Since I was a little kid, superstition, urban legends, myths, and old wives’ tales have fascinated me. Mostly because I tend to believe that most are born from some tiny kernel of truth.
Take for instance the Latin American urban legend of the chupacabra. A chupa-what-a? Exactly. This creature of the night even has a badass scary name. (Plus it’s a totally fun word to say.) Most likely, this tale came about from some villagers who were mystified by coyotes eating their animals, I don’t know. I do know it’s not so fun to think about on a scary night when your house opens up to the Hundred Acre Wood like mine does.
Upping the creepy factor, from time to time articles appear claiming researchers have found a chupacabra, and showing pictures of some ugly, hairless, dog-like creature. I scare myself by believing that such tales didn’t entirely materialize out of someone’s imagination.
Recently, I read about a superstition that hit a little close to home. In August, NPR reported that in Korea some people have a superstition about electric fans. This long held superstition has some people believing that sleeping with an electric fan can cause death. However, I didn’t have to read beyond that to know I had already formed my opinion: They are totally right to be afraid.
Most readers are shaking their heads right now in doubt, being avid fan enthusiasts. I know this because I conducted my own official research, consisting of posting a social meme featuring a cartoon character stating that it could never sleep without an electric fan. Then I watched and analyzed the survey responses, which overwhelming included comments from people indicating that they indeed believed that they also couldn’t sleep without a fan.
Based on this overwhelming evidence, I will surmise that most of my readers like to sleep with fans. So that puts me firmly in the minority. It also creates a major schism in my bedroom at night.
The NPR article suggested that people who subscribe to electric fan death might believe that the fans reduce oxygen in a room or lower body temperature. I don’t know why people who believe in the electric fan death superstition believe that the fans cause death, but I know in my house they raise the level of arguments such that there’s an increase in the possibility of someone having to sleep in the doghouse. I suppose that’s one way an electric fan can cause lowered body temperature.
I expected that after our nearly 115th year of marriage, Ron and I would have some kind of major standoff. I thought it would be that anticipated day he arrives home from work in an Italian sports car that he mortgaged our house to buy, or maybe it would be about my insistence that we pack up and move to Chile, raising our kids on the beach. Instead, we’ve had fierce showdowns about the giant dual airplane propellers situated to blow directly into our faces as we sleep. He calls them fans, I call them hazardous to my health.
Aside from the obvious risk of me getting sucked into the spinning blades of death like a tiny wayward sparrow, they tend to dry out the air causing me to wake up choking and struggling for a glass of water to quench my dry-as-dirt throat.
Somehow these things don’t happen to Ron, and so he says it’s all in my head. However, then there was the article I ran across in Scientific American discussing how a heat wave affects the body. One of the questions was about whether fans cool a room during a heat wave. The article said that actually the opposite is true. It said that fans can create a convection oven effect by whirling the hot air around, which explains why I wake up sweating and uncomfortably hot in the middle of the night (I knew it wasn’t hot flashes!).
These reasons give me plenty of ammunition for my argument against employing the large, annoying fans in my bedroom.
But there’s an even bigger reason I object to the fans: They’re loud.
“I can’t hear anything with the fans running,” I said to Ron.
“You don’t need to hear anything, you need to sleep” he said.
But I do need to hear things. I need to know that I can hear things like the kids talking in their sleep, the dog rustling in the living room, the owls hooting outside, and all the little creaks and cracks that otherwise keep me alert at night ready to bust out some crazy, funky Kung Fu action, Kill Bill style.
Also, the Hundred Acre Wood behind our house seems like it could be prime residential property for a chupacabra. I don’t know much about the living or hunting conditions that chupacabras prefer, but I know that white noise the decibel output of an airplane would make a great cover for a possibly-mythical-maybe-real creature to make a sneaky break-in to do chupacabra stuff to unsuspecting victims.
For all the anti-fan rhetoric I throw at him, Ron’s only comeback is, “I can’t sleep without it.” That’s the kind of answer that disarms any mom or spouse who’s given up his or her own comfort for the well-being of their family. And so the fan stays. I’ll just have to make it a habit to pace the house at intervals making sure my family is safe from any insidious bogeyman, chupacabra, or rogue murderous electric fan.
With the exception of electric fans, Shelly has an amicable relationship with most major household appliances. Contact her at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 29 – Nov 4, 2015.