Fan Death is Real!

Close-Up: Electric Fans Sold in Korea

(Image from Wikipedia)

Those of you who live outside of Korea have perhaps never heard of "fan death" even though it kills thousands of people every year. If you haven't heard of this, then read the informative article at Wikipedia, which tells us:

The belief [in Korea] is that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners and the fans in cars. When the air conditioner or fan is on in a car, some people are apt to leave their car windows open a crack to avoid "fan death." Fans manufactured and 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.

Although the article is written by a disbeliever, it does summarize the central facts, and more people need to be aware of these facts.

Unfortunately, some individuals -- mostly just Westerners guilty of arrogant Orientalism -- try to deny fan death. For instance, the Lost Nomad is on a misguided campaign to convince Koreans that fan death does not exist, but I've tried to warn him otherwise by providing the results from my own, rigorously conducted research:

How can people doubt fan death!? Fans kill thousands of people each year, but most of the deaths go unreported because the fans were in a different room. It's a little-known fact that the whirling blades cause disturbance in the ether that pervades the universe, and the ripple effect impairs organisms up to 500 feet distant.

This summer, fans killed several of my son's pets. First a stag beetle died when our cat, driven mad by ripples in the ether, overturned the beetle's plastic terrarium and fought the poor beetle to its death. Miraculously, the cat survived. Our eel was not so lucky as the cat. Driven insane by the whirling blades' insidious disturbance of the ether, it managed to flip itself out of its aquarium -- through a tiny hole in the top!! -- and die. We found it on the floor ... shriveled and dry. That could happen to you, too. Since then, two other stag beetles have died. Snails as well. And a goldfish has turned deathly white! Scary.

Miraculously, our cats and children have survived, but we're taking no more chances, especially now that our two fans have begun to alter weather patterns in our apartment. In the past two days, they've actually been blowing cool air at night -- even though there's no air-conditioning unit attached! We think that the fans are now trying to freeze us to death, so we've put them away in a closet, completely covered in a bag zipped carefully shut to prevent them from doing even more damage.

Fans are killers. Why do you think that they're called fans? The word "fan" is short for "fanatic." You can't trust fanatics. Don't trust fans, either.

That's what I posted on Nomad's blog, and I'm now posting it in slightly altered form here with the aim of alerting others to the deadly effects of fans. I just hope that more people will come to see how dangerous these things are.

Spread the word.