Gwisin

The general Korean term for the spirit of one who has died and not passed cleanly into the next country. The category is wide. It admits the unmarried girl who could not bear a son, the soldier whose body was never returned, the household servant whose name was forgotten before the seventh anniversary of her death. The gwisin is recognised by what is missing rather than by what appears. The hair is unbound. The shoes are absent. The face is set toward the living. Where the rites were observed, no gwisin is recorded. Where the rites were broken, the records are long.

The category covers a substantial portion of the older Korean folklore record. Subtypes are catalogued by the cause of incomplete passage: cheonyeo gwisin for the unmarried woman, mongdal gwisin for her bachelor counterpart, mul gwisin for the drowned, jangugwi for the soldier left abroad. The archive treats the term as a heading rather than a description.