The Ghost Bus - A Halloween Special

Hello there, my dear reader and a very merry Spooktober to you.

Firstly… I’ve got some not-so-spooky news to share.

If you haven’t heard it by any other means yet, I am currently working on turning this blog into an actual, physical book! Yes, you heard that right. All these short (they’re pretty long) stories will be in the form of a ‘small’ book (around 132 pages to be exact), that will also somewhat be an illustrative project since you can expect some illustrations to go along with it - sticking to the theme of the blog of course.

It will also be riso-printed which is a special kind of printing technique - similar to that of screen printing, but a lot more automated and a lot more complicated for my itty-bitty brain to wrap around when organising the files *cries*

Anyway, please look forward to it. I plan to sell some of them, so if you’d be interested, please feel free to pop me an email or DM somewhere.

Since today is Halloween, I thought what better time to share this entry with you than right now? (If you aren’t reading this on Halloween… well just pretend you are, okay?)

As you can see from the title - it’s a rather fitting time, no? Don’t worry though, I’m not going to talk to you about haunted buses or anything of the sort, but rather…

...the mysterious bus that sneaks its way past the system,

the mysterious bus that is yellow when it should be green,

the mysterious bus that you can never quite catch…unless you’re paying attention to when it may or may not arrive…

Ah yes, that bus would be bus number 73 - a bus that is supposed to be green. (You already know about the technicalities surrounding the colours of buses by now I should hope.)

So how did Ghost come to be (as I like to call her). Well, you see - I was waiting for my bus one day. I had just walked my way over to the bus stop and checked the monitor to see my bus’s arrival time. Needless to say the wait time was obnoxiously long - very out of the ordinary.

I was really upset because there’s nothing worse than wanting to just get home but being bound to the wait time of your dreaded and evidently ‘taking-it’s-oh-so-sweet-time’ bus is very much not the vibe.

So you can picture my amazement when a yellow bus came sneaking around the corner (literally, the road curves before the bus stop so the buses coming are quite the surprise unless you check the monitor), and that bus happened to be none other than bus number 73. I had to do a double take on it because I was asking myself ‘why is this bus yellow all of a sudden?’ The standard colour for this bus is green and so that is the colour it should be. If I weren’t paying attention to the square number displayed on the front window of it, I wouldn’t have thought twice about not getting on. No ordinary yellow bus will take me home so why bother even paying attention to one? Well, good thing I did then and there because it made me re-assess my confidence when it came to knowing what to look for when a bus was approaching.

Alright, so I established that I wasn’t dreaming. This was really my bus.

But the monitor still displayed a gruelling twenty minutes until 73’s arrival time, so how is it that 73 was in front of me? I didn’t have that much time to contemplate it though, so I hopped on anyway and decided to figure it out once I was inside. When I got inside, I had to reassure myself twice by looking at the schedule displayed inside the bus.

That says 73 alright…

Okay, so for sure for sure for SURE, it is my bus, and it did in fact, take me to where I needed to be – home.

Ghost made very spontaneous and very few appearances since the first time I saw her. I deduced that sometimes, they need more 73 buses on the road because there perhaps are not enough of them. I say ‘sometimes’ because the bus is always yellow when it decides to appear. Why not paint it green? Perhaps this bus plays several roles and 73 is only one of them.

So many questions… yet so few answers…

What a mystery she is. Who would have thought a bus would be so…infatuating.

Regardless, it’s an exciting find to see her on the road.

However, apart from the above-mentioned information, this specific 73 is not on the system – thus why I’ve dubbed it a ‘ghost’ bus. You just can’t track it anywhere. It doesn’t appear on the monitor at the bus stop, nor does it appear on the map app. Usually on Kakao Maps (one of Korea’s most used map apps), there’s a feature in Gwangju and a few other cities where you can view the real-time route of the bus and where it currently is. You can even watch it move and watch it stop. The system is very accurate, and it’s not often delayed – however there have been a handful of times where it glitches or the bus jumps.

Whilst yellow bus 73 is known for being a ghost bus in my books, bus number 14 tends to be the glitch bus, because every time I try and use this real-time tracking feature to see where this bus is, it always tends to glitch and jump ahead when it gets to one of the stops nearby my apartment.

This bus has screwed me over a couple of times, especially at first when I wasn’t aware of this little ‘mishap feature.’ I would leave my apartment with ten minutes to spare, ensuring I would have enough time to cross the road and get to the stop, however, bus number 14 would jump ahead to ‘arrival in four minutes’ and I’d be scurrying around like a headless chicken in hopes that the traffic light changes to green faster. (It doesn’t.)

Alright, so back to bus 73.

It had been a while since I had seen this bus, so it had escaped my mind. However, it had recently made a re-appearance at my school. Thank goodness for it because I was about to throw hands at the fact that my bus was horrible delayed - AGAIN. Turns out it wasn’t delayed, the one in front of it just wasn’t on the system – because it was none other than Ghost.

So, Ghost came and I got excited, now being familiar with her. I hopped on and thanked God that I wouldn’t get home after the sun had gone down. The ride home is only fifteen minutes, but it’s fifteen minutes too long when my bus decides to arrive later than I’d like. Although the sun wouldn’t actually set, time is still very much always of the essence.

The next day or so, I left my apartment to go wait for my bus. This time, I was going to work and not coming from work. To my surprise, I was the first one waiting at the stop (there are usually quite a few of us) and to my even greater surprise, my bus waiting time was around

T H I R T Y WHOLE MINUTES.

HUH? That’s weird.

My wait time is usually no more than eight to twelve minutes by the time I get to the stop, so this was more than strange. Another woman had come and sat down, but she didn’t appear too concerned. I wouldn’t say I was concerned either since I would still make it to work on time regardless, but it was a little bit annoying to say the least.

A young boy came next, sneaked a peak at the system and immediately whipped out his phone and proceeded to call what I assumed to be his mom or dad, telling them about the very long waiting time for our bus. My guy was stressing.

No one else had come outside yet which was also sort of unusual– but perhaps they were looking at the app schedule and realised the bus wouldn’t be here for a while – so it was only us three… waiting.

It then hit me.

Ghost.

Suddenly, I realised that the bus is probably delayed because Ghost is in front of it. I checked the time, and it was fast approaching the usual arrival time for 73, and so I looked on in anticipation – watching… waiting… tapping my feet like an eager tap dancer ready to initiate the most epic performance ever. Just know for whatever reason, I was ready.

YES!

There, out the corner of my eye, I saw a yellow bus turning the far corner and I just knew it was Ghost. (It was indeed.) I was so happy – I don’t think I’ve ever internally felt so excited to ride a bus, but I was pretty proud for guessing that the mysterious, sneaky ghost bus would make an appearance. I didn’t have anyone I needed to say ‘I told you so’ to - but the moment was still nonetheless very satisfying.

It feels good to be right annnnnnd have good intuition.

What was even better about the whole situation is that only three of us got on instead of the usual eight or nine people. The bus was also somewhat empty – because no one was most likely aware of its arrival. They’re stuck in their apartments waiting for the bus that actually shows up on their apps (those poor saps), whilst I’m here riding sneaky-peaky Ghost. Bless.

All the stops we got to had minimal to no people waiting. It felt like we were truly as invisible as the Knight Bus from Harry Potter. We were gliding down those streets like we weren’t even there to begin with – it was fabulous.

Needless to say, I made it to work in record time.

After that occurrence, I had decided how this would make a cute little blog entry and I had to excitedly write about it and so here I am, bringing you this special Halloween-themed special. Well, sort of.

I haven’t seen Ghost since, but I know she’s out there somewhere, hiding in the shadows and in-between the bus stops.

To anyone in Gwangju who’s curious to sneak a peak of her is… just remember:

Blink, and you just may miss her. She is a ghost bus after all.

Happy Spookies (㇏(•̀ᢍ•́)ノ)

Until the next stop,

Bus Blog Driver Tay