Sometimes you hear things that make so little sense, you wonder how someone came up with them in the first place. Take, for example, the fan death myth. You may not have heard of this. That’s because the myth is generally told and retold in South Korea, but the myth says not to leave an electric fan on at night because doing so will kill you while you’re sleeping. Fan manufacturers apparently take this seriously, making fans that switch off after a certain period so you don’t die in your sleep. While automatic fans are a good idea, especially if you use the fan just for the white noise and not for the cooling effect, the reason behind it is silly, especially after reading some of the reasons people believe this. Sucking all the oxygen out of a room? Really? This sounds like something from a scifi movie, not something that the government of a country would issue a statement on.
Besides, if fan death were real, I wouldn’t even be writing this because I’d be dead. Blame the fan-loving roommate from my first year of college and the air conditioner-less but otherwise quite nice dorm I lived in sophomore year. Moving in that dorm in the middle of August in Georgia (with a nineteenth century elevator to boot) was not fun.
One reply on “Leave that fan on while you sleep. It won’t kill you.”
This is an interesting myth that I’ve never heard of! Yep, my parents would be dead… *ponders that for a while, then decides that would be a bad thing) but I’d probably be fine as I can count the number of times I sleep with a fan on in a year on one hand lol