‘Waking Up Ghosts: Making Peace with Ancestors’

I was never supposed to be the one in my über-Christian family who heard voices and fed family ghosts. As a child, adolescent, and even young adult, I wasn’t aware I had religious and spiritual choices beyond categorically white Jesus. I am, whom some would call, a cradle Christian. I was born into a faith tradition through the example and nurture of my family. My maternal grandparents made sure of it. Their Christian faith held them together and comforted them during national and personal tragedies. My maternal and paternal grandparents survived the Japanese Occupation of Korea, the Korean War, and internal displacement. My paternal grandmother survived immigration to the United States in the 1960s, when Los Angeles had no real Koreatown and the US government couldn’t decide if Asians were white, people of color, or aliens. Throughout their lives, their belief in the Christian God, in Jesus, was the glue that held them together, a promise of peace and joy beyond the tragedy and sacrifice of their present circumstances. Their stories were the inheritance they gave their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren — the riches of hope, a precious treasure that survived the aftermath of war. My grandparents, all of them now ancestors, gave up everything to sustain their freedom.

There are two generations between me and the Korean War. Between those two generations, two threads of spirituality connect our lives and stories. One is the explicit thread of Korean Christianity and the embedded and embodied theologies that emerge from missional Presbyterian and Methodist traditions. The second is much older — the implicit thread of Korean Indigenous spirituality, Korean Shamanism, or Mugyo. Both sides of my family gave up Korean Shamanism in their conversion to Christianity. Back then, to give up one’s Indigenous religion and spiritual practice meant severing the connection between yourself and your ancestors. The smashing of ancestor tablets, the deliberate erasure of death days, the forgoing of the lunar calendar and celebrations, and the starvation and impoverishment of familial ghosts. Except, when something is primordial, it survives beyond the symbols that enshroud it. The ancient ways live on in unassuming daily practice and the marrow of your bones. The old ways are patient because time is a mere human invention. Deep magic does not mind waiting until we are ready to wake up and conjure again. Bindings to the older tradition of Korean Shamanism lived on in my family under the guise of the newer Christian tradition and its practices for two generations. Our family, like others, traded our old religious symbols and practices for new ones; a cross instead of ancestor tablets, prayer and laying on of hands instead of kut or hanpuri, Satan and demons instead of Korean gods and restless spirits, and communion instead of jesah.

Before my family gave up Mugyo, they practiced Korean Shamanism through Korean spiritual leaders called manshin—literally, a person with ten thousand spirits. Manshin or mudang were pillars of daily life in early Korea. They gathered the Korean people, both the living and the dead, to soothe their grief and sorrow and bring about prosperity. Korean Shamanism was and is still prominently led by women and queer people. The arrival of Buddhism, Confucianism, and, later, Christianity buried Korean Shamanism, or Mugyo, and those who kept Mugyo as part of Korean culture. The political power of state religions like Confucianism fused with Korean culture, and Korean Shamanism became relegated to hushed practices among villagers and in homes during times of desperation and crisis. On the ground and behind closed doors, people acknowledged that even though religious power changed hands through political play, hauntings of land and lineages continued.

Pursuing and acknowledging our hauntings requires intimacy with ghosts, an exchange of mutual melancholy. Hauntings, whether through spirits or memory, fixate on unresolved generational questions, pain, and suffering that defies healing. I spent years intentionally communing with ghosts and their hauntings. When I deliberately pursued my journey to embrace a spiritual connection with my ancestors, I started by making my body and spirit the vessel for their stories. Learning about their lives, I pulled on the explicit and implicit threads that connected me to previous generations. I discovered stories are magic, folk magic, the people’s magic, always co-created, co-conjured. When we tell stories, we cast spells and perform rituals. We weave together our reality with one another’s dreams and conjure up the possibility of collective futures. The Christian and Mugyo traditions regard storytelling as the root of how we remember forward, learn, and live life together. The more I pursued the stories of my ancestors, the more I realized my own stories were extensions of theirs. Storytelling is hanpuri, a spiritual practice of disentangling, releasing, healing, and self-discovery through ancestor veneration.

The more I consumed and digested the stories of my ancestors, the more truths about my life came into focus: a child between two traditions and two cultures. My experiences as a child of Korean immigrants who wrestled with religious traditions and the immigrant bargain began to make sense in light of my ancestor’s stories. Even as I discovered clarity, I struggled with the reality that reclaiming a more authentic spirituality would be abhorrent to some, perhaps even to loved ones. In response to my seeking out a more genuine path, some ask, what do the sacrifices of your ancestors mean if you reclaim the very practices and beliefs they gave up and never wanted you to possess? This story and storytelling as hanpuri is my response. Telling stories and the stories between stories is my practice of ancestor veneration, building altars of connection across generations. Storytelling as hanpuri is my participation in my family’s generations-long cyclical return to our Indigenous spiritualities and practices, no longer hidden away but lifted up alongside Christian practices as a commitment to decolonization.

I am done believing that we must let go of the old to pick up the new. Like Mago, the Creatrix at the beginning of the oldest Korean cosmos stories, the old gives birth to the new and is not destroyed by it. My body and spirit can hold more than one world at a time, more than one tradition. I am learning to embrace the traditions, practices, and rituals that nourish me as spiritual siblings living within me rather than at war with each other. Bringing our collective stories and practices together across generations, time, and oceans is a work of feeding and appeasing spirits, including my own.

Reprinted with permission from “Waking Up Ghosts: Making Peace with Ancestors” by Christine J. Hong. Copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books