Choi Yu-won

Before going to the palace one morning, a minister is dressing for office when sleep catches him. He dreams that he is riding toward the palace and sees his dead mother walking. She tells him she has left the living world and is bound for a servant’s home in Yong-san, where a shaman is conducting a ceremony. When the minister asks why she is going there instead of to his own household’s regular offerings, she answers that spirits find satisfaction in the prayers of a medium, then hurries away.

The minister wakes with the feeling that something has happened. He sends a servant to the house, telling him to return before he enters the palace. The servant returns before daylight and, because it is cold, first warms himself in the kitchen. He tells a fellow-servant what he saw at Yong-san: the medium recognized him, named the master’s mother as the possessing spirit, and said she had met her son entering the palace. Waiting in another room, the secretary overhears this account and begins to cry. He calls the returning servant in and questions him further; the account strengthens his conviction before he calls the medium and makes an offering.

Afterward, the minister gives offerings in his mother’s name four times each year, as each season returns.