Actress Song Ji Hyo is no stranger to intense filming experiences, but one memory from the set of her breakout horror film Wishing Stairs still sends chills down her spine — and it wasn’t part of the script.
Appearing on the pajama party-themed YouTube talk show SsookSsook, hosted by fellow Running Man star Yang Se Chan and featuring guests Ji Suk Jin and Ji Ye Eun, Song Ji Hyo opened up about a paranormal encounter that happened during production.
The Wishing Stairs shoot took place at an abandoned school — already a creepy setting in its own right. Song Ji Hyo recounted that while heading to lunch with co-star Park Han Byul, she spotted their producer on the central staircase accompanied by a man and a woman. She called out, “Aren’t you coming to lunch?” but received no response. The group stood still, staring ahead.
But things got even stranger.
“When we got to the first floor, we saw our producer standing by the door,” she said. “I asked him, ‘How did you get down here so fast? We just saw you upstairs,’ and he looked confused and said, ‘I’ve been here the whole time.’”
Both Song Ji Hyo and Park Han Byul were left shaken but not terrified. Song Ji Hyo remembers laughing it off in the moment. “I wasn’t scared — I just thought, ‘Wow, this movie’s going to be a box office hit!’” she said. And she wasn’t wrong — Wishing Stairs went on to become one of Korea’s most iconic early 2000s horror films.
But the unexplained activity didn’t end there.
Song Ji Hyo recalled another eerie moment on set involving a clock that played a role in one of the film’s hallway scenes. The sound team had taken every precaution to eliminate ambient noise, including removing batteries from nearby devices.
“There was this alarm clock in the scene, and suddenly, it started ringing,” she recalled. A crew member rushed over to stop the noise and opened the clock, only to find it had no batteries inside. “Everyone just froze,” she said. “We all saw it. A clock chiming with no power source.”
Song Ji Hyo said the entire cast and crew were left stunned. “That moment still gives me goosebumps,” she admitted.
While ghost stories from film sets aren’t uncommon, Song Ji Hyo’s chilling recollections add an extra layer of mythos to Wishing Stairs — a film that has since cemented its place in Korean horror cinema.
