Korean Fan Death

like publication over here that made this up. It's been a national jokes in the seventies. You guys really took it seriously. But no, they seem to have tripled, quadrupled, octupled down on this over the years. Yeah. So, just very briefly, there is a superstition in Korea that if you sleep with a fan on in your room at night, you could die. Yeah, just might be old fan might even be likely that you'll die. And you call it superstitions. Some people call it folklore, other people call it an

urban legend. In Korea, they call it fact. It's fan death right. And not only is it is like the the average Korean person believes that there that that you will die, like believes this is true. Um, Like the makers of fans put warnings about this stuff on their fans. They say may cause death. Um if if you leave this on overnight, Like the fans and Korea have timers on them so that if you fall asleep with it on,

it will shut off. People sleep with their windows open and their fan on in the heat of the summer so that they don't die overnight. It's it's like, it's very much a widely held belief in Korea. Yeah, not only that, like you said, tripled and quadrupled um. Their Consumer Protection Board in two thousand five, two thousand five not eighteen issued a warning that said beware summer hazards

exclamation point. And there were a lot of warnings, but one of them had to do with electric fans, and it said leave your doors open when using a fan while sleeping. You could possibly de hydrate, die of hypothermia, or die from decreased oxygen. Which are all their heads in their bets there, because there's a lot of explanations for this. Yeah. And in that same summer hazards warning report or whatever, it attributed twenty deaths between two thousand

three and two thousand fives. Two fans, not fans landing on someone, no, or cutting your your face off or something, just fans. Yes, the air blowing from fans killing you because you you slept with one blowing on your face overnight, right, And there are apparently in Korea. And I should say, if you'll notice, we're saying Korea, not South Korea or North Korea, just in case they've unified by the time

this comes out. I wonder if it's it's probably true in both though, don't you think I would very much assume that although it's entirely possible that it is just South Korea because they took away all the fans in North Korea. Well, no, I mean Korea was divided in nineteen fifty. By nineteen fifty, if not sooner. This this

started in the early nineteen seventies. I actually can point to not necessarily the first news report or the first day that it happened, but it definitely started in the early seventies, which is kind of bizarre because Korea, both North and South, had had fans since nineteen hundred, that

back when there was just one Korea. Toshiba was making fans that people had in their homes all the way back in nineteen hundred, and from nineteen hundred to nineteen seventy, no fan deaths, and then all of a sudden, there's such a thing as fan deaths. Yeah. And some people point to a seventies ad campaign to conserve electricity, uh, and maybe like the from it and got involved and said, hey, if we cook up the story about fan DEAs, it'll get people to turn off their fans or put them

on a timer and we can conserve electricity. I don't fully rule that out. Actually I don't either. But what you've just said is an urban legend within an urban legend. Is it really it's mind Yeah, because it's not verified as facts. It's just people are kind of ascribing that it's it's it's as made up as fan death really, from what I understand you, Um, but it's fascinating and

I don't really rule it out either. Apparently the leader during the time of the um oil embargo from OPEC that led to this energy crisis was was of that. Like you wouldn't put it past him actually, uh, to propagandize this. Yeah, just too. He was very much dedicated to Korea becoming self sufficient at any cost, and that would be a pretty cheap cost, like just tricking everybody into thinking fan deaths a thing. Well, and here's the

thing too, what likely is happening? And we'll get to in a bit like all the real reasons and kind of debunk those. But what likely is happening is is they find a dead person. It's usually an old person who died of natural causes probably or from drinking or drugs or something, and a fan is on in the room, and because it's a thing, they attribute it to fan death. But it's weird to me that they weren't like that, Uh, it's mattress death, yeah, or whatever, anything in the room

right right, it's um, it's ugly shag carpet death. No. But I'm with you because what what you just said is like probably the origin of fan death, or at

least the popularization of it. That somebody walked into a room found a dead body sleep in its or dead in its bed, and the only thing that was going on in the room was the fan blowing on them, and that's something in their brain just went wrong, and they're like they saw the fan like a murderer standing over a dead body like they just caught it or something like that, even though they have absolutely nothing to

do with one another. Yeah, and here's the deal, our very own e p A here in the United States says when it's really really hot during a big heat wave. They even say, don't direct the flow of a of a fan right towards yourself when the temperature is hotter than ninety degrees fahrenheit, which is super super hot to be in a room like I can't even imagine. I

can't imagine a room being that hot. And this warning is basically it's rooted in the fact that fans in an enclosed room when it's that hot, could evaporate evaporate moisture from the body faster, which would ostensibly, I guess, dehydrate you to death. But the thing is checked the It's really weird that the e p A is saying something like that because that actually lends like a tiny bit of legitimacy or credence um to one of the theories about fan death. Yeah, you want to take a

break and get to the theories, let's do it. Okay, Okay, So Chuck, we're talking fan death. It's a thing. Even our own E p A says it might be a thing in a roundabout way. Well, yeah, it's if you're in an oven, literally in an oven, yeah degrees fahrenh height, don't blow a fan on you, and you could look like a brisket. At ninety degrees you pretty much could. You could cook an egg on your hairy naked chest.

But they're they're that actually, Like I said, it legitimizes one of the theories that they have in Korea for for an explanation for fan death, and one of them is that when it's hot out, you start sweating more, and that the fan blowing on you cool you off or evaporates the sweat a lot faster than under normal circumstances. Hence you will dehydrate to death overnight if you sleep

with a fan on you. That is, that's one theory behind fan death or the other one of the others, which I love for it's it's craziness, is that the fans blades chop up oxygen into carbon dioxide in the CEO two and you die from a lack of oxygen because you can't breathe. Yeah, that's a good one. It is. I also saw that it didn't chop it up into into carbon dioxide, because that's just nuts, but that it mutilated the oxygen okay, molecules and so therefore there was

less available when you die. So mutilating is different than chopping up way different man. Another one that to a serial killer, Well, yeah, it's true, it is true. You make a good point. I'm sure there's somebody out there listening. I wonder how many serial killers we have listening to our show. I bet at least ten. Well listen, guys, stop what you're doing and just go turn yourselves in, right or the very least to stop what you're doing. I say both because I don't know. If you're a

serial killer. You might be addicted to this kind of thing, and and maybe you can't trust yourself to just stop, so you need help e g. Being locked up. Yeah. I don't like this to train. I think people will want if they are out there, they want to find us now, Okay, well maybe we'll decide to the south. Okay.

So um. I saw another one that was you would just straight up suffocate, uh and if the fan killed you by by basically blowing the air hot air around the room and affecting the amount of oxygen available in that way, rather than chopping it up and mutilating it, it would it would just make less of it available recirculating carbon dioxide, and then you would suffocate. That one

actually is that maybe the closest one to it. But the problem is is how is they're not built air tight but just not and so you're not going to suffocate in the house even with all the windows and doors closed. You you just can't um but to be safe, one of the things that a lot of Korean people will do while they're sleeping with fan on or just have a fan on the general is crack a window

or keep the doors open to their room. Yeah. And one of these articles too, says that sometimes in Korea they will even crack their windows in their car because their air conditioner fan. Yeah, it's a fan. I got I gotta start paying attention to that. Now. I'm gonna start looking around h Mark and just be like, do you have your window cracked and it's really hot? Uh?

And then the only other explanation I saw was that it could possibly cause hypothermia, would make the temperature drop solo that you would it would cause hypothermia and then you would die, which is which is not true because well, for a lot of reasons. A you probably want to have a fan on if it's in the dead of winter anyway, And that's just chuck talking um. But x perts say, of course, a fan doesn't even drop the temperature. It moves the air around in that air is a

certain dempature. But it doesn't actually cool it. That's a big one. Yeah, it just circulates there, it doesn't cool it. But I mean, you can kind of see where the kernel of like um knowledge is is growing into like a misshapen thing, right with with the idea that your body does cool at night because your metabolism slows. And what they're saying is that while you're already right there on the edge, and the fan pushes you over the

edge and you die of hypothermia. Yeah. So, as far as doctors are concerning Korea, any time that they give a cause of death of fan death, which sometimes doctors will actually sign that piece of paper, um, they say it's death of afphixiation caused by fan. And at the Samsung Medical Center, they say that when a fan blows on your face, that air currents reduce uh, the atmospheric pressure in front of your face by as much as could cause a drop in oxygen. But that is a

big reach if you ask me. Yeah, that's from a skeptoid article. And Brian Dunning went on to like calculate how much it would take in like UM six and fifty kilometer per hour wind to to cause a change in air pressure that substantial. So that's not doing it either. But I think one of the bigger arguments against fan death, I think snows related out like this was like, you don't like, no one attributes fan like death by fan anywhere else in the world, and all over the world

people sleep with fans, and you don't have anything like this. Yeah, just the mirror fact that it's only in Korea largely is kind of says that it's just superstition and folklore that was passed down from family to family. But apparently Korean person will counter, well, maybe there's something unique about Koreans or Korea that makes us susceptible to it. Interesting. Yeah, they're hanging on to that one for sure. All right, So that's fan death. If you want to know more

about it, give it a shot. But don't blame us, Okay, agreed. As a matter of fact, don't give it a shot just in case it is real. Thanks for joining us. If you want to hang out with us, join us at at home on the web. Stuff you should know dot com. We're all over social and we'll see you next time. Everybody, good day.