The Wandering Ghost by Martin Limon

delay the onset of shock. Meanwhile, a Korean ambulance arrives but at the same time the girl’s father erupts on the scene. He shoves Jill out of the way, sees his daughter on the ground and then, realizing she’s still breathing—barely—he lifts her up and starts to carry her home. The Korean paramedics stand by and do nothing. Jill’s shocked. She’s sure the girl’s suffering from internal bleeding, and she knows enough about first aid to know that in order to save her life the girl has to be taken to an emergency room immediately, if not sooner.
    “When nobody acts, she does. Jill grabs the father and holds him, screaming and pointing to the ambulance. The father won’t hear of it. Why, no one knows.”
    I did. Or at least I thought I did. I explained it to Sergeant Bernewright. And to Ernie. In Korean tradition, it is believed that if someone dies away from home their spirit, when it rises and leaves the body, will become disoriented. It will become lost and then, being away from home, away from the shrine set up by its family, the spirit will become a wandering ghost. Without the proper ceremonies, without offerings of incense and food, without the prayers of the people who loved the spirit in life, it will never be able to make the transition from wandering ghost to revered ancestor. So Chon Un-suk’s father’s reaction was rational from his point of view. He didn’t want his daughter to be hauled away by strangers to die alone in some emergency room. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to make sure she died at home, not on the street where she’d be lost and would wander alone for eternity—with no one to burn incense at her shrine, no one to pray at her gravesite, and no one to make offerings of food and drink to ease her sojourn through the underworld.
    A hungry ghost, the Koreans call such a creature. A spirit whom no one remembers. A spirit who can’t find its way home.
    Ernie stirred more sugar into his coffee. “When did this shit start?” he asked.
    “What?” I asked. “Wandering ghosts?”
    “Yeah.”
    “In ancient times.”
    “How come I never heard of it?”
    “How many Koreans have you been around that died away from home?”
    He thought about this. I knew the answer. None.
    “Besides,” I said, “ensuring that a loved one dies at home is not a modern custom. Most Koreans trust Western medicine nowadays and most of them die in hospitals. Alone.”
    “Progress,” Bernewright said.
    “When Jill couldn’t stop the father,” I asked, “what did she do?”
    “She wrestled with the old man,” Bernewright told us. “He wrestled back. And then a horrible thing happened. Chon Un-suk fell to the ground. ‘With a big thud,’ Jill told me. Everyone was shocked and for a moment—Jill said it seemed like hours—there was a deathly silence. Then, like one person, the Korean crowd inhaled and when they exhaled it was in a solid rush and they fell upon Jill like a pack of demons.”
    “So the father took Chon Un-suk home?” Ernie asked.
    “Yes. The best we can tell, she was dead before she arrived.”
    “So maybe her ghost is still wandering.”
    “Maybe,” Bernewright said. “Luckily, three MP jeeps arrived about the same time Jill went down. They waded into the crowd, busting heads, and pulled her to safety. She kept screaming for them to leave her alone, and one buck sergeant told me that she cracked him a good one in the chops.”
    “Bold,” Ernie said.
    “Yeah,” Bernewright agreed. “But he was just trying to help. When Jill pushed through the crowd searching for Chon Un-suk, the Korean mob attacked her again. The MPs pulled her out once more and this time they handcuffed her, threw her in the back seat of a jeep, and drove her to the dispensary on Camp Casey.”
    “She was hurt badly?” I asked.
    “Not exactly. But she was hysterical, she wanted to go back, save the girl. One of the medics told me they had to strap her down on the gurney and shoot her up