
I have loved reading ghost stories and horror novels since I was little. In fact, my first ever movie experience when I was four years old was a werewolf movie. My parents didn’t realize it was a horror movie when they decided to take me with them on their movie date night, OR SO THEY CLAIM. My mom tells me that even when she covered her own eyes because she was too scared to watch the screen, I kept my eyes wide open and glued to the action, unblinking, expressionless. And I couldn’t help but wonder… WOMAN!! WHY DIDN’T YOU COVER MY EYES TOO??!!!
Apparently they assumed I wasn’t scared. Hilarious, right? These are the same parents that took me with them to see Jaws just a few years later. I blame them for never learning how to swim.
And of course as Koreans, whenever they wanted me to be good, they would tell me scary stories about gwishin (Korean ghosts that will kill you) and dokkaebbi (trolls that will beat you with a club) and more gwishin — water ones and abandoned building ones and ones that hide under staircases, etc. But the most frightening one of all is the egg gwishin — the ghost with no face. There is no American ghost story that I find as frightening as the Korean one. There is hands down nothing scarier to me. Except fast zombies. I do not appreciate that this lore has been changed. Zombies are supposed to be slow and shuffling. Stop with the fast zombies already!
I think because of how “mean” my parents were to me, I vowed to do my very best to frighten my own children as much as legally possible without getting me arrested for child abuse. When my kids were little, I would hide motionless for hours, just for a chance to jump out and scare them. As they got older, I graduated to telling them gwishin stories, especially whenever we drove by dark wooded areas. If they are screaming at me, then I have done my job and I am satisfied. And always, I remind them, when they are crying, to never forget that this is all Grandma’s fault.
When writing Spirit Hunters, I had many nights where I would feel the hair rise on the back of my neck just as my dog would come and bark furiously at absolutely nothing. That was beyond creepy, and it helped me write the book. I knew I had achieved Stephen King-level horror when my oldest read it and said, very seriously, “Mother, there is something terribly wrong with you.”
Scaring people makes me happy. In fact, I much prefer giving rather than receiving this special pleasure. Perhaps because I have a talent for scaring myself silly already, I prefer to share. And that is why I love to write horror.
Ellen Oh is the founder of We Need Diverse Books and the author of the Prophecy trilogy (Prophecy, Warrior, and King) for young adults. Spirit Hunters is her fourth book and her first for middle grade readers. A former adjunct college instructor and lawyer with an insatiable curiosity for ancient Asian history, Ellen lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and three daughters and has yet to satisfy her quest for a decent bagel. You can visit her online at www.ellenoh.com.
