Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries

The crimes and mysteries Korea won't talk about — deeply researched and respectfully told. Each episode reconstructs a Korean true-crime case, unsolved disappearance, cult, or disaster: what happened, how, and why.

Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries is a true crime podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 34 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries, a true crime show with 34 episodes published.

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  Episode #38

  Episode 38: Korean Air Flight 801 Guam Crash

  Aug 20, 202617 min

  It is twenty minutes past one in the morning, over the Pacific. A Boeing 747 is coming down through the rain toward an island runway, and the man flying it says three words into the dark cockpit: "eh… really… sleepy." Behind him, two hundred and fifty-three people are asleep, or watching the lights of Guam come up out of the water, or thinking about the beach in the morning. In twenty-one minutes, most of them will be dead. What makes this crash so hard to look away from is that nothing about it was sudden. The airplane was fine. The engines were fine. Three qualified men sat in that cockpit and watched it happen — and by the time one of them finally said the plain sentence that would have saved everyone, the airplane was seven seconds from the trees. Korean Air Flight 801 Guam Crash · 1997-08-06 · Bijia Peak, Nimitz Hill, Asan-Maina, Guam (flight from Gimpo, Seoul)

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  Episode #37

  Episode 37: West Sea Ferry Disaster (Seohae Ferry Sinking)

  Aug 19, 202613 min

  October 10th, 1993. A gray Sunday morning on Korea's west coast. A small white ferry pulls away from a fishing island, packed with weekend anglers heading home — so packed that people are standing shoulder to shoulder on the deck, sitting on crates of fish sauce, wedged between gravel sacks and fishing gear. The boat is licensed for 221 people. It is carrying 362. Thirty minutes later, it is upside down in the Yellow Sea, and 292 of them are dead. And then the country does something almost as cruel as the sea: it turns on the captain. Newspapers say he swam away and fled. Prosecutors put him on a wanted list. For five days, police hunt a dead man — while his body waits inside the sunken ship, in the one room that proves he never left his post. This is the story of the Seohae ferry. West Sea Ferry Disaster (Seohae Ferry Sinking) · 1993-10-10 · Off Wido Island, Buan County, North Jeolla Province, South Korea

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  Episode #36

  Episode 36: Daeyeonggak Hotel Fire (대연각호텔 화재)

  Aug 18, 202612 min

  Christmas morning, 1971. Seoul's Daeyeonggak Hotel is full — more than three hundred guests and staff inside a gleaming twenty-two-storey tower in the heart of the city. At ten minutes to ten, a propane gas cylinder in the hotel coffee shop explodes. Within about ninety minutes, fire has climbed all the way to the sky lounge on the twenty-first floor. The tallest fire ladder in the country reaches the seventh. The rooftop door is locked. Before the day is over, at least 163 people are dead — and more than half a century later, it is still the deadliest hotel fire in recorded history. This is the story of the day Korea watched a skyscraper burn on live television, and what that day exposed. Daeyeonggak Hotel Fire (대연각호텔 화재) · 1971-12-25 · Chungmuro, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea

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  Episode #904

  Dark Files: When the Clock Ran Out — Cases Korea's Law Can No Longer Touch

  Aug 17, 20261h 21m

  For most of modern South Korean history, murder came with a deadline. Fifteen years, and prosecution became impossible — no matter what was found, no matter who confessed. This Dark Files compilation brings together four cases that deadline swallowed. We begin in Hwaseong, 1989, where an eight-year-old girl vanished walking home from school. Months later, police found her belongings and a fragment of bone — and hid it, leaving her family to search for thirty years. When her killer finally confessed in 2019, the law could no longer charge him. Then Seoul, January 1991: a nine-year-old boy taken from a Gangnam playground, and sixteen days of calm, meticulous ransom calls made for a child who was already dead. That voice is still preserved, still being analyzed — and has never been matched to a name. Then Daegu, two months later: five boys who went up a hill to look for salamander eggs and were found eleven and a half years on, in a case forensic experts concluded was murder. And finally Daegu, 1999: a kindergarten-age boy attacked with acid, who survived forty-nine days and named the man he knew — on some three hundred minutes of tape. No one was ever charged. His name, Kim Tae-wan, is now written into the law that abolished Korea's statute of limitations for murder. It reaches none of the families in this collection. These are the cases the clock beat — and the reason the clock no longer exists. In this compilation: • Episode 9: Hwaseong Elementary School Girl Case (Kim Hyeon-jeong) • Episode 21: Lee Hyung-ho Kidnapping and Murder (이형호 유괴 살해 사건) • Episode 2: Frog Boys (Seongseo) Disappearance • Episode 34: Daegu Child Acid Attack (대구 어린이 황산 테러 사건) — the Kim Tae-wan Case and Taewan's Law

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  Episode #34

  Episode 34: Daegu Child Acid Attack (대구 어린이 황산 테러 사건) — the Kim Tae-wan Case and Taewan's Law

  Aug 16, 202617 min

  On a spring morning in 1999, a six-year-old boy left his house in Daegu to walk to his after-school lesson. It was around eleven o'clock. Broad daylight. In an alley near his home, a grown man took hold of him, forced his mouth open, and poured concentrated sulfuric acid over his face. The boy survived forty-nine days. In that time, blind and burned, he told his parents — clearly, and by every account consistently — who had done it. A man he knew. A neighbour. His family recorded three hundred minutes of him saying it. No one was ever charged. And in July 2015, a courtroom clock ran out, and South Korea's legal system declared the case closed forever. Two weeks later, the country abolished the statute of limitations for murder — in a law that carries the boy's name, and could do nothing for him. Daegu Child Acid Attack (대구 어린이 황산 테러 사건) — the Kim Tae-wan Case and Taewan's Law · 1999-05-20 · Hyomok-dong, Dong-gu, Daegu, South Korea

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