Today's Christmas theme story is a stark reminder that there are truly dangerous and unstable people who walk among us. But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of The Strange, Dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload once a week. So if that's of interest to you, please invite the like button to go fishing with you. But when you're out on the water and the like button asks you, what are we using for bait? Say nothing and just stick your hook into the like button and cast them out into the water. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's story. On the evening of December 20th, 2022, a young woman named Moon, Su-ho, along with her boyfriend, whose name was Lee K-Yung, sat at a table at a Korean barbecue restaurant in Northern Seoul, which is the capital city of South Korea. The couple didn't even have any food yet, but Moon was not even looking at the menu. Instead, she was excitedly checking her watch, waiting for her parents to arrive.

This dinner was a very special occasion for Moon because she had been dating Lee for several months now, and she was totally in love with him, but she had not introduced him to her parents yet. And so Lee had surprised her with reservations to this restaurant tonight for four people. He had invited her parents to come to the dinner so they could all finally meet. Moon looked across the table at Lee, and she smiled because she knew as soon as her parents saw this guy, they were going to be impressed. Lee was a 32-year-old army veteran with lots of crazy stories from his time in the military. He was also exceptionally good looking. He was very well educated, and he came from a family that was extremely successful and very wealthy. Lee's grandfather owned the high-rise building that Lee was staying in. I mean, this family was very influential and powerful in South Korea, but Lee was not full of himself. He was very humble, he was kind and polite, and he had a total soft spot for little animals. He had adopted a dog and three cats and adored them. I mean, this was a guy who was like the total package that any parent would be psyched that their daughter was dating.

After Moon and Lee had been sitting at this table for about 15 minutes, Moon looked up and she saw her parents finally coming in the door. And so Moon, she stood up and she waved to her parents and flagged them over to the table. And so they came over, they said hi to Lee. Right away, Lee, he picked up the menu and he ordered all these very expensive drinks and all the expensive meats on the menu. And then before long, Lee was chatting with Moon's father about his military service, and then Lee was talking to Moon's mother and showing her pictures of his dog and his three cats. And Moon, she was just sitting back, enjoying watching this because she could see from her parents' facial expressions that they seem to really like Lee, too. And so this night was going as good as it could have. Moon and Lee and Moon's parents stayed at this restaurant for at least two hours, just enjoying each other's company and throwing back a lot of drinks and eating expensive food. And by the end of the night, when the parents got up to leave, they were like hugging Lee and slapping him on the back and telling him how great he was.

And Lee was doing the same thing to the parents. It was like, really, they had hit it off. But after Moon's parents were gone, Moon and Lee, they left the restaurant, too, and they began walking across the street towards the parking garage where Lee had parked. Right away, Moon could tell Lee was actually pretty drunk. She had not noticed it in the restaurant, but now she could see Lee was stumbling a little bit. But Moon wasn't upset about this. If anything, she just thought, Wow, he was so composed, talking to my parents in there, despite obviously being drunk, he had just managed to mask it really, really well. But despite how impressed she was with her boyfriend, Moon didn't want Lee to drive them home. It seemed like that would be unsafe to do, because, again, obviously he is drunk. And so when Lee and Moon made it to Lee's car, Moon gently told Lee, Hey, why don't we leave your car here and just call a taxi and they can take us home safely? But when she said this, Lee took it as if Moon was criticizing him for being too drunk, and he felt really offended, because in his mind, he had just put on this great date and made this great first impression on Moon's parents, and here she is nagging him.

And so Lee just blew his lid and the couple got in this horrible yelling fight in the parking garage, which ended with Lee telling Moon that their relationship was now over. And then Lee turned around and stormed off to hail a cab by himself. And after he was gone, Moon just stood there next to Lee's car, being totally shocked at what had just happened. And then in a days, she went and hailed a cab herself and went home. And then she just laid in bed and cried until she went to sleep. But Moon was not heartbroken for long, because the next morning, when Moon woke up, she heard a knock on the front door. And when she opened it up, there was a delivery guy with this huge, beautiful bouquet of roses for Moon. And so Moon took these roses and quickly found a card attached to the roses. She opened it up, and there was a letter from Lee saying, Please accept these roses as a part of my apology. Last night didn't go so well. I'm really sorry. Please come to dinner with me tonight. Moon was so relieved to get this apology letter that she called Lee right away and said, You know what?

I do forgive you. It's all water under the bridge. My parents, they loved you, and they have no idea about that fight we had, so let's just put it behind us and just continue being boyfriend and girlfriend. And at this point, it was Lee's turn to be totally relieved because he didn't know if Moon would want him back. But they were back together. And that night, they went out for a fancy dinner together. And then also, Lee had booked a very fancy hotel room that night for them to stay in. And this is really how their relationship went for the next couple of days. Basically, Lee would take Moon out shopping anywhere she wanted to go. They went to all the best restaurants and stayed in the best hotels. To Moon, it was obvious that Lee was really just continuing to shower her with gifts and praise and all these fun things to still try to make up for that big fight they got into, even though Moon really had forgiven him. And at some point, after several days of being treated like a princess by Lee, Moon finally told Lee, Stop buying me stuff.

It's fine. I totally forgive you. Everything is good. But Lee insisted that he'd be allowed to continue to spoil her. After all, it was the Christmas season, and she deserved to be spoiled around Christmas. So in South Korea, Christmas is celebrated a bit differently than it is in Western countries like America. In South Korea, Christmas is a big holiday, but it's really just a holiday for couples. It's not really a family occasion. So in South Korea, on Christmas, lots of couples will go out on these fancy dates. And so that's how they celebrate Christmas. Whereas in Western countries like America, it's all about family and waking up and getting presents from Santa Claus. So that's the difference. Western is family centric, and in South Korea, it's very couple centric. It's like Valentine's Day in the winter. So on Christmas Eve, Lee told Moon that he had a very special dinner planned for Christmas. And would Moon mind coming over to Lee's apartment on Christmas morning to feed his cats and his dog because Lee was going to be out running errands in preparation for this big Christmas dinner? And of course, Moon said she would.

So at around 11:00 a. M. On Christmas Day, Moon hopped off the elevator inside of Lee's apartment building and began walking down the hall towards his door, carrying the key to his door. But as Moon walked closer and closer to Lee's door, she began smelling this really powerful smell. It smelled like roses. And for a second, Moon thought to herself, Oh, my goodness, this whole thing was a setup. I'm not here to feed his pets. I'm here because he must have planned some really elaborate thing for Christmas Day for right now, and probably it has to do with lots of roses inside of his apartment. And so Moon was really excited by the time she got out front of Lee's apartment door. But before she used her key to open it up and just go in, she decided she would just call out for Lee because she figured at this point, he's got to be in there. He knows I'm about to be surprised by this big thing. And so she calls out for Lee, but there's no answer. And so she knocks a couple of times to see if maybe she can get Lee to come to the door.

But after knocking several times, there was no answer. So eventually, Moon used the key. She opened up the door, swung it open, and she stepped inside of Lee's apartment, expecting to be wowed by whatever Lee had planned. But instead, when she looked around, she couldn't really understand what she was even seeing. Lee was nowhere to be found, but there were roses all over the apartment. However, these were not new roses. These were several days old. Many of them were wilted and the petals were starting to fall off and the water that all these roses were sitting in was very dirty. But really, there were like vases of roses everywhere on every surface. Right away, Moon started to feel really uneasy. It was very creepy to be in this dark apartment where no one's inside of with just these weird flowers everywhere. Without going any further into the apartment, Moon once again yelled out for Lee in hopes that maybe he was here. But again, he didn't come out of any of the room, so she knows she's alone. And so she called Lee on his phone to try to get an explanation for what she was looking at.

But Lee didn't answer his phone. By this point, Lee's three cats were circling around Moon's legs because they were eager to be fed. And so Moon stopped thinking about this strange flower situation and looked over at the cat's bowls and saw there was no dry food. They had eaten all of their food. And so Moon began walking over to the bowls when she realized Lee had not told her where he kept the cat food. And so she had no idea where it was. So Moon began opening all the kitchen cabinets, hoping to find this cat food somewhere, but she didn't. And so eventually she left the kitchen and she walked down this hallway inside of the apartment, and she found there was a skinny closet in the hallway that looked like a place where you would store cleaning supplies and vacuums and that thing. So she reached down and tried to open it, but she was able to turn the doorknob, but there was something inside of this closet that was making it really hard to open, like it was stuck on something. Now, again, Moon is looking around this dark, dingy apartment that's filled with all these wiltid roses, and she's feeling super uneasy, but she thought, I just want to feed these cats and just get out of here.

And so Moon just grabbed that door handle and yanked as hard as she could, and she managed to pop it open. And for a second, Moon just stare at the inside of the closet, having no idea what she was even looking at. And then she started to scream. One of the most terrifying places in the entire world is a place called Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. There have been so many unexplained occurrences on this property that government agencies have been sent to this ranch to basically do an investigation, and a lot of what they found is classified. I actually covered the Skinwalker Ranch story early on in my YouTube career, but the reason I covered it is because I watched another video, which was way better than mine, about Skinwalker-Ranch. And it was by my favorite YouTube channel by far back then and still today, and that is, of course, bedtime Stories. Their coverage of Skinwalker Ranch is terrifying. The scene where one of these things is outside the door of this house and they're tapping on the walls, it's like the most unsettling thing I've ever seen on YouTube. And if you don't know this by now, we, Ballin' Studios, were lucky enough to secure bedtime stories on our roster, and they now produce a weekly podcast where new episodes come out every single Wednesday.

But this week to celebrate Christmas, they're going to be releasing three new episodes, and they are all about Skinwalker Ranch. Also, stick around till the end of this video, because we're going to play a sneak peek from one of those three episodes. It would turn out virtually everything Moon thought she knew about Lee, her boyfriend, was wrong. Five days earlier, after Moon and Lee had gotten into that horrible fight in the parking garage following the dinner with Moon's parents, Lee had made it seem like he was storming off to go hail a cab and drive home on his own. But in reality, after he stormed off, he waited for Moon to walk away and get a cab on her own. And then Lee just walked right back over to where he had parked his car in the parking garage. He got inside, turned it on, and began driving home. But on his drive home, he actually crashed into a taxi driver. Now, neither Lee nor the taxi driver were harmed in this accident, and both cars were still drivable. But Lee actually had a really big problem with drinking and driving. Nine years earlier, in 2013, when Lee was serving in the military, he was put in military prison for drunk driving.

And then after he got out of the military, he was arrested two more times for drunk driving in 2018 and 2019. And so even though this accident with the taxi driver was very minor, Lee did not want to go to police and report this accident, because if officials got involved, they would see that Lee has this horrible history of drunk driving, and he would get in way more trouble. And so Lee convinced the taxi driver to just allow him to pay him privately for the damages in order to avoid getting officials involved. However, the taxi driver, who was open to this, demanded that Lee pay him in cash. He didn't want some deferred payment plan. He wanted to be paid now. And so Lee said, okay, well, then let's go to my apartment and I'll just pay you there. However, when the taxi driver and Lee got to Lee's apartment, they got in a fight over how much money Lee actually needed to pay the taxi driver for the damages. And eventually, Lee just snapped and beat the taxi driver to death and then stuffed his body inside of that cleaning closet in his apartment's hallway.

And so that's what Moon had seen when she had opened up the closet. She saw the corpse of the taxi driver. And then after Lee had murdered the taxi driver, he stole the taxi driver's credit cards and his cell phone. And Lee would use the taxi driver's credit card to pay for all those lavish dinners and hotel stays and gifts over the next few days as Lee spoiled Moon for Christmas. And also during that time, Lee was using the taxi driver's cell phone to send messages to the taxi driver's family to convince them that he was still alive. Also, Lee went out and bought a whole bunch of bouquets of roses and put them all over his apartment to try to mask the smell of the rotting corpse inside of his closet. But this murder and Lee's horrible drunk driving were not his only secrets. Lee claimed he was from this very wealthy, successful family that owned all these amazing high rises in South Korea, but that was all a big lie. Lee was not from a very successful family. He did not have any money. He basically just borrowed money from family and friends and then lied about how he acquired the money, claiming he was this big, successful, wealthy guy.

Also, when the police in South Korea began investigating the taxi driver's murder, they discovered that Lee's apartment was not even his. It belonged to his ex-girlfriend, who was a bartender in South Korea, who was in her 50s. Also, Lee's beloved three cats and dog that he talked about all the time about how much he loved them and cared for them. Well, those weren't his either. Those were his ex-girlfriends. And as police continued their investigation into the murder of this taxi driver, they would eventually find traces of Lee's ex-girlfriend's blood inside of Lee's apartment, so his ex-girlfriend's apartment. And they would discover that Lee had murdered his ex-girlfriend, stolen her apartment, stolen her pets, and even took her cell phone, and to this day, had been sending messages to her family to try to convince them that she was still alive, even though nobody had seen her and had no idea what was going on with her. Lee was ultimately arrested for two counts of murder, and he would quickly admit that he did kill the taxi driver and his ex-girlfriend. However, by this point, police had located the cell phone of a missing woman amongst Lee's things, and so they became very suspicious that he might have had something to do with this third woman's disappearance.

However, to this day, Lee has denied having anything to do with this missing woman, and they still have no idea what happened to her. And so that case is on hold. Despite how totally crazy this whole story sounds, the craziest part actually happened after Lee was arrested. Once Lee's crimes were being talked about all over the news, Lee became totally famous in South Korea because he was exceptionally good looking. On the news, they would play CCTV footage of Lee interacting with that taxi driver before he murdered him. And the only takeaway from lots of people in South Korea was, wow, this guy is so unbelievably attractive. He looks like an actor, not here's a guy who's about to murder someone. In fact, Lee became so popular in South Korea for being so beautiful that there became a real fear that Lee's ex-girlfriend, Moon, would become a target in some way, that maybe Lee's fans would blame her for putting their beloved, Lee, in prison, and they might try to attack her. However, the police in South Korea did a really good job of masking Moon's identity. And so to this day, we believe she is still safe.

And also for Clariti, Moon is actually not her real name. That is a pseudonym that we used to protect her identity as well. In the end, Lee was sentenced to life in prison for those two murders. One of the most terrifying places in the entire world is Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. And this week, as part of a special Christmas release, that's the one time stories the podcast, who is part of the Ballin' Studios network, is going to be releasing three episodes about Skinwalker Ranch. And as promised, here is a sneak peek from one of those episodes. Enjoy.

In the new year, as the spring rains began to lash the ranch, the family would lose even more cattle. But now they began to reappear, sometimes dead from no apparent cause, other times extensively mutilated. The nature of these mutilations was bizarre. Huge chunks of flesh and skin were carved out of the animals, yet there was no blood. The wounds always seemed to be cut with precision instruments. Depending on their size, displaying an almost surgical quality rather than the savage tearing of animal predators. The Shermans were feeling the stress caused by these losses. Throughout 1995, the strange activity only intensified. Events took place that were frankly, beyond bizarre.

So that's going to do it. If you've got something out of today's story, be sure to check out our podcast called the Mr. Ballin' Podcast, where we have hundreds more stories, a lot like this one, that are available to listen to right now, but many of them on this podcast are only available on the podcast. They are not on YouTube. Again, that podcast is called the Mr. Ballin' Podcast, and it's available on Amazon Music.