This note comes from the period when KWAIDANOTE also wrote about Korean tradition. The library now keeps to the records of Japan; this page is kept at its address because other writers have linked to it. It was revised and checked in September 2026.
Two sisters die in a pond. They come back, night after night, to the room where the county magistrate sleeps, and each magistrate dies of fright before they can say anything. Then one stays awake and listens, and the story becomes a court case.
Janghwa Hongryeon jeon — the tale of Rose Flower and Red Lotus — is the Korean ghost story most Koreans would name first. It is also a good test of how a story becomes a fact, because its reputation rests on a claim that it really happened.
The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture classes it as a classical novel of unknown author and unknown date, belonging to two genres at once: the court-case story and the domestic story, the kind built around a stepmother. About thirty versions survive — manuscripts, woodblock printings, and around a dozen movable-type editions of the early twentieth century, in Korean, in Chinese, and in mixed script. There is no single original text to appeal to.
A man of Cheolsan, in the far northwest, loses his wife and remarries. The new wife bears sons; the two daughters of the first marriage are in the way.
She takes a skinned rat and puts it in Janghwa’s bedding, arranged to look like a miscarried foetus, and shows it to the father as proof that his elder daughter has disgraced the house. He believes it. Janghwa is sent from the house and dies in a pond — in most tellings forced into it. Hongryeon learns what happened, goes to the same water, and drowns herself there.
Then the hauntings begin, and the magistrates begin dying, until one of them sits still long enough to hear the case. He calls for the evidence, cuts the thing open, and finds the organs of a rat. The stepmother and her son are punished.
The whole plot turns on a physical object being examined instead of believed. That is unusual in a ghost story, and it is why the classification “court-case fiction” is the right one.
The tradition holds that the case was real: that a magistrate named Jeon Dong-heul heard it at Cheolsan, and the novel records it.
Here is what can be said. Jeon Dong-heul was a real late-Joseon military official, born about 1609 and dead in 1705 at ninety-six, and he did serve as magistrate of Cheolsan. The case attached to his name is traditionally dated to 1656, in the reign of King Hyojong. In the novel the magistrate is called Jeong Dong-u, a name close enough to be read as a screen.
And here is where it stops. The account of the case in Chinese is preserved in records compiled by Jeon Dong-heul’s own descendants — the eighth generation, in 1865. The novelised version in Chinese was written by Pak In-su on commission from a sixth-generation descendant, and is dated to the twelfth month of 1818. Both documents are family records, made a century and a half or more after the events they describe. No independent judicial record of the case has been produced.
So the honest description is not “based on a true story” and not “invented.” It is: a family preserved an account of an ancestor’s most famous judgement, had it written up twice in the nineteenth century, and the popular novel grew in the same soil. What is certain is the magistrate and the post. What is traditional is the case.
An earlier version of this page placed the family in the reign of King Sejong. That was wrong by about two hundred years, and it has been corrected.
Korea has many vengeful-spirit tales, and our note on the wonhon sets out the five types the encyclopedia uses. This one has outlived the others in popular memory, and the reason is visible in the plot.
The sisters do not take revenge. They have no power to punish anybody; they cannot even speak until someone is willing to be in the room. What they need is an official who will hear a complaint from people with no standing to make one — two dead girls against the word of a living householder. The horror in the first half is domestic and the resolution in the second half is bureaucratic, and that combination is why it was retold as a novel rather than as a ghost anecdote.
The story has been filmed repeatedly, and the dates are worth having straight, because English sources often collapse them.
A silent version appeared in 1924, one of the earliest Korean-produced feature films. The first sound version came in 1936, and there were further versions in 1956 and 1962. In 2003 Kim Jee-woon made A Tale of Two Sisters, which is the version most non-Korean viewers have seen; it takes the names and the shape of the family and builds a psychological story in place of the court case, and it has no ghost-magistrate in it at all. The American film The Uninvited of 2009 is a remake of that 2003 film, not of the novel.
Counts of “seven adaptations” and similar totals circulate; we could not verify any of them, so the list above is what we will stand behind.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.