Janghwa and Hongryeon

At a Glance

• Central figures: Janghwa and Hongryeon, two sisters murdered by their stepmother; Bae, the father who could not see the truth; the stepmother Heo, who plotted their deaths; and the magistrates who governed Cheolsan county.
• Setting: Cheolsan county in what is now Pyeongan Province, during the Joseon dynasty; the story is preserved in oral seolhwa tradition and later adapted into pansori and written fiction.
• The turn: The stepmother Heo frames Janghwa for unchastity, then has her drowned in a pond; Hongryeon, learning what happened, drowns herself in the same water.
• The outcome: The sisters’ ghosts haunt the county office, killing magistrate after magistrate, until a new magistrate listens to them, investigates, and punishes the stepmother and her accomplices.
• The legacy: The sisters were cleared of all dishonor, and the story became one of the most retold tales in Korea - a byword for the cruelty of stepmothers and the persistence of the wronged dead.

Bae Jwasu had two daughters by his first wife, and he loved them well. Janghwa was the elder, Hongryeon the younger. Their mother died when they were small, and their father married again - a woman named Heo, who brought three sons of her own into the household.

Heo hated the girls from the start. She hated the way their father looked at them. She hated that Janghwa was beautiful and literate, that Hongryeon followed her sister everywhere with a quiet, steady devotion. Most of all she hated that if the girls married well, they might draw their father’s affection and his resources away from her own sons. So she set about destroying them.

The Rat in the Bedding

Heo began with Janghwa. She skinned a rat, wrapped the raw thing in cloth, and placed it inside Janghwa’s bedding. Then she called Bae over and pulled the covers back.

Look at this, she said.

The skinned rat, small and bloody, was meant to resemble a miscarried fetus. Heo wept and told Bae his eldest daughter had been with a man and had lost the child in secret. The evidence was in her bed. What more did he need?

Bae looked at the thing in the cloth. He looked at Heo. He did not look at Janghwa.

He believed it. He was a Confucian father in a Joseon household, and the accusation of unchastity was the one thing that could sever his bond with his daughter utterly. Heo knew this. She had chosen her weapon with precision.

Janghwa protested. She knelt and pressed her forehead to the floor and swore she had done nothing. Her father would not hear her. The household closed against her like a door.

The Pond at Cheolsan

Heo sent a servant to take Janghwa to a pond outside the town. The servant was one of Heo’s people - a man who owed her and feared her. He loaded Janghwa onto a horse and led her through the fields to the water.

At the edge of the pond, Janghwa understood what was happening. She asked the servant to let her pray. He waited while she knelt on the bank and spoke to the sky. Then he pushed her in. The water was deep and still and took her without sound.

When Hongryeon learned her sister was dead - drowned, they told her, though no one would say by whose hand - she went to the same pond. She stood where the bank was soft. She walked into the water after Janghwa.

Their father was told both daughters had died. Heo made sure the story that reached him was simple: the girls, ashamed and unstable, had taken their own lives. Bae grieved. He did not investigate. He had already chosen which version of his daughters to believe.

The Magistrates Who Could Not Stay

Strange things began to happen at the Cheolsan county office. The new magistrate, on his first night in the yamen, saw two young women standing in the hall. They were pale and wet and their hair hung loose. They did not speak. He died that night - of fright, the clerks said, though no mark was on him.

A replacement was sent. He lasted three days. A third magistrate arrived, heard the rumors, and refused to sleep in the office. He died anyway, found sitting upright at his desk with his eyes open.

Magistrate after magistrate came to Cheolsan and died or fled. The county became impossible to govern. No official wanted the posting. The court in Seoul - or Hanyang, as it was then - grew impatient. The dead were interfering with administration, and that could not stand.

The Magistrate Who Listened

A young official named Jeong Dongu volunteered for the post. He was either brave or ambitious or both, and he rode into Cheolsan knowing the stories.

On his first night in the county office, he sat at the magistrate’s desk with a candle burning and waited. Near the second watch, the two women appeared. They were as the clerks had described - young, soaked, their white sobok mourning garments clinging to their bodies, their faces the color of river clay.

Jeong did not run. He did not collapse. He addressed them as he would address petitioners in his court.

State your grievance, he said.

The elder ghost - Janghwa - spoke. She told him everything: the skinned rat, the false accusation, the servant at the pond, the stepmother’s design. Hongryeon stood beside her and did not speak but wept without sound, and the water that ran from her eyes was the water of the pond.

Jeong listened to the end. Then he told them he would investigate. The ghosts bowed and vanished, and the candle burned steady for the rest of the night.

The Trial and the Clearing

Jeong summoned the stepmother Heo, the servant who had led Janghwa to the pond, and Bae Jwasu himself. He questioned them separately, as a magistrate should. The servant broke first. He confessed to drowning Janghwa on Heo’s orders. Heo denied everything until the servant’s testimony was read to her, and then she fell silent.

Bae knelt in the courtroom and heard what had happened to his daughters. He had believed a skinned rat over his own child’s voice. He had not gone to the pond. He had not asked a single question. The court record does not say what he did with his face, but it says he knelt there a long time.

Heo was sentenced to death. The servant was punished. Bae was not formally charged - he had committed no crime the law could name - but he lived the rest of his life in the house where his daughters had grown up, and the house was empty.

The ghosts of Janghwa and Hongryeon were not seen in Cheolsan again. The county office functioned. Magistrates came and went and slept through the night. The pond remained where it was, still and deep, and the people of Cheolsan did not swim in it.