For decades, many Koreans believed that sleeping in a closed room with an electric fan running could quietly kill you overnight. It even has a name: "fan death."

On The Story Real Korea, we unpack one of the most famous myths in Korea: why fans are sold with built-in timers, how news outlets and even a government body once treated it as real, the (debunked) theories about oxygen and hypothermia, and how heat waves and repetition turned a harmless appliance into a national bogeyman.

— Hosted by Jacob Lee Independent production. All facts drawn from publicly available sources.