Ken Kaliher has lived in Korea for 33 years, since he first came with the Peace Corps
Newspapers fan belief in urban myth
Another stiflingly hot summer has come and gone in Korea, and with it, the risk of dying by electric fan.
If you've never heard of death by electric fan, you're probably not from here. Every summer, mainstream Korean newspapers carry reports of people dying after sleeping in a room with the electric fan on and the doors and windows closed.
A search of the JoongAng Ilbo's archives reveals stories about fan death dating back to the early 1970s. A July 9, 1973, story describes how a 20-year-old man was found dead in the morning after going to sleep with two fans turned on and the room's windows and door shut. The story also describes a mysterious jar of chemicals found in the room but does not explain what it was.
A wider search of Korean newspapers shows that each summer from 1990 to 2004, about 10 stories related to someone dying in the presence of an electric fan were published. Some of the deaths were chalked up to electrical failure of the fan and related fires, but many of them said the victims died from suffocation or hypothermia because the windows and doors were closed.
The debate rages on Internet bulletin boards frequented by confused English teachers and other foreigners who have been warned by Korean friends about the hazards of fans. On one message board, a writer, whose nationality is unknown, postulates that because Korean buildings are built primarily from concrete, oxygen is not easily diffused from small rooms. Others say some fans create an air current that seals the room, driving oxygen to the ceiling and carbon dioxide toward the floor, suffocating the person inside.
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Ken Kaliher would agree. He has lived in Korea for 33 years, since he first came with the Peace Corps. A collector of off-the-wall news stories, he heard about fan deaths when he first arrived in Korea. But he's never heard of them in any of the many countries he's visited, he said.
"If a story appears in the newspaper, it generally won't get a skeptical response from Koreans," Mr. Kaliher said. "Koreans also tend to believe anything a doctor tells them. They don't usually ask doctors questions."
