Documented in the Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture and studied as part of the life-replacement cycle: a miserly rich man, the jangja, abuses and drives off a Buddhist monk asking for alms. The daughter-in-law secretly feeds the monk, who tells her to flee the house at dawn and never look back. She flees; behind her the house groans; she turns, sees the estate sinking into a pond, and becomes a stone on the spot. The shamanic Jangja-puri narrative runs the identical setup to the opposite ending: she refuses to leave, interprets the father's dream, and saves the household.
The village moral: generosity earns the prophecy, curiosity earns the stone. Communities named their ponds and standing rocks after her, the way the Dead Sea names its pillar after Lot's wife. The tale travels the same moral roads as the Sodom story, a monk in place of angels, a pond in place of fire, the same woman paying the same price.
The structural reading: the look-back taboo polices the border between the condemned past and the permitted future, and the woman who turns is the true protagonist because she alone loved the place enough to risk the rule. Her stone is not the villain's punishment but the story's admission of cost: the rule survives because someone merciful keeps paying it. In the Jangja-puri, where she stays and wins, the shamans recorded the same insight from the other side: sometimes the house is worth the look.
If the warning exists to save the obedient, why does every telling spend its sympathy on the one who turns?