Prior to the adoption of Confucianism, it was the tradition to abandon one's parents on a mountainside if they were over 70 years of age. In the ancient kingdom of Goryeo, now modern Korea, a nobleman defies this tradition when he refuses to leave his mother to starve to death.
A man meets a woman on his hiking trip to Mountain Seorak, but she suffers from incurable diseases. He becomes infatuated with her hair. When he tells her about his feeling she promises him that she would leave her hair after she dies as part his heritage for the man. But when he looks for her later she is already dead, and her hair was already sold to another person. He meets another woman he becomes intimate with, but finds that she is his biological mother.
Artist Kyeong-pa is asked by the father of a dead girl to paint a portrait of the man's daughter to put her soul to rest. But whenever the artist tries to paint it, a different woman appears on the canvas. The image always takes the form of a woman whom he loved but has also passed away. The ghost of the man's daughter is not very happy that her painting has not been finished and makes her wrath known.
In the process of arresting a smuggler, the criminal's wife is killed. Twenty years later, the smuggler is released from prison and vows to murder the wife of the policeman who killed his spouse.
