Out of the many dangerous items in the house, an electric fan might not be the first thing you would be cautious of, but in Korea, they would be concerned about that fan. An urban legend that has cycled throughout Korea created a superstition that running an electric fan at night with a closed door and closed windows can lead to death.
Some say that news of ‘fan deaths’ started circling around Korea during the 1920s and 1930s and that the cause of these rumors is unclear. Others say the rumors started during the 1970s when the Korean government was very poor and decided to spread the rumors in order to get citizens to conserve electricity. It is said that the rumors started with warnings of possible facial paralysis and nausea from the fans and eventually evolved into a warning of possible asphyxiation.
Causes of fan deaths include heat stress, hypothermia, and asphyxiation. If you do not keep air moving in the rooms, besides using the fan, it supposedly puts you at risk for your body being prone to any of these life threatening conditions. The heat stress becomes an issue if the air coming from the fan is warmer than your body temperature. Hypothermia comes from the idea that your metabolism slows down at night, making you more prone to temperature changes and therefore more prone to hypothermia. Fans are believed to lead to asphyxiation by oxygen displacement, or the idea that there would be more carbon dioxide in the room than oxygen if the room is not well-ventilated.
Multiple cases of ‘fan deaths’ have been reported by Korean media over the years. Approximately 20 cases of these deaths involving asphyxiation were reported from 2003 to 2005. The government issued a safety alert about this problem in 2006 when Korea experienced “asphyxiation from electric fans and air conditioners” to be in the top five most common accident or injury for that summer.
No matter when this legend first started, the danger of electric fans has been passed down through generations. The warnings that people receive about fans vary from getting a simple cold after sleeping with a fan on to an uncle died of asphyxiation after forgetting to turn the fan off at night. Science, and some common sense, can disprove the existence of ‘fan deaths,’ but it has become a habit for South Korea as a whole. The legend is now just a part of Korean culture. Many Koreans cannot explain their own legend past, “My grandparents told me…” or “My parents said…” The rumors will continue to spread into new generations for the foreseeable future.