Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries

Episode 83: Seohyeon Station Stabbing Rampage (서현역 흉기 난동 사건)

Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries

Show Notes

It was a Thursday evening in August 2023, just before six. Commuters were heading home, and shoppers were drifting into a department store connected to a busy subway station south of Seoul. Then a small car jumped the curb and drove straight down the sidewalk. The driver got out, walked into the store, and started attacking strangers with a knife. In less than ten minutes, fourteen people were hurt, and two women would never come home. This is the Seohyeon Station rampage, and the question it left Korea with is still hard to answer: what do you do when the danger was visible, and nobody could make it stop?

Seohyeon Station Stabbing Rampage (서현역 흉기 난동 사건) · 2023-08-03 · Sidewalk outside and inside AK Plaza Bundang, by Seohyeon Station, Bundang-gu, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province

More from Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries

Oct 22, 2026

Before dawn on January 20, 2009, a shipping container swung through the air above a street in central Seoul. It hung from a crane, and it was full of police commandos. They were headed for a makeshift tower on a rooftop where dozens of evicted shopkeepers and their supporters had barricaded themselves in. About an hour later, the tower was on fire. Six people would never come down from that roof: five protesters and one young police officer.

Oct 21, 2026

In January 2008, a fire tore through a cold-storage warehouse under construction in Icheon, just outside Seoul. Forty workers died. The company was fined 20 million won. Twelve years later, in the same city, another cold-storage warehouse under construction caught fire in almost exactly the same way. This time, 38 workers didn't make it out.

Oct 20, 2026

A hospital is supposed to be the safest place you can be when you're old and sick. On a freezing January morning in 2018, in a small city in southern Korea, it became one of the deadliest places in the country. Almost no one there was burned. They died of smoke, in beds, in hallways and in a stalled elevator. And some of them were still tied by one wrist to a bed rail when the smoke reached them.

Oct 19, 2026

On a cold Thursday afternoon four days before Christmas, women in a small city in central Korea were doing something completely ordinary. They were at the sauna. Some came with their mothers, some with their daughters. Within an hour, twenty people on that floor were dead. And outside, a few meters away behind a wall of glass, their families were on the phone with them, begging firefighters to break the windows.

Oct 19, 2026

A building is a promise. You walk in, you go to sleep, you cross a river on your way to school, and you trust that someone, somewhere, did the work to keep it standing.

See all episodes →