The Korean Folklore Behind The East Palace
Note: This article is completely spoiler-free. It does not discuss the major plot twists or ending of The East Palace. Instead, it explores some of the Korean folklore and older literary traditions that shape the supernatural world of the series.
If you came here after watching The East Palace:
The supernatural world of the series draws on several Korean concepts, including Gwisin, Wonhon, Gwimae, shamanic traditions, and older accounts of strange beings. But knowing what these terms mean is only part of the story.
A more interesting question is why The East Palace brings these older ideas into a royal palace. Why do some of its supernatural beings have stories of their own? Why does a brief description from a fifteenth-century text become a fully realized CGI creature? And why does the past keep returning in supernatural form?
One possible way to read the series is through a simple idea: the supernatural gives the past a way to return.
When the Dead Have a Past
The Korean term Gwisin (귀신) is often translated as “ghost,” but it is a broad term rather than the name of one specific kind of spirit. Ideas about the dead and the unseen have developed through different religious and folk traditions, including Buddhism, Confucian practices, shamanism, ancestor traditions, and local beliefs.
For storytelling, one aspect is particularly important: the dead can remain connected to what happened before death.
This is where Wonhon (원혼) becomes relevant. The term is commonly associated with a wronged, resentful, or troubled spirit. Rather than treating such a figure simply as a supernatural threat, a story can ask what happened to the person before death and why that experience remains unresolved.
The idea of Han (한) is sometimes discussed alongside such stories because it can encompass suffering, grief, resentment, and emotional pain that resist resolution. But this is only one small point of contact with a much broader and more complex concept. Han should not be treated as a universal explanation for Korean spirits.
What matters here is the narrative possibility created by a troubled dead person.
A supernatural presence with a past creates a different kind of mystery. The question is no longer simply how to defeat it. It becomes why it has returned.
That question connects the supernatural with memory. A spirit may point toward a death, a grievance, or an event that was never fully settled.
This is particularly effective in historical drama, where the surviving record can preserve some lives in detail while leaving others almost invisible. A fictional spirit can occupy the space between what history remembers and what it leaves behind.
From a Few Words to a Creature
This idea becomes especially vivid in The East Palace through its use of supernatural material associated with the Yongjae Chonghwa (용재총화), a fifteenth-century collection of anecdotes, customs, unusual stories, and observations attributed to Seong Hyeon.
What makes this material fascinating is its brevity.
An old text may describe something strange in only a few words. A television drama, however, needs something that can move through a scene, make a sound, interact with characters, and occupy a physical world.
The East Palace fills in those gaps.
Jeongyeouhu (庭如牛吼) is associated with a strange phenomenon involving a sound like an ox bellowing in a courtyard. The series reimagines the idea as an aquatic being connected with a well, turning an unusual textual image into something physical and threatening.
Ssangdusa-mok (雙頭四目) offers a more direct image: two heads and four eyes. In the drama, those few words become an ominous Gwimae, giving a terse literary description a body and a role within the story.
Then there is Gosuyechil (枯瘦如漆), a description that evokes something extremely thin and black, almost lacquer-like. The series expands that image into a distinctive figure with an emaciated lower body and unusual clothing.
The transformation is more significant than simple preservation.
The old text provides the fragment. The modern drama gives it a body.
That is one way folklore can travel across centuries. It does not have to remain visually or narratively unchanged. An old image can be reimagined, placed in a new setting, and made to serve a new story.
Creatures, Rituals, and the Unseen
The same process can be seen in the series‘ treatment of Gwimae (鬼魅), a broad term associated with strange or uncanny supernatural beings.
Kkeomeoksali, for instance, appears as a small black creature that initially threatens humans by draining their vital energy. Yet its role changes within the story, eventually becoming something closer to a companion and action partner.
The shift is revealing. Once folklore enters a fictional world, its elements do not necessarily retain a single fixed function. A being that begins as a threat can acquire a different role within a new narrative.
The series also draws on the cultural vocabulary of the Mudang (무당) and Gut (굿). A Mudang is better understood as a Korean shamanic practitioner than simply an “exorcist,” since shamanic practice has historically involved spirits, healing, divination, protection, blessings, and the dead.
Likewise, Gut refers broadly to shamanic ritual rather than to one particular form of exorcism. Its music, movement, offerings, speech, and ritual space give the drama a visual language for encounters with the unseen.
These elements help establish that the supernatural world of The East Palace is not simply populated by monsters. It has its own ways of making sense of the relationship between the living and the dead.
The Pond Between Two Worlds
The series takes that idea further by creating a distinct supernatural realm, described as the “world of ghosts” (귀의 세계).
The pond becomes an important connection between that realm and the human world.
Water works naturally as a cinematic threshold. Its surface separates what can be seen from what lies beneath, making an ordinary landscape capable of concealing another reality.
This should not be taken to mean that traditional Korean belief universally regarded ponds or bodies of water as literal entrances to the afterlife. Korean stories contain many different traditions involving water, spirits, underwater worlds, and other realms.
In The East Palace, the pond functions more specifically as a dramatic boundary. Something familiar becomes connected to something hidden.
And the significance of the pond lies partly in where it is found.
It belongs to the palace.
Why Does the Palace Need Ghosts?
A royal palace is already a place where the past is carefully managed.
It is a world of hierarchy, ritual, political authority, family relationships, and restricted information. People have different levels of power, different access to knowledge, and different abilities to shape how events are remembered.
That makes the palace an unusually effective setting for supernatural storytelling.
An event can remain hidden because someone has the power to conceal it. A death can become part of an official record without preserving the experience of the person who died. History can survive while a person’s story disappears.
The supernatural disrupts that process.
The spirit associated with the Crown Prince’s pond, for example, draws on the familiar motif of a wronged spirit tied to a particular place. Its grievance becomes connected to the royal household itself, bringing personal suffering into a space defined by political power.
The question therefore becomes larger than the identity of one spirit.
Who had the power to decide what happened?
Who was vulnerable?
Whose account became part of the historical record?
And whose did not?
The spirit does not need to be read as a literal representation of historical truth. Instead, its presence gives the drama another way to explore what an official record may leave unresolved.
The palace contains secrets. The supernatural gives them a way to return.
This is why the supernatural elements fit the setting so naturally. They are not simply decorations added to make a historical drama more mysterious. They interact with tensions already built into the palace itself: power, secrecy, death, memory, and unequal voices.
When Folklore Becomes a Modern Story
Seen together, the supernatural elements of The East Palace form a process of transformation.
A few words in an old text become a CGI creature.
A traditional image of a wronged spirit becomes part of a mystery.
A shamanic ritual becomes a dramatic encounter with the unseen.
A pond becomes a passage between worlds.
And a palace secret becomes something that can return.
This is what makes the series‘ use of folklore more interesting than simple historical decoration. It is not attempting to reproduce an untouched version of traditional Korean supernatural culture. Instead, it reinterprets fragments of that culture through contemporary fantasy and mystery.
The process inevitably changes the original material.
But that change is not necessarily a loss.
Folklore has always moved through retelling. What survives may not be the exact original image, but the possibility of using that image to tell another story.
In The East Palace, old supernatural vocabulary is given new bodies, new spaces, and new meanings.
Why Do the Ghosts Keep Coming Back?
Perhaps this is the most useful question to take away from the series.
A creature can frighten us simply because it is strange.
A spirit with a history does something more. It makes us ask what happened before the story began.
That question becomes particularly powerful in a palace, where history, power, and memory are shaped by those who have the authority to record them.
The fictional spirit can enter the gap between the event and the record.
It does not necessarily represent the past itself.
It represents a past that has not finished speaking.
And that may be why the supernatural world of The East Palace feels so closely tied to its historical setting.
Its spirits and creatures are not simply visitors from another world. They are reminders that the past may not remain where history places it.
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