Cheonyeo gwisin, the maiden ghost

In Korean folk belief, the ghost of a young woman who died before she could marry. She is one of several kinds of gwisin, the ghosts of Korean folklore.

English Wikipedia uses gwisin for the ghosts of Korean folklore and lists several kinds. It says folklore describes gwisin as usually see-through, without legs and floating. The cheonyeo gwisin is the ghost of a woman who died unmarried. Her male counterpart, the chonggak gwisin, is a man who died unmarried, and the mul gwisin is someone who drowned.

The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture files her under the name songaksi, and also lists sonmalmyeong, wangsin and cheonyeo gwisin. It says a young woman of marrying age who died without marrying turned her grief into an evil spirit. She was believed to attach herself mainly to other young women of the same age and harm them. The wangsin form was feared as able to ruin a whole household, so some families kept it as a household deity: a small jar or wooden box on a shelf in a corner of the wooden-floored hall, or inside a document chest. Anything new brought into the house was offered to the wangsin first, and a family member about to marry had to report it to the wangsin first or, it was said, suffer great harm.

The Gwangju News, from the Gwangju International Center, says she is the commonest of the four ghosts it describes. It links her grievance to women's lives in earlier times, which were spent serving a father, a husband and children. A woman who died with that wish unmet and a lifelong resentment was thought to remain stuck in this world.

English Wikipedia describes her in the white hanbok worn for funerals, with long black hair and sometimes no face. Reporter Jeong Yong-in wrote in the Weekly Kyunghyang in 2026 that the white-clothed ghost is hard to find in Joseon-era stories of wronged ghosts. In the classic novel Janghwa Hongryeon jeon, Hongryeon wears a pale green jacket and a red skirt.