Shownotes Transcript
You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. At California Psychics, we know that sometimes you can wake up thinking, I don't know if I'm in the right career, you, or the right relationship. But whatever your life dilemma, at California Psychics, we'll give you the guidance you need to feel certain about your life choices. And because we only connect you with the very best, we guarantee if your reading isn't life-changing, it's free. California Psychics.
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It's March 26th, 1991 and South Korea is gripped by election fever. Local elections for district, city and county councillors are being held for the first time in 30 years. A national holiday has been declared and many people, including military personnel and school children, have been given the day off. Pupils from the Seongsu Elementary School on the outskirts of Daegu are no exception.
Among them, it's Kim Hyun-do's 11-year-old son, Yong-jiu. For the purpose of clarity, South Korean names begin with the family name followed by the given name. That morning, Hyun-do watches Yong-jiu wave goodbye before disappearing into the small maze of interconnecting concrete-lined alleyways behind their house to meet up with his friends Woo Chi-ol-won, Jo Ho-yeon, Park Chan-in, Kim Yong-sik,
and Kim Tae Ryong. The boys, aged 9 to 13, are all neighbours in an area known as Dao So, a modest working class neighbourhood on the western edge of Daegu's city sprawl. They often play together around their houses in the nearby rice paddies or on the thickly wooded slopes of Hwo Yong Mountain just to the north.
On that morning of elections, with no classes to keep them in school, the boys have been given free reign to enjoy the spring day. Just after 8am, a young man gets annoyed with them playing outside his apartment and tells them to go and play somewhere else. A short time later, one of the boys returns home
as nine-year-old Kim Tae Ryong explains to his parents. He wanted to keep playing, but the others decided to head off to Wo Yong Mountain and he struggled to keep up with them. Having also been worried about going too far from home, he decided to cut his losses and come back. Middle school student Moo Yeon is riding his bike past the entrance to the mountain trailhead when he sees his younger brother walking with the four other boys. He calls out to him and asks where he's going.
Ho Yeon replies that they're heading up to the mountain, to the salamander pond, a waterhole where salamanders are known to congregate to look for eggs. Moo Yeon watches for a moment as the boys head up the trail, then turns around and cycles off. It has just gone nine when a woman named Kim Sun Nam, who lives at the foot of Woyong Mountain, heads out of her home to cast her vote in the elections.
The sun is shining, the spring air fresh and cool, with the thick carpet of last year's fallen leaves on the ground. When she too sees the boys as they head up the mountain, as they pass her by, they wonder aloud if they can get there and back in two hours. That short innocuous question will echo through her mind for many years to come. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard McLean-Smith.
It had just gone 11.30 when another pupil from Xiongso Elementary School, named Ham, climbs alone to a gravesite located on the middle slopes of Woyong Mountain. Just then, he hears a series of unusual sounds, sharp and urgent, coming from the top of the mountain in roughly 10 second intervals. Then he hears another sound, this one is unquestionable, a marrow-melting scream, followed swiftly by another,
The intensity of it seeps under his skin. This is followed by an unnerving, eerie silence. By the end of the afternoon, the young boys have yet to return. And as dusk falls, the boys' families begin to get seriously worried. Mr Kim, father of nine-year-old Yong Shik, knows there are some fierce dogs kept partway up the mountain trail. He worries that the dogs might have escaped and attacked the boys.
And so the parents quickly assemble and begin to search the mountain path, calling out their children's names as they climb higher up into the trees. But they find no sign of them. It is 7.50 when they're reported missing to the police. With the help of some local officers, the parents continue to search for the boys into the early hours of the next morning. But still no sign of them is found. The police seem unconcerned. The boys are just being boys, they say.
They'll come home eventually. That night, at his home, a petrified Kim Hyun-doo drifts into a fitful sleep and starts to dream. Rain pours down, sluicing off his home's roof, dripping noisily into its tiled courtyard. Hyun-doo stands on his porch and looks up to see his young son, Young-ju, playing in the alley outside. It's a replay of the morning before, turned hideously inside out.
The boy pokes his head around the half-open metal gates to the yard and smiles. Then without a word, he turns and scampers off. Gripped by terror, Heon-Do runs after his son. Out through the gate and into the narrow alleyway beyond, its concrete walls damp and stained with rust. Up ahead, he sees the back of his son as he runs up the alleyway. He tears after him, frantically calling out for him to stop and come back.
But the boy never stops and never looks back. As he on do fights desperately to keep up with him, his son recedes ever further into the distance. Then he wakes with a gasp in the dark, his eyes streaming with tears, gripped by the horrifying certainty that his beautiful son will never be coming home.
When the five young boys fail to return on the second day, the frantic parents demand more help from the police, only to be told they still can't be categorised as officially missing, and there is little they can do until then. The police also begin to wonder if the boys have run away. Perhaps they've been getting up to mischief, because that's what's expected of boys who come from lower income, working class families.
but there are no problems in any of their homes and none of them have done anything like that before, the parents protest, to no avail. Then, one of the fathers receives an anonymous phone call. The man on the other end of the line claims to be holding the missing children. He says that the boys are all suffering, that two are very ill and that the parents must bring a large sum of money to a street near Daegu's main train station before it is too late.
scraping together what they can at short notice. The parents go to the location the following evening, wracked with worry, but also fuming with anger. They are ready to beat the perpetrator to a pulp, but also determined to sacrifice all they own to get their boys back. Five, then ten, then twenty minutes go by as the parents wait where the caller had told them to go.
They continue to wait for another hour, feeling helpless, but in the end, no one comes. In the days following the boy's disappearance, people in Daegu and across South Korea glue themselves to their radios and TV sets, completely immersed in the emerging news from the elections. There is widespread interest in the country's politics at the time, especially because of a growing pro-democracy movement struggling to emerge.
South Koreans sense there is a chance for a transition from military dictatorship to free and fair elections on the horizon. It isn't until almost a week after the disappearance of the five boys from Daewolso that the media really begins to pick up the story. When one broadcast reports that the boys had gone to try and catch frogs, the missing children become known as the Frog Boys.
As public interest in the case intensifies, the boys' parents are invited onto the popular news program, the Square of Public Opinions, where they angrily lambast the police, who continue to classify the boys as runaways rather than missing. The program hosts phone lines for members of the public to call if they have any information on the boys,
Suddenly, during the middle of the broadcast, one of the phone operators shouts out to the parents that they have one of the boys, Kim Yong-sik, on the line. The operator says the boy is sobbing and asking to speak with his mother. Yong-sik's mother rushes over, but by the time she reaches the phone, the caller has hung up. It is a prank call.
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Rumours became widespread that a terrible fate had befallen them, but after almost a month, the children turned up, malnourished but alive, having simply got lost. Despite their young age, they used their knowledge of foraging to survive, having done relatively little to help. On May 5th, six weeks after the boys disappeared,
President Ro Teu issues a special order mobilizing the police and military in a massive search operation. In July, an investigation headquarters is established by the Daegu Provincial Police Agency and thousands of police and military officers are drafted in to help.
Search teams form lines and use sticks to probe the ground as they go exhaustively over the region surrounding the salamander pond and then in widening circles around the entire mountain. The undergrowth on the mountain is short at that time, leaving few places for the boys or their bodies to remain hidden. But still, nothing is found.
In lieu of any concrete answers, the case attracts many false reports and prank calls. Meanwhile, theories about what has happened to the Frog Boys get more and more extravagant. Back in the 1970s, North Korean agents kidnapped some South Korean high school students to help them train North Korean spies to blend into life in the South. Some people wonder if the Frog Boys were taken under similar circumstances.
Some wonder if the boys have been abducted by aliens, others that a group of patients suffering from leprosy have taken the boys to help treat their disease. At one point, police even visit a leper colony, just in case the rumour is true. No end of self-described psychics and fortune tellers also join the ranks of people claiming to have insights as to what has happened to the boys and where they are.
But no one can provide any information that brings the children back, so the boys' fathers decide to take matters into their own hands. In the summer of 1991, the fathers of the missing boys quit their jobs and rent a small truck together
They deck it out with posters containing pleas for information about their sons, as well as a large portrait of each boy. Then, the desperate fathers drive across South Korea, beseeching fellow citizens to help them find their sons. Often, the fathers find a busy spot in a city or town where they park and hand out leaflets appealing for information.
The men watch on hopefully as one middle-aged woman in a hurry pauses briefly to grab a flyer, only to then use it to wipe chewing gum off the sole of her shoe. On the first anniversary of the disappearance, in March 1992, the parents hold a press conference involving media representatives from across South Korea.
At some point, people begin to notice a number of men in the audience who don't look like journalists, taking notes whenever the parents speak. It later transpires that the men are from an unnamed intelligence agency. For several months, they have shadowed the fathers, recording every detail of what they do and where they go. Some have even turned up at the boys' homes, claiming they are there for the parents' protection.
It is the final indignity that the boys' own fathers are now in the frame for the disappearance of their children. As month after month rolls by, the fathers continue to drive across South Korea, pleading for any information that will help find the missing boys.
They continue for three long years, but finally, disheartened and in serious debt, the fathers hold another press conference in the nation's capital, Seoul, to announce that they are giving up their search. They will go back to what is left of their families and attempt to restore some measure of normality to their daily lives. For their part, the police continue their efforts
20,000 leaflets containing computer-generated images of how the children might look now are distributed. 1,000 welfare facilities and religious organisations, along with 11,000 households and 48 mountain areas, are searched. 1,800 elementary school pupils are questioned, along with around 19,000 industrial complex workers.
Around 570 reports as to the boy's whereabouts are received from all across the nation, even from fishing boats along South Korea's extensive coastline. Several large Korean companies also join in the effort to help the search, with details about the case and requests for information being printed on all manner of products, from cigarettes to milk cartons, sweet wrappers and telephone cards.
Pohang Steel and Korean Airways also provide money for the police to distribute tens of thousands of flyers to employees and customers. But finally, after five years of fruitless searching, in 1996, the Frog Boys Investigation Department of the Daegu Police Agency is disbanded.
The search is transferred to the local Dalsow police station where the local police chief takes over the investigation with a team of just 10 men.
What if I told you that right now, millions of people are living with a debilitating condition that's so misunderstood, many of them don't even know that they have it. That condition is obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. I'm Dr. Patrick McGrath, the Chief Clinical Officer of NoCD. And in the 25 years I've been treating OCD, I've met so many people who are suffering from the condition in silence, unaware of just what it was. OCD can create overwhelming anxiety and fear around what you value most, make you question your identity.
beliefs, and morals, and drive you to perform mentally and physically draining compulsions or rituals. Over my career, I've seen just how devastating OCD can be when it's left untreated. But help is available. That's where NoCD comes in. NoCD is the world's largest virtual therapy provider for obsessive compulsive disorder.
Our licensed therapists are trained in exposure and response prevention therapy, a specialized treatment proven to be incredibly effective for OCD. So visit nocd.com to schedule a free 15-minute call with our team. That's nocd.com. At California Psychics, we know that sometimes you can wake up thinking... Ugh.
I don't know if I'm in the right career, you, or the right relationship. But whatever your life dilemma, at California Psychics, we'll give you the guidance you need to feel certain about your life choices. And because we only connect you with the very best, we guarantee if your reading isn't life-changing, it's free. California Psychics. Visit CaliforniaPsychics.com today for limited time offers.
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Get started risk-free at greenlight.com slash iHeart. For the missing boy's parents, who are still under intense public and media scrutiny, the years since their boy's disappearance have been interminably hard. Not only are they dealing with the heartbreak of losing their children, any sign of happiness in the fleeting moment that they might experience it must be fiercely suppressed.
If not, the press might use it as evidence that the parents never really cared about their boys and that they are the ones truly at fault for them going missing. Some members of the media continue to harass the families, on occasion manipulating their words and even publishing fake stories about them. But eventually, even the media grow tired of the story and it completely drops from the headlines.
Then one day, the parents receive an unexpected call. Out of the blue, the families are contacted by military personnel from the 50th Division of the South Korean Army, who happen to have a base close to where the five boys went missing. The parents are told that military personnel want to see them all without the police knowing.
Rain lashes down and water sluices along the drains in the narrow concrete alleyways as the parents gather outside their homes before being escorted by soldiers into minibuses. The parents are driven the short distance to the military base and through the gates. Commissioned army officers greet them and lead them through the rain into a large tent where more officers and some regular soldiers are waiting for them.
Mystified and alarmed, the parents become even more confused when one of the officers steps forward to speak. He tells them that one of his soldiers is a medium who has special talents. In fact, continues the officer, this soldier will be able to give the parents supernatural powers which will help them find their children.
Before the bemused parents can ask any questions, a man steps forward and proceeds to solemnly place his hands on each side of Kim Ki-on-do's head. Father of missing boy, Young-ji, the man feels nothing. But then his wife, with a boldness none of her neighbours have ever seen her display, suddenly demands that everyone follow her outside and into the deluge.
The woman begins striding up the mountain, as if totally convinced where she is going, and everyone hurriedly follows. It's hard to walk, as the heavy rain has turned the mountain slopes into a quagmire, and most of the parents have only their regular shoes on. They stagger uphill, slipping and sliding on the muddy terrain, then Mrs Kim suddenly stops and screams, while pointing at a spot in front of her.
The children are there, she yells. I can see them. Unnerved, everyone looks around, their flashlights cutting through the drenching rain, but to their immense distress, there is no sign of the children. Eventually, the search is suspended and the disconsolate parents are returned home without a further word of explanation.
It is January 1996 when a well-groomed, respectable man dressed in a black suit comes to speak with some of the parents. The man is not from the government, but a psychology professor named Kim Ga-won, who tells them that he's spent some time studying criminal psychology in the USA. As the professor goes on to explain to the desperate parents…
Having reviewed the available evidence, he believes he knows exactly what happened to the five missing boys. He tells them first that it is his firm belief that they never actually went up into the mountain. For a long time, he's been developing doubts about the alibi of Kim Chiu-Ju, father of Yong-Shik, one of the missing boys, who's been somewhat vague about his whereabouts for three hours on the afternoon the boys went missing.
The reason, according to the professor, is clear. Mr Kim is the killer, and if his suspicions are correct, they will find the remains of all five boys underneath Mr Kim's own house. There were very few criminal psychologists in South Korea in the mid-1990s. Professor Kim's rarity, combined with the utter confidence with which he announces his reasoning, are enough to convince the police that his claims were at least worth investigating.
Several of the boy's parents openly tell the professor that he is completely wrong, but some also begin to wander. And so, one weekday afternoon, police officers, accompanied by workmen armed with sledgehammers, pickaxes and shovels, all watched on by the parents of the missing boys and other curious neighbours, turn up at the Kim family home.
Before long, the media have arrived too to film the unfolding events. Inside the home, police find an area at the back where a new toilet and cement floor have quite clearly only recently been installed. The accused father, Chiu Giu, watches on with anguish as the workmen get to work, swinging their sledgehammers and pickaxes at the back wall of the house.
Then others quickly join in, excavating the area around the toilet. As police investigators swarm all over the family's belongings, they move furniture and scatter the belongings into the yard as they search for clues. After hours of searching, with only a five-foot trench dug into the back of the Kim property to show for it, only then do people begin to question the psychology professor's logic.
Even if there were three hours unaccounted for in the father's schedule, how would he have had the time to kill all five children, including his own son, then bury them and completely hide the evidence of his crime? Finally, after a day of searching, with some embarrassment, the police announce they have drawn a blank. Nothing at all incriminating is found.
As the professor tries to make an inconspicuous exit, enraged onlookers begin chanting to catch him and attempt to rush at him. The police are forced to make a cordon shielding the disgraced psychologist and hurry him into a police car before driving off at speed. The following day, under the full glare of the media, Professor Kim is forced to make a full apology to the parents, but especially to the wrongly accused father, Cho Kyu,
Before the boys went missing, Kim Chiu-gyu was a robust and healthy man. But after this incident, his health goes downhill fast. He turns to drink to numb the pain of it all. Within a year, he is diagnosed with liver cancer and dies shortly after, still in his 40s, having never found out the truth about his son's disappearance.
though the official cause was his cancer. Those closest to him know that the stress of everything that had happened was a major contributing factor. Other parents also lose themselves in drink or become severely depressed. They find it hard to hold down jobs. Park Gun-seo, father of Chan-in, who was 10 when he went missing, is consumed with unresolved anger.
He repeatedly gets into fights with the police and is eventually placed in a detention centre for a while. Only one thing keeps him and the remaining parents going, the hope that they might finally, one day, find their sons. You've been listening to Unexplained Season 8, Episode 29, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, Part 1. The second and final part will be released next Friday, May 16th.
This episode was written by Diane Hope and Richard McLean-Smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound recordist in her own right. You can find out more about her work at dianehope.com and on Instagram at InTheSoundField. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McLean-Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me, Richard McLean-Smith.
Unexplained, the book and audiobook, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at unexplainedpodcast.com and reach us online through Twitter at UnexplainedPod and Facebook at facebook.com forward slash unexplainedpodcast.
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It's free. California psychics. Call 1-800-PREDICT today and get 20 minutes for just $20. With comprehensive reports on local schools you won't find anywhere else, Homes.com is the only place to find the in-depth info home shoppers want. Very in-depth info.
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