Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Korean Fan Death

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

There’s a commonly-held belief in Korea that if you fall asleep with a fan blowing on your face you may die in your sleep from it. And while this idea is found nowhere else in the world, Korean culture has come up with some interesting explanations. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff, the very brief stuff you should know. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry, welcome.

Yeah, this is a cool one. I remember hearing about this, and it may have been when this article was written by our friend Debbie Ronca, but I remember hearing about this, and it was the first time I ever heard about this odd superstition in Korea, and thinking, this can't be true. I know, I keep waiting for Korea to be like, guys,

we have this onion-like publication over here that made this up. It's been a national joke since the 70s. 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 a regular old fan. Might even be likely that you'll die. And you call it superstition, 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 like the average Korean person believes that you will die, like believes this is true, like the makers of fans put warnings about this stuff on their fans. They say may cause death if you leave this on overnight. Like the fans in Korea have timers on them so that if you fall asleep with it on, it'll 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 very much a widely held belief in Korea. Yeah, not only that, like you said, tripled and quadrupled, their Consumer Protection Board in 2005, 2005, not 1895, 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 dehydrate, die of hypothermia or die from decreased oxygen. Which are all, they're hedging 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 20 deaths between 2003 and 2005s to fans. Not fans landing on someone. No, or cutting your face off or something. Just fans. Yes, the air blowing from fans killing you because 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, North Korea, just in case they've unified by the time this comes out. I wonder if 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 1950 by 1950, if not sooner. Oh, yeah, good point. And this started in the early 1970s. 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 70s, which is kind of bizarre because Korea,

both North and South had had fans since 1900. Back when there was just one Korea, Toshiba was making fans that people had in their homes all the way back in 1900. And from 1900 to 1970, no fan deaths. And then all of a sudden, there's such a thing as fan deaths. Yeah, and some people point to a 70s ad campaign

to conserve electricity, and maybe like the government got involved and said, hey, if we cook up a story about fan deaths, 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 just said

is an urban legend within an urban legend. Is it really? It's mind, yeah, because it's not verified as fact. Oh, okay. It's just people are kind of ascribing that. It's as made up as fan death, really, from what I understand. Gotcha.

But it's fascinating, and I don't really rule it out either. Apparently the leader during the time of the oil embargo from OPEC that led to this energy crisis was of that, like, you wouldn't put it past them, actually. Yeah, to propagandize this. Yeah, just to, 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, the 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,

it's mattress death. Yeah. Or whatever, anything in the room. Right, right, it's ugly shag carpet death. No, but I'm with you because what you just said is probably the origin of fan death, or at least the popularization of it, that somebody walked into a room,

found a dead body sleeping or dead in its bed, and the only thing that was going on in the room was the fan blowing on them, and that something in their brain just went wrong, and they were 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 EPA 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 fan right toward yourself when the temperature is hotter than 90 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 moisture from the body faster, which would ostensibly, I guess, dehydrate you. To death. But the thing is Chuck, it's really weird

that the EPA is saying something like that, because that actually lands like a tiny bit of legitimacy or credence to one of the theories about fan death. You wanna take a break and get to the theories? Let's do it. Okay. Hey, dude, the 90s

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, OK, so Chuck. Yes. We're talking fan death. It's a thing. Even our own EPA says it might be a thing in a roundabout way. Well, yeah, if you're in an oven, literally in an oven.

Yeah, 99 degrees Fahrenheit. Don't blow a fan on you. And apparently. You could slow cook a brisket at 90 degrees. You pretty much could. You could cook an egg on your hairy naked chest. Jeez. But that actually, like I said, it

legitimizes one of the theories that they have in Korea for an explanation for fan death. And one of them is that when it's hot out, you start sweating more and that a fan blowing on you cools 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's one theory behind fan death. One of the others, which I love for its craziness, is that the fans blades chop up oxygen into carbon dioxide in the CO2 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 carbon dioxide because that's just nuts, but that it mutilated the oxygen molecules. And so therefore, there was less available and you died. So mutilating is different than chopping up. Way different, man. Another one is to a serial killer. 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 10. 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. OK, sure. Because I don't know. If you're a serial killer, you might be addicted to this kind of thing 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 train.

I think people will want, if they are out there, they'll want to find us now. OK, well, maybe we'll just edit this out. OK. So another one that was you would just straight up suffocate. The fan killed you 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 just make less of it available, recirculating carbon dioxide, and then you would suffocate. That one actually is maybe the closest one to it. But the problem is, houses are not built airtight. They're just not. And so you're not going to suffocate in a house, even with all the windows and doors closed.

You just can't. But to be safe, one of the things that a lot of Korean people will do while they're sleeping with a fan on, or just have a fan on the general, is crack a window and 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 they're air

conditioner fan. Yeah, that's a fan. I've got to start paying attention to that now. I'm going to start looking around H-Mart and just be like, do you have your window cracked and it's really hot? And then the only other explanation I saw was that it could possibly cause hypothermia. We make the temperature drop so low that it would cause

hypothermia and then you would die, 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. But experts say, of course, a fan doesn't even drop the temperature. It moves the air around, and that air is a certain temperature. 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 knowledge is growing into a misshapen thing with the idea that your body does cool at night because your metabolism slows, and what they're saying

is that, well, 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 concerned in Korea, anytime that they give a cause of death, of fan death, which sometimes doctors will actually sign that piece of paper, they say it's death of affixiation caused by fan.

And at the Samsung Medical Center, they say that when a fan blows on your face, that air currents reduce the atmospheric pressure in front of your face by as much as 20% 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 calculate

how much it would take in something like 650 kilometer per hour wind 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 Snopes laid it out like this, was like no one attributes 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 mere 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 a 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 onto 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, OK? 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 our home on the web at suffered.com. We're all over social and we'll see you next time, everybody. Good day. I. I. I. I.

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I. I. Good day. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it.

And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.