August 29, 1987.
A craft company in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, Odaeyang.
An employee who came to the factory that day opened the loft leading to the cafeteria ceiling —
and froze on the spot.
Inside that narrow ceiling space, thirty-two people lay dead.
Not one or two.
Thirty-two.
It was the beginning of the strangest mass death in modern Korean history.
Thirty-two people
The dead were the woman who led Odaeyang, her family,
and the people who followed her.
The head of this company was no ordinary businesswoman.
She stood at the center of her own faith, and a large number of the employees were her devotees as well.
In other words, this place was a factory and at the same time, a community.
Most of the thirty-two were women.
The autopsies found that most had died of asphyxiation by strangulation.
Their bodies showed traces of tranquilizers and motion-sickness medication.
But there was something strange.
There were almost no signs that anyone had resisted.
8.9 billion won
Behind these deaths lay an enormous debt.
Odaeyang carried private loans of roughly 8.9 billion won — an astronomical sum for the time.
The pressure to repay was relentless, and creditors had even swarmed in and turned violent.
A collapsing company, mounting debt, and people who followed her like a god.
Police weighed all of this and reached a conclusion.
Group suicide.
Driven to ruin, the leader had made an extreme choice together with those who followed her.
No indictment followed, and the case seemed to close.
Four years later, a confession
In 1991, as the case faded from memory.
Something shocking happened.
Six people connected to Odaeyang came forward to the police and turned themselves in.
Their statements brought a new fact to light.
Before the mass death of 1987, three people inside the community had been killed and secretly buried — for supposedly breaking its rules.
The case was reinvestigated on this account.
But the conclusion of the reinvestigation was the same as in 1987.
The thirty-two in the ceiling — group suicide.
The three secretly buried were a separate case, and those responsible were punished.
What was never resolved
The official conclusion was group suicide, but the questions never disappeared.
First, in that narrow ceiling space, could thirty-two people really lose their lives one after another, without resistance, truly of their own will?
Some of the experts who handled the autopsies even gave the opinion that some of the deaths should be seen not as suicide but as murder.
Second, why the ceiling of all places?
Was it to hide something, or was it a ritual all their own?
This case was also trailed by a rumor of involvement with a well-known religious group of the time.
But one thing must be made clear.
Across multiple investigations, prosecutors found no evidence that this religious group was behind the case,
and concluded that it was "unrelated."
When the group's leader was later criminally convicted, it was not for this case but for a separate fraud charge.
The rumor of involvement is only a rumor, and officially the group is unrelated.
This point must be remembered.
Before we close this drawer
The Odaeyang case is not a story of chasing a culprit.
Nor is it fully explained by the word "unsolved."
The official conclusion exists. Group suicide.
And yet the reason this case has stayed in memory for nearly forty years
is that no one has ever given a complete answer to the question of "why."
What led thirty-two people up into that cramped ceiling?
What stripped from them even the will to resist?
That one person's faith could take thirty-one others with it.
Perhaps that is a truth more chilling than any ghost story.
Nearly forty years have passed over the site of that factory in Yongin.
The whole of what happened above that ceiling was buried forever with the people who were there that day.
