For any of my fellow Koreans...

[Grenadier]

I'm curious, as to how many of y'all were exposed to the urban legend of "Electric Fan Death?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death

I can still remember my mom actually believing that nonsense. During those hot summers (we only turned on the AC when it got into the mid 80's or higher inside the house), I'd open up a window, and turn on an electric fan, in order to get SOME sort of cooling, so that I could go to sleep.

Sure enough, my mom would routinely shut off the fan, howling something about "Nooooo!!!! You'll dieeeeeeeee!!!"

So, when I was away at summer school, I'd sleep with the electric fan on all the time. Lo and behold, I'm still living!

Seriously, though, I wonder what kind of culture would allow itself to continue to propagate the urban legend?

 

[rlp271]

A sensationalist one. I love Korea, I love living here, and I love the people, but some of the superstitions are crazy. I was adopted, so I didn't have any of the crazy stuff growing up. I've been living here for the last two and a half years, and I always challenge my brightest students to do the research on fan death and bring me scientific evidence that it exists. They've all failed, and they've all stopped believing haha.

Here's how it started. Some people died in rooms with all the windows and doors closed and a fan running. Some nutty doctor declared that the cause of death was by fan ie fan death. The sensationalist media (read all of it) in Korea ran with it and created a national scare. It is now a LAW in Korea that all fans must be equipped with a timer that can be turned on. Most of them have a 연속 (continuous) setting, but some only have that stupid timer.

Here's my guess as to what happened. The people that died, died from Carbon Monoxide poisoning. It's colorless and odorless, but wasn't really brought to the forefront even in the US until not long ago. It still isn't thought about here. I'm guessing they looked around, tried to figure out what happened, saw it wasn't a heart attack or anything, and just said, "You know what? Fan death." You know all the other superstitions anyways. Like whistling at night will bring out snakes that will bite you and kill you. Stuff like that.

 

[miguksaram]

Like whistling at night will bring out snakes that will bite you and kill you. Stuff like that.

Ha.ha.ha.ha...My wife is Korean and she always scolds me on this one because I tend to whistle. I haven't heard about the fan death superstition though. That is a good one.

 

[Tez3]

There's an urban myth in the forces about a parent throwing a child up to amuse it, as you do, and the child hitting the ceiling fan and being chopped to pieces! According to who's telling the story ( it's always true and happened to a friend of a friend lol) it's either in Cyprus, Singapore, Malaya or Hong Kong, all places where British troops were based and had their families in married quarters which of course all had those electric ceiling fans.

A big supersition when I was a child was that when there was thunder and lightning you had to turn the mirrors round, hide all the cutlery and anything else shiny in case it attracted lightning. The television had to be turned off too but that I can understand as there were big aerials on the roofs in those days.