Episode 4: Sampoong Department Store Collapse

Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries · Jul 13, 2026 · 9m

It was one of the busiest shopping districts in Seoul. A gleaming pink department store, five floors of luxury, packed with customers on a warm summer evening. And in less than twenty seconds, it was gone. Not a bomb. Not an earthquake. The building simply folded in on itself and dropped straight into the ground, taking more than five hundred people with it. What makes this one of the darkest stories in modern Korean history isn't that it was an accident. It's that it wasn't. Almost everyone who could have stopped it knew — and chose the money instead. This is the story of the Sampoong…