Korea’s silent killer strikes again.
YTN (Korean) reports that a 48-year-old man was found dead on the floor of his rental room in Daegu in the early morning hours Wednesday.
His colleague who found the body noted the electric fan was running.
Police are still examining the exact cause of death, but they believe that in the absence of signs of an outside intruder, the man died because he fell asleep with his fan on.
BTW, on a personal note, I fell asleep with my fan turned on and the windows closed last night. It’s a miracle I lived to blog the tale.
53 Comments
Yet another person gets away with poisoning.
“Police are still examining the exact cause of death, but they believe that in the absence of signs of an outside intruder, the man died because he fell asleep with his fan on.”
Airtight case!
I caught my fan looking menacingly at me the other night. Manageed to turn the bastard off before it sucked all the oxygen out of the air though.
How much money could a pharmaceutical company make here if they developed a fan death vaccine, patch or pill?
do ya suppose the cops would feel as strongly about the cause of death if the man had no fan and just a silly propeller hat?
on a side note: i plan to challenge my tower fan to a deathmatch tonight. i’ll be closing the windows and giving it all the juice it can take. and just to make sure we have a level playing field, i’m going give myself hypothermia before i go to sleep in an ice water bath. BRING IT ON!!!!!
With CSI on TV about five hours a day here, you’d think that a few people - hey, maybe even the odd local cop - would start to question this kind of investigative logic (or lack thereof).
I’m not expecting most Koreans to suddenly realize that fan death doesn’t exist - my occasional attempts at conversions over the years were neither appreciated nor successful - but it is amazing that other causes - Wedge mentioned poisoning, for one - are seemingly not considered by the police.
What can account for this? Poor training? Ineptitude of the officers in question? Laziness? A different process of reasoning?
Can I call in sick tomorrow and claim I had a close brush with fan death?
The guy was 48. An obvious explanation is heart failure or a stroke.
I’m starting to wonder if the cops who tip off the press about the fan death cases really believe their BS. I think they are just making this stuff up just so they can make a bit of pocket money and have a good laugh at the expense of the reporter.
Damn… Decepticons are turning into fans now!
Nah, if you die sleeping, it’s going to be diarrhea or vomit from the dog meat you’ve eaten. Unless you submit yourself to the fatwa that’s been released from, where, the Filippines.
Hey, you do read the comments!
I must confess, pulling a Jimi Hendrix on bad dogmeat seems a particularly unpleasant way to go.
Reason #1,214 why Korea will never be taken seriously by the world community.
Not to mention using fan death to cover murder, how about suicide? Get a huge policy with AIG, drop a bottle of Nembutal, shut the window and door, turn on the fan and, voila, the kiddies go to Harvard.
Blown to death. . . What a way to go!
Friends, what some of you think of as ‘fan death’ is really just a part of ‘fan life’.
Like the blades on a 신일 SIF-14GSP stand-up model with 3-hour timer (available for KRW26,800 from eNuri while supplies last), it’s all just coming around again.
Regis Philbin says fan death is tough but it’s worth it.
I always thought that the reports of Koreans believing this were exaggerated until last week. I was traveling with a Korean friend in Thailand last week when he insisted that the front door be left open during the night. The reason? – there are so many deaths in Korea due to electric fans. It’s all over the news.
I saw that he was a true believer and that arguing would not do any good so the door was open throughout the night. I was just hoping that no thief decided to visit our room during the night.
Is this belief a recent phenomenon or does it go back several years?
“Police are still examining the exact cause of death, but they believe that in the absence of signs of an outside intruder, the man died because he fell asleep with his fan on.”
Absence of signs of an outside intruder? I would bet money the gang that wacked this guy was still on the premises during the police “investigation.”
The police may want to go back and conduct another sweep of the crime scene for “So Ju” and the rest of his little green bottled gang. Fan death my arse!
“I saw that he was a true believer and that arguing would not do any good so the door was open throughout the night.”
Amazing, isn’t it? You’d have better luck reasoning with the homeless soju addicts outside Seoul Station on most subjects.
How about submitting this urban legend to the Mythbusters on Discovery channel? It would be sort of fun to see what the Korean media would do if that episode aired in Korea.
Isn’t there ONE Korean scientist that has the balls to tell the country that this is complete BS??!!
I have gone 900 rounds with my Korean wife regarding this and I am amazed at the complete lack of understanding of basic scientific principles that these people have. What kills me is that they make their kids go to school for 12 hours a day and this is the product? My school me in math any day of the week but I can’t get anyone I know that is Korean to believe that fan death is crap.
ARRRRRGGGGG!!!!! Save us from fan death!!!!!
Saw this point raised on Dave’s, and ima steal it . . . is anyone ever hospitalized with fan sickness? I mean, there have to be times when a family member or friend finds a victim before the symptoms leading to fan death become fatal.
Century, I’m with you on the Mythbusters idea. You know there’d be a big stink on Naver the next day that those guys are “anti-Korean” though.
Griego, I think finding a scientist who’d admit that would be SLIGHTLY easier than finding one who’d admit kimchi isn’t a wunderfood that cures cancer, domestic violence, gayness, and is a viable substitute for viagra.
No scientist that ever wants to work again in Korea, at least.
#17.
I would have told that person, “Fine, leave it open if you want to get your throat slit by a burglar while you sleep.”
#21.
Of course there are. Dr. Gun-II Kang, for example, is a well known skeptic and serves as the director of KOPSA (Korea Pseudo-Science Awareness).
@ century, I just checked the mythbusters website and the fan death has already been submitted. Repeatedly.
I, too, have been cheating death nightly this summer with the air con set at 25 degrees.
Being single, I wonder how those of you who are married to Koreans handle this. I enjoyed the one poster’s line about “going 900 rounds” with his wife on this topic, but what was the result?
If I may, I’d like to ask that poster, and others of you in the same situation, what goes on at night in the privacy of your bedrooms — with you, the Korean, and the fan.
In the privacy of the bedroom: The wife moaned and groaned. Claimed she couldn’t breathe with it there.
What? Oh, we’re talking about fans. Sorry.
Rumor has it that “fan death” is reported to cover up otherwise humiliating deaths. Korea’s not too keen on reporting deaths from “auto-erotic asphyxiation”.
“Being single, I wonder how those of you who are married to Koreans handle this.”
My wife is OK with the fan as long as it is A) aimed at my side of the bed and B) the door remains open. When it gets really hot, I move to the couch (which happens to be less than ten feet from the blessed and almighty “air con”.)
As far as discussing fan death with one’s Korean better half, it is a topic generally best avoided. Not quite as treacherous a minefield as Dokdo, but pretty close. Questioning fan death can be perceived by one’s Korean wife as you ridiculing Korea in general. That seldom goes over too well.
Regarding your wives, just leave the fan on one night. Tell her you forgot to turn on the fan’s timer.
Oh, and if she gets mad at you for risking her life, and withholds sex for a month…. I’m not responsible…
My wife doesn’t believe in the fan death nonsense. We don’t sleep with the fan on, though. She hats having a fan blowing in her face. I can’t get a good nights sleep with it and my throat feels dry in the morning.
“hates”, not “hats”
Ya know, this gives me an idea - when a Korean stares at me - I’m going to pull out a battery powered fan and aim it at them.
Think I will get arrested for assault? I’d RISK jail time just to see something so insane get international ‘Stupid Korea Myths’ attention.
You’ve just gotta remember this happened in Taegu. That actually can explain a lot.
My wife and I used to have this argument until I saw a Korean scientist on TV debunking this (it was of course on some late night show, they woudld never allow it on a mainstream show). She reasoned that if sleeping with the fan in your face was deadly, all the drivers of convertibles would die instantly from the force of wind and lack of oxygen (unable to exhale, etc). That shut my wife up really quick.
Hey, this is a common superstition across the whole country. Don’t go knocking Taegu now, dude.
…Seoul itself seems to be the nexus of all these urban myths, and given that folks in the provincial cities seem to friendlier to foreigners than Seoulites, I prefer to repay the favour by not looking down on them the way Seoulites themselves do. (Plus my in-laws are all Taeguites….)
@34
No attempted murder charges unless you shoot them with tranquilizer darts while aiming the fan at them. The true evils of electric fans only surface when the victims are sleeping.
“auto-erotic asphyxiation”?
Choking to death while having sex inside a car?
I’m not that lucky.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a970912.html
HAHAHA guys my wife believes the same things we argue about it every summer!!!!!
and the pointing of the fan is hilarious
they think that if it blows in their face they will stop breathing!!!!!
HOLY SHIT i have to stop because if not i will say something bad about koreans!!!
#35.
It would be great if we didn’t have to show up to work every time the wind blows.
#41.
My wife just hates having a fan blowing in her face. Has nothing to do with fears of asphyxiation. She just doesn’t like it, just like I can’t stand having a fan blowing on me while I’m eating, as it often happens at restaurants here.
Sounds like the plot of a bad mystery short story:
One foreigner, married to a Korean woman who had brow-beaten and belittled him so much that he decided that her death was his only option, decided to kill her and make it look like the fan did it. He prepared and excecuted his plan with great precision by slipping some chloral hydrate into her carefully prepared side dish and switching her usual drink with Bacardi 151. After she passed out, he placed her in repose on the bed and turned the fan on full blast pointed directly at her face and only a few feet away. He then closed all the windows; which he had been sure to seal with weatherizing foam during the winter months. He then used a hypodermic syringe to inject her with air into the femoral artery where a mosquito had bitten her that day. The police, upon seeing the scene, determined the fan to be the killer and no further investigation was assumed. The coroner’s office did a routine autopsy and determined that she died of heart failure; a common side effect of fan death they stated — case closed. The man had his wife creamated immediately so no further investigation could take place. He collected on the 500 million won insurance policies that he took out on her only 6 months before on the same day that he weatherized the windows. He now lives in a seaside villa in Thailand where he enjoys the company of his two new, wives.
And they lived happily ever after.:)
#44.
Can’t wait to see the movie!
Although I have no solid evidence to support this, I have always believed that the fan death phenomenon started during the Japanese colonial rule in Korea. Once electricity and fans were introduced to Korean homes with the old fashioned ‘ondol’ heating system (charcoal or wood burning directly under the floors) people started dying during the rainy season in the summer when they had died of carbon monoxide poisoning from having the room closed and a fan on with a defective ‘ondol’ system. As all of us know, sometimes Koreans will use the floor heat (even today in Korea) during the rainy season to take the dampness out of the room. In earlier days, the floor would be lit off and the victims would die of carbon monoxide poisoning and the only visible explanation for their deaths had to be the closed room and the fan blowing on them. Is this a “Strange but true” fact or just my ramblings?
@46 - this is the first logical explanation I’ve ever seen for fan death.
My experience with Koreans who I’ve brought fan death up with is different. They seemed very accepting of the fact that they’d been duped by deep-rooted backwardness. The wikipedia article which, at least in the past, laughs at the country for being the only place on Earth to believe this myth is good to help convince them. We all know how motivating that can sometimes be. Despite that I seem to have been able to convince the Koreans, at least on the surface, I bet when the sun goes down on a hot humid night they still got the fear of the fan in them to some extent.
Anyway, this story has about 50 arguments already, so I’m curious.. Where are YoungRocco2, NetizenKim, and their other Korean apologist friends’ defense of Korea and Koreans here?
#46, I’m beginning to believe that all of Korea’s problems can be blamed on Japan.
#46,
That is where many people the legend began, yes.
I still think the cops are lying. Maybe it’s to earn a bit of cash on the side, maybe it’s to spare the ‘victim’s’ family of the embarrassment of having the world know that daddy had a heart attack while having sex with a 15 year-old prostitute.
many people say…sorry.
“Beginning to believe”?
[snort]
Dogbertt, WJK has convinced me, Koreans have no willpower, common sense or even minds of their own and Japan has completely influenced all their behavior, like zombies.
Ok. Which one of you wrote this on the police website?
“Recently I had a bad breakup with my girlfriend. I started dating again but I think my ex chased her away.
I think by ex has a key to my apartment. I think she has been slipping in while I am out, even possibly while I am asleep. The police were contacted but said they could not do anything.
Today I awoke to find my apartment much different than when I went to sleep. All the windows were closed. There were two electric fans on full blast, pointed at my face. I think sometime in the night my ex slipped in and tried to kill me by fan death.
Could this be considered attempted murder? Her name is Jang Jung-eun. I am afraid that she will attempt again.”
http://www.smpa.go.kr/smpaWeb/.....amp;print=
2 Trackbacks
[...] Instead of linking to Daum and all the Hangeulblely-gook, read what other skeptical foreigners and true believers have to say. [...]
[...] 18 July: Sadly this post turned out to be prophetic: Fan Death Claims Another Victim, Marmot’s Hole, 18 July 2007 Not being familiar with this site, I can’t tell whether this [...]