy to investigate the unconscious mind (Lee 15). The problem (sort of) was that Korean physicians who went to the U.S. to study psychiatry often didn’t have the time to do the intensive study of psychoanalysis that American physicians did. They concentrated their efforts on psychopathology and the physical bases of emotional illnesses. When they returned to Korea, they brought what Dr. Ho Young Lee calls a “Koreanized dynamic psychiatry” (15).

The Korean War ravaged the country from 1950-1953. The Seoul City Mental Hospital was the only psychiatric facility that remained open throughout the duration of the war, although barely (Greenberg). Mental patients during that time were largely discharged from the hospital and left to wander the streets unless they had family to take them in (Greenberg).

As you might imagine, going through World War II and the Korean War back-to-back left a large number of veterans and civilians with symptoms of trauma. But in the aftermath of the Korean War, there was very little capacity to care for these folks. According to Jack Greenberg:

Only 1 percent of the national budget was allotted to the health ministry, three-fifths of which went to programs for veterans and Hansen’s disease patients. Although hard data was not collected, numerous reports pegged the number of people with severe mental illness at roughly 100,000. In 1957, however, there were no more than 359 inpatient psychiatric beds throughout the nation, the majority of which were at a veteran’s relief hospital in Seoul’s Noryangjin neighborhood.

As an aside, because I had to look it up, Hansen’s disease is another term for leprosy. Yikes.

So you can see that there was a large-scale crisis when it came to mental health treatment in Korea. And there was – and still is – a negative stigma when it comes to living with mental illness. So here we have about 100,000 people in Korea needing mental health care in the 1950s but only 359 psychiatric beds available. Obviously, that created issues. Those who had family members who could care for them were sent home. The few who could afford private hospitalization paid to have their family members in smaller facilities. Still others were accepted into religiously-affiliated homes. The rest were left largely unhoused (Lee 16).

Suddenly, there was an urgent need for increased psychiatric care. Some physicians had studied in the U.S. and came back to implement what they had learned abroad. Others, as Ho Young Lee points out, learned about medicine during the war: 

American medical officers were mostly of requisition civilian doctors who were willing to teach Korean doctors advanced medical and surgical knowledges and skills that Korean medical officers wanted to learn. Take account of the fact that almost all medical doctors in Korea were recruited during the war, such full scale exposure to American medicine was a god-given opportunity for Korean medicine modernized. In no other country in [the] history of medicine, [has] modernization [taken] place in such magnitude in a short period. (Lee 15)

The urgency of learning as much as they could in order to treat the surplus of people facing mental illness was looming.

By December 1961, the National Mental Hospital opened with 360 new inpatient beds. They had hoped to have 500 beds, but due to budget restraints, they had to downsize (Greenberg). As you might imagine, 360 beds filled up immediately, mostly with veterans but also with other young, unemployed men (Greenberg). A new problem then emerged: how long should the patients stay? There were no aftercare services for them in the community, so initially, admissions to the hospital were indefinite. And for years after the National Mental Hospital opened, it had a months-long waitlist.

Now I’ll add here that some sources state that Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital also opened in 1961. Others list it as 1982. Still others say 1992. You’d think this would be fairly easy to find out, but not so much. None of the peer-reviewed sources I read mentioned when it opened. The most credible source I found was one where the writer apparently speaks Korean, so she was able to read original sources. That writer, just listed as Ashley, indicates that the hospital opened in 1982. Based also on the style of architecture of the hospital, I’m inclined to agree that 1982 seems to be the most reasonable estimate. If you know for sure one way or another, please let me know.

Now, an interesting phenomenon occurred during the 1970s in South Korea: due to economic growth caused by industrialization, people began moving around the country for their jobs. This caused extended families to become separated. Whereas it used to be common for family members to take care of those with mental illness, it became increasingly more difficult during this decade. And the need for putting family members in institutions also increased (Lee 16). Ho Young Lee says: 

Soon…it became a business, for the demand for such facilities was high and no other alternative was available for families of the mentally ill with exception for those families who could afford expensive private care, which was scarce at the time. There was no psychiatric treatment at those asylum-type facilities and the management was unchallenged through inspections for years while they remained illegitimate. Naturally most of these facilities deteriorated as time passed by. (Lee 16, lightly edited for clarity)

It became imperative during this time to limit how long a person could remain hospitalized. Prior to the 70s, people were hospitalized indefinitely but now the waitlist became so long that there had to be a way to move people through the system faster. So in the 70s, hospitals were forced to limit inpatient treatment to no more than three months at a time. This meant that many people did not receive adequate treatment. They would be discharged, only to go right back on the waitlist (Greenberg).

I find it interesting to compare what was happening with mental hospitals in South Korea during the 1970s with what was happening in the U.S during that same time. Whereas the U.S. was at the height of deinstitutionalization and the old asylums were clearing out most of their patients and some closing all together, South Korea was just starting to ramp up the number of hospitalized folks.

That’s why I think it makes the most sense for Gonjiam to have opened in 1982. This was right when more hospitals were desperately needed.

It was located near the city of Gwangju in the Gyeonggi-do province. It was nestled in a forested area near the foot of a mountain. The hospital itself was built in a sort of brutalist architectural style – it’s large and boxy and made of concrete with a zigzag of stairs on each end. It was three storeys high and 11,000 square meters (Ashley). I couldn’t even find how many beds there were – that’s how limited the information is on this place. But I can imagine that with the forest surrounding the very industrial building, it must have looked quite creepy.

Now, contrary to what legend has suggested, there is no available documented evidence that patients at Gonjiam were mistreated (What the Horror). That doesn’t necessarily mean it didn’t happen, but no evidence remains that it did. I would speculate – so take this with a grain of salt – that it followed a similar pattern as our other hospitals, who were also underfunded and understaffed at the time. There were probably staff who did their best and some staff who took advantage of their authority and power, like anywhere else.

In other areas of South Korea, people desperate for mental health care were doing their best to get the treatment they needed. According to Jack Greenberg: 

With the public system struggling to find the money to stay afloat and meet demand, private actors, both legitimate and illegitimate, stepped in to offer their services. Richer families sought private psychiatric assistance while the poor opted to lock patients in their homes or dropped them off at unlicensed “prayer houses,” often located on the mountainous outskirts of major cities. Rather than receiving actual treatment in such facilities, patients were routinely tied up with ropes or chains and violently beaten, sometimes to death, during rituals aimed at exorcising their inner “demons.” Meanwhile, from 1975 through to the end of the Chun Doo-hwan regime in 1988, patients on the streets were rounded up and delivered to private-run social welfare facilities under an extraconstitutional anti-vagrant ordinance. Certain facilities supported these patients in the true spirit of service, yet abuse, violence, and death were widespread due to failures in regulations and monitoring. 

It is absolutely shocking and abhorrent to think that this type of abuse was happening in the 1970s. These were the conditions of the almshouses of the 18th and 19th centuries! But we also have to think of the cultural context of the time. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s was the rise of the “Satanic panic” – this widespread fear that Satanic cults were committing mass atrocities. So it makes some degree of sense in that context that mental illness was being mistaken for demon possession and that exorcisms were being performed to a dangerous extent.

The abuses taking place at psychiatric facilities in South Korea were exposed in a broadcast of a KBS special program. The audience, including the Korean president, were shocked to see the condition of the hospitals. This facilitated conversations about the development of a comprehensive mental health policy. The intentions were very good, but the initial draft of the law was based on a copy of the Japanese mental health law which, according to Ho Young Lee, “was totally inadequate and against the directions of the contemporary mental health movement and psychosocial rehabilitation of chronic mental patients, deinstitutionalization, and community-based mental health service” (Lee 17). The draft of the law was shot down and wouldn’t be readdressed until 1995.

However, it wasn’t all for nothing. Dr. Lee points out that:

The government, as a next step, encouraged private sectors to construct mental hospitals by low-interest OECF loan in order to increase the number of psychiatric hospital beds throughout the nation. There was a sharp increase of privately owned psychiatric hospital beds from 1985 to 1995, from 4,156 to 22,786. (Lee 17)

Again, I return to my amazement that while psych beds in the U.S. were rapidly decreasing, the number of beds in South Korea were increasing even more rapidly.

As I mentioned earlier, the National Assembly returned to the idea of new mental health policies in the early 1990s. In 1995, the Mental Health Act was finally passed after a 27 year off-and-on effort (Greenberg). One of the tenets of the Act said that anyone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility needed a psychiatric diagnosis and the consent of two family members (Park). As you might imagine, this could potentially cause problems – and it did. Anyone wanting to put away an unwanted family member could easily do so. No doctor’s signature required. This would remain in place until 2017, when the Act was amended. Now potential patients have to be evaluated by two psychiatrists at an interval of two weeks (Park) – I actually like this caveat a lot because the two weeks can help differentiate if someone is having a mood episode or not. Good thinking, South Korea!

Meanwhile, at Gonjiam, conditions at the hospital were starting to deteriorate. The place was becoming increasingly unsanitary due to problems with their sewage disposal system (“Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital” Atlas Obscura). According to an article from Curious Archive:

With the implementation of the Water Source Protection Act in South Korea, a new sewage treatment facility became a sudden legal [requirement] for the hospital. This caused a disagreement between the owner [of the hospital] and the director over whether or not it was worth the financial strain to install a new treatment facility. (Ashley)

All of this is happening in the context of what would later be called the Asian Financial Crisis, which was a period of turbulent economic hardship in South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand (“Mental Health in South Korea”). So the financial barriers to keeping the hospital open eventually won out. Gonjiam closed in July 1996, and all remaining patients were transferred to Yong-In Mental Hospital (“Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital” Moon Mausoleum).

Yet behind the scenes, negotiations were continuing. But when the elderly hospital owner died in 1997, that seemed to be the end for the hospital. The owner’s son took over the property but left it in disrepair, so the hospital remained closed (Ashley). But as I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, there was no reason given to the public about the sudden closure, so rumors began taking over.

The hospital became the source of popular lore. It was rated the third most haunted site in South Korea (What the Horror) and, according to a 2012 CNN article, one of the freakiest places in the world.

In the decades following the closure of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital, it became a draw for urban explorers hoping to get a glimpse of the spooky old site. People said they could hear screams from inside the old building, see mysterious figures lurking the halls, and feel vengeful spirits following them. Interest only increased when a Korean ghost hunting documentary explored Gonjiam in 2008. There were fences put up and barbed wire placed around the perimeter, but people still found ways to get in. The site was decidedly creepy. After the CNN article came out, the amount of people coming to break in to the site became almost unbearable for the residents who lived in the area. They had been less afraid of the patients who had resided there than they were of all these people who came from around the world and traipsed through their backyards to get to the site. It was becoming more and more unsafe.

The old hospital building and grounds had long been for sale, but there were no interested buyers. So when talk of a film about the hospital began, the property owner filed a lawsuit, hoping to stop production of the film. After all, it would only slander the name of the hospital and make it even more difficult for his property to sell. He lost his case and in 2018, the horror film called Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum was released. Although it was filmed primarily at a Korean high school, it was loosely based on the legends surrounding the original psychiatric facility. I don’t like horror films, but reviews I saw of it make it look a little like The Blair Witch Projectwith that shaky-cam found footage sort of style. Many reviews call it the scariest movie they’ve ever seen. So I guess watch at your own risk? 

The property was unable to be sold and after the film came out, the site practically became a liability. Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital was demolished on May 28, 2018. The site remains empty today, although there has been talk of developing apartments on the property. Who knows? Maybe the lingering spirits will finally find a happier place to reside?

And that’s where I’ll end the history of Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital. I know there wasn’t a lot on the hospital itself – perhaps there is more history available in Korean that I don’t have access to. But I enjoyed learning about the differences in the progress of mental health treatment in South Korea. There’s always something new to learn.

As an aside, because it’s important to point out, mental illness is still highly stigmatized in South Korea. It has the fourth highest suicide rate in the world, particularly among folks under age 40 (“Suicide in South Korea”). If you’re in the U.S. and having thoughts of suicide, you can call 988 to get help. If you’re in South Korea and having thoughts of suicide, you can call 119 or the suicide hotline at 1588-9191. Help is available.

Thank you so much for listening! As always, please be sure to rate, review, and subscribe if you haven’t done so already. Join the Facebook page, Behind the Walls Podcast, and follow on Instagram at @behindthewallspod.

I’m going to take next week off, but I’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new hospital to discuss. So be sure to come back for that!

Until then, remember the words of Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” Until next time…

“10 of the Freakiest Places Around the World.” CNN, 8 May 2019. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/freakiest-places-world/index.html

Ashley. “The Haunted Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital: Gone but not Forgotten.” Curious Archive, 10 March 2022. https://www.curiousarchive.com/haunted-gonjiam-psychiatric-hospital/

“Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital.” Atlas Obscura. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/gonjiam-psychiatric-hospital

“Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital.” Moon Mausoleum. https://moonmausoleum.com/gonjiam-psychiatric-hospital

Greenberg, Jack. “Korea’s Struggle with Institutionalized Mental Healthcare.” The Korea Times, 20 Nov. 2022. https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsldx=339674

Lee, Ho Young. “Past, Present, and Future of Korean Psychiatry.” Psychiatry Investigation 1.1 (2004): 13-19.

“Mental Health in South Korea.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_health_in_South_Korea

Park, Seohoi Stephanie. “I’m Not Mad: Involuntary Psychiatric Hospitalization in South Korea.” Korea Exposé, 31 May 2017. https://koreaexpose.com/involuntary-psychiatric-hospitalization-south-korea/

“Suicide in South Korea.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea

What the Horror. “The TRUE Story Behind Gonjiam Haunted Asylum.” YouTube. https://youtu.be/ltXd-ahRgyw?si=ZG75UBMxZtSAL13s