Yongma Land:
Seoul's Abandoned Park
Where the Rides Never Stop
There is something uniquely wrong about an abandoned amusement park. The wrongness is not subtle — it hits immediately, before you've had time to think about why. Something in the human brain recognizes the combination of things designed to be joyful and the absence of joy, and responds with a discomfort that other kinds of abandonment don't produce. An abandoned factory is sad. An abandoned amusement park is something else.
Yongma Land closed in 1999. It sits in Jungnang-gu in northeastern Seoul — not in some remote location, but in the middle of one of the most densely populated cities on earth, surrounded by apartment blocks and convenience stores and the ordinary texture of Korean urban life. The rides are still there. The carousel is still there. The ticket booths are still there. For over two decades, the park has sat unchanged while Seoul continued to grow around it, and the question of why it has never been demolished has never received a satisfying answer.
What It Was
Yongma Land opened in 1983, during the period of South Korea's rapid economic growth when amusement parks were appearing across the country as symbols of a modernizing, prosperous nation. It was a mid-sized park — not as large as Lotte World or Everland, but a genuine neighborhood attraction with rides, carnival games, food stalls, and the full apparatus of organized fun.
For sixteen years it operated without notable incident. Families came on weekends. School groups visited. The carousel turned. The rides ran. Children screamed with appropriate joy rather than inappropriate fear. It was ordinary in the way that places meant to produce happiness are ordinary.
In 1999, following the economic crisis that devastated much of Asia in the late 1990s, Yongma Land closed. The official reason given was financial difficulty — the same reason given for hundreds of Korean business closures during that period. The closure itself was unremarkable. What became remarkable was everything that happened afterward, which was nothing. The park was not cleared. The rides were not removed. The fencing went up and the gate was locked and the park was simply left.
The Carousel
The detail that appears in almost every account of Yongma Land — from early visitors in the 2000s to recent ones — is the carousel. It is the first thing visible through the fence. It is the thing that photographs best and disturbs most. And according to multiple independent accounts spanning more than a decade, it moves.
Not under power. The electrical systems have been dead for years. But the carousel is built on a mechanism that, in the absence of a locking brake, will rotate in the wind. And so it does, sometimes. Slowly. The horses turning in a circle without music, without lights, without riders, without any of the context that would make the motion meaningful.
"I went at dusk, which was a mistake. The carousel was turning — slowly, maybe one full rotation every few minutes. Just the wind, I know that. But there was a horse near the front, a white one, and every time it came around to face the fence it was facing me directly. I know that's just geometry. I know the horse isn't looking at anything. But I watched it complete four full rotations and every single time that horse came around, I felt like I was being watched. I left before it got dark."
— Account from visitor, Korean urban exploration community, 2018 (translated)The Mannequins
Beyond the carousel, the detail that most disturbs visitors who have entered the park — legally, for photo shoots or film productions, or illegally as urban explorers — is the mannequins. At some point after the park's closure, mannequins in carnival costumes were placed throughout the grounds. Who placed them, and when, and why, is not clearly documented. They may be props from a film production that were left behind. They may have been placed by the owner for reasons not explained. They may have been there since the park was operating.
They are positioned at game booths, near ride entrances, and in the food stall areas. They wear the kinds of costumes that carnival workers wear — bright colors, exaggerated features, the visual language of enforced cheerfulness. Their placement is close enough to natural human positioning that visitors have initially mistaken them for people. The recognition that they are mannequins, in the middle of an abandoned park, at the moment when you have just been startled by them, is an experience that multiple accounts describe as one of the most unsettling of their lives.
A film crew that used the park for a production in 2017 documented their experience afterward. They noted that the mannequins seemed to be in different positions between their setup day and their shooting day — not dramatically different, not moved to obviously different locations, but subtly repositioned in ways that none of the crew could account for. They had not moved the mannequins. No one had authorized access to the park during the intervening night. Their footage from the shooting day shows the mannequins in positions that don't match their setup photographs.
The crew's explanation: the wind, shifting the mannequins on their stands overnight. It's possible. The park is exposed, and the wind does move things. But several crew members noted that the mannequins are heavy, designed to be stable, and that a wind strong enough to reposition them would have been strong enough to damage lighter equipment that showed no sign of disturbance.
The 1999 Question
The question that hangs over Yongma Land is the same one that hangs over all abandoned places that should have been cleared but weren't: why is it still here? Seoul is one of the most expensive real estate markets in Asia. The land that Yongma Land sits on is valuable. The cost of demolition would be recouped almost immediately by the development that would follow. The park has been sitting on that land for over twenty-five years.
Legal disputes over the property have been cited as the reason for the delay, without specifics. The ownership situation is described as complicated, without elaboration. It's possible that the explanation is entirely mundane — paperwork, inheritance disputes, legal technicalities that take decades to resolve in property law.
It's also possible that whatever the explanation is, it involves reasons that the people involved prefer not to discuss publicly. Yongma Land in 1999 closed during a period of significant economic trauma in Korea. The 1997 financial crisis destroyed businesses, devastated families, and in documented cases drove people to desperate acts. What happened at Yongma Land specifically, in the months around its closure, is not part of the public record.