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| A mysterious woman waits alone at a deserted bus stop on a dark, rain-slicked street. |
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I don't really talk about this a lot. Most people just look at me weird when I bring it up, like I'm trying to be interesting or something. But it happened. And sometimes, when I walk past bus stops at night, I still think about her.
This was a couple years ago, junior year. I was taking an evening lit seminar that let out at nine-thirty, and the walk back to my apartment cut through this quiet stretch of campus—one of those streets that's technically part of the university but feels like it belongs to the city. Old brick buildings, a few maples, a single bus stop with a yellow plastic shelter and a flickering streetlight above it.
The first time I noticed her, I thought nothing of it. A woman standing at the stop, just waiting. She was maybe mid-twenties, dark hair, long coat. I figured she was catching a late bus.
Except the second night, she was there again. Same spot. Same stillness.
By the fourth or fifth night, I'd started paying attention. She never looked at her phone. She never shifted her weight or checked her watch or did any of the things people do when they're waiting for something. She just stood there, facing the road, like she was watching for a specific set of headlights she'd recognize.
I'd lived near that stop for two years. I was pretty sure no buses ran past nine on that route.
I told myself there were a hundred explanations. Maybe she was waiting for a friend. Maybe she just liked the air. Maybe I was wrong about the bus schedule.
The night I finally said something, I almost didn't. I'd had a rough week, I was tired, and approaching a stranger at night felt like an easy way to make things weird. But there was a stray dog on the sidewalk ahead of me—a skinny shepherd mix that wandered the neighborhood sometimes—and as I got closer to the bus stop, it slowed down and started growling. Low and steady, the kind of sound a dog makes when it's not just annoyed but actually afraid. It backed up against the fence, eyes fixed on the woman.
She glanced at it once. "Animals can be rude," she said, like she was commenting on the weather.
That should have been my cue to keep walking. Instead I stopped. "Do you know if this stop is still running?" I asked. "I always thought the last bus was like eight o'clock."
She looked at me then, and I remember thinking her eyes were very dark—not in a scary way, just noticeably dark, the kind you don't see that often. "I'm not sure," she said. "I thought maybe later. I'm still learning the city."
Her English was good but careful, like she was choosing words deliberately. She told me her name was Mina, that she'd moved here from Korea a few months ago for a graduate program. We ended up talking for maybe twenty minutes, right there under that flickering light. She was easy to talk to in a way that surprised me—thoughtful, a little dry, interested in what I was studying.
When I finally said goodnight and walked away, I realized I hadn't thought about the dog once. It was already gone.
I started stopping every night after that. It became a thing—my walk home, twenty minutes at the bus stop, then the last few blocks to my apartment. We'd talk about her program, my classes, movies, food. She was funny in a quiet way. She remembered everything I mentioned, even offhand things.
I liked her. Obviously I liked her. About three weeks in, I asked if she wanted to get coffee sometime during the day, and she said yes.
That's when I started noticing the small things.
She almost never blinked. Or she did, but not often enough that you'd clock it in normal conversation. I only noticed because I was watching her talk and realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her eyes close. When I mentioned it once as a joke—"you stare like a lizard"—she laughed and blinked several times in quick succession, deliberately, and the whole thing felt slightly off.
The eating thing was harder to ignore. We got dinner a couple of times, and she always ordered meat. Steak, once, and when it came she looked at it and asked the server to take it back. I thought she was going to say it was overdone. She said it was overcooked.
She was uncomfortable in bright spaces. Coffee shops with big windows, the well-lit section of the library—she'd steer us toward corners, toward dim. She never complained about it directly, but after a while I could see her choosing.
I told myself I was being paranoid. That I was doing the thing where you pick someone apart when things start to feel real.
Then two students went missing.
It was campus gossip at first, then a department email, then a story in the student paper. Two people, different programs, last seen within a few weeks of each other—both walking through the same general part of campus late at night. The area near the old brick buildings. Near the bus stop.
I didn't make the connection consciously. But I started arriving at the stop a little earlier.
One night I got there about fifteen minutes before my usual time. Mina was already there. She was always already there, I realized—I'd just never been early enough to notice her arriving. She was standing under the streetlight the way she always did, still and quiet, watching the road.
I stopped about thirty feet back and watched her for a moment.
The light above her was doing something strange. Her shadow stretched out behind her the way shadows do, long and thin across the pavement. But as I stood there, the shadow seemed to—split. Not dramatically. Slowly. Like it was fraying at the edges, separating into distinct shapes that extended behind her. They moved, slightly. A slow, rhythmic swaying, like something dragging.
I blinked, and they were gone. One shadow. Normal.
I walked up and said hi and she smiled and we talked about nothing for twenty minutes and I walked home and I did not sleep.
I looked it up that night. I don't remember exactly what I searched—something about Korean folklore, fox spirits, women who wait. The word gumiho came up almost immediately.
I read for a long time. A spirit that takes the form of a beautiful woman. That lures people close, cultivates trust, feeds on them. That can live for centuries, take different names, move through different places. That, according to some versions of the legend, you can identify by its shadow.
Nine tails. A fox with nine tails.
I told myself it was a coincidence. I told myself I'd half-imagined what I saw. I told myself the missing students had nothing to do with anything.
The next night I went back. I don't know why—something in me needed to ask.
She was at the stop. Of course she was. I walked up and I said, "I've been meaning to ask. Why are you always here? You've been waiting at this stop for months. The buses don't even run this late."
She looked at me for a moment. Then she smiled. It was a slow smile, the kind that arrives like it's taking its time.
"I was waiting for you," she said.
I wanted to laugh it off, turn it into something cute. But then I saw it.
The streetlight was directly behind her, and her shadow stretched out in front of me across the pavement. And unfolding from it—slowly, unmistakably, one after another—were nine long shapes. They spread wide behind her, each one moving with its own slow rhythm, swaying at their tips like things with weight.
I took a step back. Then another.
She watched me the whole time. She didn't move. She just tilted her head slightly to one side, and her expression shifted into something careful and patient and very, very old.
"You noticed too soon," she said quietly.
I ran. I didn't stop running until I was in my apartment with the door locked and every light on. I never walked that route again.
A few months later, I was cutting through the campus administrative building and stopped in front of one of those framed historical photographs they hang in the hallways. Old black-and-white shots of the university from decades past. This one was from the 1950s—the same street, the same row of brick buildings. The bus stop wasn't there yet, but there was a lamp post in the same spot.
And standing next to it, half-turned toward the camera, was a woman in a long coat with dark hair.
She looked exactly the same.
That night, from a distance, I walked past the end of that street. I didn't get close. But I could see her under the streetlight. And I could see the college student she was talking to, laughing at something she'd said, leaning in just a little.
The bus never comes. It never has.
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved. This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog. Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission. This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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