The Missing Frog Boys

By Sarah Thompson

The mysterious disappearance of vulnerable people is always a hard one to swallow. When mothers, elderly people, or children go missing, it often causes empathy and panic to both stir within the community. Perhaps the worst is when children disappear without a trace. Children abductions are very rarely done by someone that the child doesn't know. While stranger abductions are far rarer, they're also far more dangerous. People who study missing children have come up with a formula: or every twenty-four hours that a child is missing, the chance of finding them alive reduces by half.
As terrifying as that is, it is the unfortunate reality when it comes to missing children. But what about the children that just disappear out of thin air? In some cases, a child is there one minute, and gone the next, with no understanding of where they have gone, or if anyone has taken them. The story of the Frog Boys has confused, intrigued, and saddened people all over the world for the last twenty-seven years. It is a story of five boys who simply walked into the woods, never to be seen again.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393813927

Sarah Thompson

Sarah S. Thompson is a freelance writer living on Seneca Lake, where she and her husband plan to open a small winery. Sarah writes about food, wine, science, and news for Cornell University and regional publications. The photographs in this book were selected from collections kept by local wineries, farmers, libraries, historical societies, and museums.

Book preview

THE MISSING FROG BOYS

SARAH THOMERSON

table of contents

THE MISSING FROG BOYS

BETHANY DECKER

MISSING JOYCE

FINDING JODI

PATRICIA MEEHAN

KELSIE SCHELLING

NATALEE HOLLOWAY

JENNIFER KESSE

TARA CALICO

The mysterious disappearance of vulnerable people is always a hard one to swallow. When mothers, elderly people, or children go missing, it often causes empathy and panic to both stir within the community. Perhaps the worst is when children disappear without a trace. Children abductions are very rarely done by someone that the child doesn’t know. While stranger abductions are far rarer, they’re also far more dangerous. People who study missing children have come up with a formula: or every twenty-four hours that a child is missing, the chance of finding them alive reduces by half.

As terrifying as that is, it is the unfortunate reality when it comes to missing children. But what about the children that just disappear out of thin air? In some cases, a child is there one minute, and gone the next, with no understanding of where they have gone, or if anyone has taken them. The story of the Frog Boys has confused, intrigued, and saddened people all over the world for the last twenty-seven years. It is a story of five boys who simply walked into the woods, never to be seen again.

Daegu is a city in South Korea, located in the North Gyeongsang Province, surrounded by the beautiful Waryong mountains that sit to the west of the city. Officially known as Daegu Metropolitan City, Daegu is the fourth largest city in the whole of South Korea. Like many large cities, there are places of Daegu that are spread out from the city center, creating a quieter sort of life than inside the city. According to local culture in Daegu, the Waryong mountains are meant to resemble a Dragon lounging along the horizon line. The forest and waterways around the mountain make the western outskirts of Daegu a beautiful place to stay, so close to nature. Of course, the locals know that the beauty of Waryong can become troublesome at the drop of the hat if one is not careful where they’re walking.

In March of 1991, Daegu and Waryong mountains became the site of a devastating disappearance... and then, years upon years later, a reappearance that everyone had been hoping for, in the worst way. The area of Daegu known as Song-so, where the Song-so Elementary School sits, is the setting for this tragedy. From the school, one can see just over the rooftop and get a stunning view of Waryong behind the building.

On March 26th, 1991, South Korea was having a public holiday. The holiday was due to the local elections being held that year. Without school to entertain them, the local children were given a free day to do as they pleased. Five boys decided that they would spend their day off from school doing what many young boys like to do, regardless of culture: playing outside and catching frogs.

The group of boys that decided to go playing among the mountain paths were all friends, despite the range in their ages. They bonded over things most young boys bond over and decided to spend their day off from school together. U Cheol-won was the oldest of the group, at age thirteen. Jo Ho-Yeon was the second oldest, at twelve. Kim Yeong-gyu was eleven, Park Chan-in was ten, and Kim Jong-sik was nine. In South Korea, counting ages happens a bit differently than in the Western world, and in other cultures, the boys would have been one year younger. The five boys decided to go catch frogs and salamander eggs in the streams that flowed down from Waryong.

Photographs that can be found of the Frog Boys together show five happy, healthy friends. Their hair is cut in a similar manner, but each boy has his own unique, smiling face. They look like any other pre-teen group of boys: happy, excited, ready to spend their days off playing outside and catching frogs. For a long time, these photographs were all that the people of Daegu had to remember them by.

The five boys wandered up a path beyond Song-san High School. It was a well-worn path, one that wound up the edge of the mountain without any great need for hiking. It was probably a path that the children knew well, as they felt confident enough to head out on their own. Catching frogs might have been a well-loved activity for the five boys. They couldn’t have possibly known that deciding to wander up the mountain that day would be a terrible mistake.

There was a sixth boy, by the name of Kim Taeryong. He was ten years old, and on the morning that the boys wanted to go catch frogs, Kim was busy eating his breakfast. He told them to go ahead without him, and that he would catch up after he finished his meal. He couldn’t have known that being tardy for the fun would be the very thing that saved his life.

After U Cheol-won and his four friends disappeared up the path of Waryong, they were never seen or heard from again. Just like that, they vanished out of thin air. Either their parents, or some adult in charge of them, must have known their plan to go catch frogs and gather salamander eggs. When they didn’t return from their adventure into the forests, the five boys were immediately reported missing.

News of the boys, who quickly became known in South Korea as The Frog Boys (개구리소년), traveled fast around South Korea. People were moved to action by the horrific and terrifying disappearance. 300,000 police and other military troops were dispatched to Waryong mountain. Hundreds of thousands of people worked hard to comb through the forests, rivers, roads, railways and bus routes in an attempt to locate the boys. Parents of young children the same age as the missing boys left their jobs in order to search through the mountains. Some even quit the jobs, permanently, in order to travel the entirety of South Korea in hopes of finding the boys in some other city. Private companies and even citizens pooled together 42 million won, equivalent to about $35,000 U.S dollars in 1991, as a reward for whoever could find the lost boys.

In the end, thousands upon thousands of people searched Waryong mountain over five hundred times... and still, no boys, or bodies, were to be found.

Locally, the children who had gone to school with the five boys at Song-so Elementary organized a campaign called ‘Find the Frog Children Campaign’. Photographs of the boys were put on phone cards and milk cartons, with their names, ages, and desperate pleas for anyone with any information on their whereabouts to come forward. Despite all the effort and attention, the Frog Boys continued to evade being found.

A year after their disappearance, there was still a general air of optimism that they would be found. Fear that they would find bodies had not yet sunk into the general atmosphere around those still searching for the missing children. There was an idea that the missing boys had been taken by someone, and they if enough effort was put into finding them, they would be lead right to the culprit. Others, too, thought the boys had simply run away together, and were now living elsewhere in South Korea, perhaps on the streets of another, bigger city. In 1992, a film was released titled Frog Boys, named after what the locals in Daegu had been referring to the boys as. Those who released the film hoped that it would reach the boys, wherever they were, and convince them to return home- or at the very least, reach whoever had taken them, and convince them to release the Frog Boys.

In the years that followed, many people began coming up with more and more theories about what could have happened to the Frog Boys. The idea that the boys had run away was becoming less and less prevalent. More people began to think that someone had abducted the boys, and even some people suggested that they had been abducted by North Korea. Even more gruesome were the theories that the parents of the boys had killed them off and buried them somewhere. However, no one could seem to come up with a solid reason as to why five separate families with all murder their children at the same time.

Police would end up receiving over 500 false leads about the Frog Boys, certainly making it harder, or near impossible, to pinpoint their location. When cases like this gain international attention, strange people tend to come out of the woodwork. Police are often met with false confessions from disturbed individuals who are desperate for attention and recognition. Authorities who were in charge of the Frog Boys investigation got a phone call from one such individual, claiming that he had the boys and that they were dying, right at that moment, from lack of food and water. Of course, the lead went nowhere, and the case remained more and more stagnant. With each new false lead that ended up going nowhere, authorities moved further and further away from being able to definitively locate the Frog Boys.

Speculation about the Frog Boys continued for eleven long years. While many people never gave up hope, the special operation in regards to the five children only operated up until 2001. Life in South Korea was moving on, even though there was still hope that one day the Frog Boys would be found, or at least an understanding of what happened to them would come to light. That understanding happened in 2002, eleven years after the day the Frog Boys disappeared from their homes.

On September 26th, in 2002, two local men were searching for acorns along the mountain paths of Waryong. One of the men was identified in new stories as Choi Hwan-tae, 55 at the time of his fateful walk that day. He certainly hadn’t been meaning to uncover the answer to one of South Korea’s greatest mysteries in the last decade. And yet, he had. The man had stumbled upon pieces of torn clothing and the ones of five