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It's Not Just the South Koreans

We could have fans on while we slept, but they couldn't be pointed directly at us. That would result in something bad. Possibly a ghost sitting on your chest. Mebbe death. I don't remember exactly anymore. Sometimes the horrible consequences for various things sort of blend together in my memory.

In South Korea, many older people fear that if you sleep with an electric fan in the room, you may never wake up.
...
The South Korean news media and scientists keep trying to debunk this notion, but it won't go away.
...
Do a bit of research on fan death, and you'll find an American climatologist who -- at least according to the Internet -- says it's a real thing.

That man is Larry Kalkstein of the University of Miami, and he says if you're dehydrated, sitting in front of a fan in a hot room can make you more dehydrated. That can cause medical problems.

But, he's quick to add, "fans do not chop up oxygen molecules in the middle of the night, they can't lead to hypothermia, they can't suck oxygen out of a room. None of those things can happen."

This lost-in-translation moment came a few years ago when Korean journalists interviewed him in Seoul.

"One of the women asked me if I believed in fan death, which I'd not heard of, so I said, 'Yes. Fans can create a problem.'" he recalls.

"But they thought I meant that I believed in traditional fan death, when I did not, so that made a bit of a stir, and that's probably why you're calling me right now, because my name became associated with fan death," he adds.

So for the record, Kalkstein does not believe in fan death.

In 2008, Chun Rim, a professor at the Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, decided to actually test the hypothesis.

He says it was hard to find anyone to take part in this so-called dangerous experiment. So he used his 11-year-old daughter.

Link

I risk my life nightly so that fnord12 can have the ceiling fan on when we sleep. No ghosts, so far, but sometimes i have to sleep with my head under the covers for protection from all that moving air.

Don't go to bed with wet hair, either. That'll result in rheumatism. And headaches.

By min | August 21, 2015, 1:14 PM | Ummm... Other?