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‘Due to my grandfather’s training which he passed on to me, I [US citizen] am always in a near-meditative state. This may have an impact on why I’m rarely completely in this world. I had wandered about a mile away from the group I had come up the mountain with, along the ridgeline at first. As I got further away, I started feeling very much at home and also veering into one small valley. I began to sing in words I did not recognize but understood. It was not the Korean language. Someone else sang as well, in the same language I was using. A familiar, tenor voice, I did not know whose it was, and it did not belong to people I had come up the mountain with. I kept walking and saw in front of me a near palatial house of the sort common in the area roughly two-thousand years previous. At the gate of the house stood an extraordinarily beautiful man. He glowed. I was about four feet tall at the time (a very short thirteen years old). He stood at least seven feet tall. Though my perception of his height was likely colored by my shortness. He wore the most beautiful clothes I’ve ever seen, and smiled when he saw me, and his smile brightened the entire afternoon forest around us as though he’d lit a military grade searchlight in the undergrowth. I wasn’t afraid, though some part of me suggested I SHOULD HAVE BEEN VERY AFRAID, but I kept feeling like I know this one, THIS ONE won’t eat me. He hugged me so tightly it was hard to breathe. The main emotion I got from him was relief and joy and an I’VE FOUND MY DEAREST TREASURE vibe. This happened in the mid-nineteen-eighties and I had not seen or heard of any supernatural romance stories at that time. There was a huge sadness to him, also. And my own heart was a crazy blend of the same feelings. No idea if they were MINE or if I just picked up on his feelings strongly. We went into the house and it was as though it were MY HOUSE. He treated me like I was the lady of the house, and kept calling me his Bride, his Mistress, his (fill in the blank with an extravagant title/compliment). It was strange. A feast was laid out, and, as I’m not an idiot, I complimented the beauty and smell of the food, but ate nothing. He put his arms around me to kiss me, I think (who knows, I didn’t know what a prelude to a kiss was at that point in my life), and quite suddenly an elderly Korean man with a gravelly voice burst into the room saying, ‘NOT YET, FOX! She is NOT of age in her world, there will be no liver for you today!’ The old man hustled me out of the house, muttering imprecations at the gumiho (fox neighbor). The old man brought me to my parents again. I was angry they were digging up the mountain spirit’s shrine. I told the old man I could not stop them from destroying it. He told me humans are like that – avidly visiting and being respectful one day, destroying everything they ever brought you the next. And that none of it truly mattered, because playing Janngi (Korean chess) with the other folk was infinitely more enjoyable than bothering with the ‘children’ who pass so quickly you barely recognize their descendants as being separate from the first one you met yesterday. I’m fairly certain the old man was a mountain being. He left me with a mirror that belongs on a shaman’s costume. I still have it.’ ‘Fox: Very tall. Very physically beautiful. Carried himself like a warrior. Fierce yellow eyes of a predator. His hair was black and fell to his knees with an iridescence reminiscent of a raven’s wing. Pale, pale, pale luminous skin. Traditional Korean clothes from roughly Silla Dynasty, from that he seemed to have a high noble social status.’ ‘Mountain Person: Wrinkly, considerably shorter than the fox. But still taller than my four feet high at the time. His skin was rough and dry. His clothes were wild, too. Like he’d been a scholar, at some point, but ran away to the mountains for a purer existence, and only patches were left, mended with forest bits.’ ‘No sounds other than the Mountain Person’s voice, and my own voice in reply to the fox’s thoughts.’ ‘It [the place] may have had a reputation, as twenty years later I saw a special on a Korean broadcaster investigating the presence of ‘folklore creatures’ in the region.’ ‘Having traveled in the Far East, and being of Irish and Cherokee and German extraction with an obsession with understanding what I experience – the various words ‘faerie’, ‘yokai’, ‘dokkaebi’, ‘efreet’, what have you – are describing if not the SAME BEINGS, then species who are remarkably similar to each other which are specific to that ecosystem.’