Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

It’s been hot for the past month or two in Korea. And I mean REALLY hot. It’s never below about 29-30 degrees in our apartment and that’s with the air conditioner running. It easily gets to 35+ humidity everyday and would rarely drop below 30 even at night. This has lead us to rely on the air conditioner and the fan to get through the days and nights of heat. So far we’ve been quite lucky and haven’t had any problems with fan death. All of our friends still seem to be kicking and we haven’t heard of any incidents in the news. Keep your fingers crossed for us for our last few days in Korea.

For those of you who don’t know what fan death is, the following is from Wikipedia.

Fan death is a putative phenomenon, generally accepted only in South Korea, in which an electric fan left running overnight in a closed room can cause the death of those inside. Fans sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on.^[1]

The specifics behind belief in the myth of fan-death often offer several explanations for the precise mechanism by which the fan kills.

• That an electric fan creates a vortex, which sucks the oxygen from the enclosed and sealed room and creates a partial vacuum inside.

• That an electric fan chops up all the oxygen particles in the air leaving none to breathe.

• The fan uses up the oxygen in the room and creates fatal levels of carbon dioxide.

• That if the fan is put directly in front of the face of the sleeping person, it will suck all the air away, preventing one from breathing.

• That fans contribute to hypothermia, or abnormally low body temperature.^[2] As the metabolism slows down at night, one becomes more sensitive to temperature, and thus supposedly more prone to hypothermia. If the fan is left on all night in a sealed and enclosed room, believers in fan death suppose that it will lower the temperature of the room to the point that it can cause hypothermia.

• That fans directly on the body deprives “skin-breathing,” leading to suffocation.

Fan death is frequently cited when police detectives are unable to determine cause of death.