A 20-year-old Journalism student, living in Seoul, recounts the nightmare experienced during the Halloween party in which at least 154 people died
The Itaewon subway station in Seoul predicted a chaotic night at 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 29 . The faces of thousands of young people were hidden under masks and makeup of all kinds. Zombies, vampires or superheroes left the suburban with the help of the police and the subway staff.
Already on the street, the makeshift stalls to make people up and the lines in some places followed one another on a crowded sidewalk. Among the young people, faces of astonishment when seeing their friends with the most original costumes and hundreds of mobile phones that recorded curious people in a crowd, making it difficult to get to the clubs.
Barely a few meters from the mouth of the subway, the nightmare was cooking in a sloping alley four meters wide. People tried to go up to the Atelier, one of the most famous clubs in the area, while another mass descended towards the main avenue, fleeing from a street that at that time was already collapsed.
A 20-year-old student looked scared at her friends asking them to turn around, she had managed to get to the middle of the street and could not move forward. To her right, several young Korean women could not move, her will was at the mercy of gravity and the decisions of an increasingly uncontrollable mass.
This grotesque introduction to the chaos was mixed with the laughter of those who were still in a normal situation and those who kept inadvertently walking into a death trap. The spotlight for them was still on the illuminated sign of the Atelier, visible at the end of the street. They couldn’t rectify in time, none of them could foresee that he would get stuck in the alley.