My father-in-law grabbed the pen out of my hand so fast I thought I’d insulted his mother. All I’d done was sign a birthday card in red ink — the only pen on the table, as far as I could tell. He didn’t yell. He just looked at me the way you’d look at someone about to step off a curb into traffic, swapped the pen for a black one, and kept talking like nothing happened. Nobody explained anything for another ten minutes.
My education in Korean superstition followed a strict, unspoken curriculum: get quietly corrected, feel thoroughly confused, and piece together the logic years later, usually from a different relative entirely. I’m Yijidaddy, and I’ve spent enough years married into a Korean family, raising Korean-Vietnamese kids, and getting side-eyed by my mother-in-law to have collected a small museum of these beliefs. Some are genuinely spooky once you know the backstory. Some are just funny. A couple of them, I’ll admit, I still low-key follow — not because I think the universe is tracking my pen color, but because it costs me nothing to not find out.
The Red Pen That Nobody Will Explain to You Directly
Here’s the thing about the red ink rule: almost nobody in Korea will spell it out for you unprompted. It’s absorbed, not taught, which is exactly why it trips up so many foreigners. Writing a living person’s name in red ink is considered bad luck, tied directly to death.
The history actually makes sense once you hear it. Back in the Joseon Dynasty, death sentences were recorded in red ink, and the names of the deceased were entered into family registers the same way. Red ink meant “this person’s story is over” on an official document. Over centuries, that association calcified into a blanket rule: you don’t write a name — any name, on anything — in red, because red-ink names are for the dead. The only carve-out is a dojang, the traditional stamp Koreans use in place of a signature, which is often pressed in red ink without anyone blinking; the taboo, it turns out, is specifically about the pen touching paper, not about the color itself.
I know this sounds like it should have died out with hanbok and horsehair hats, but it hasn’t. Teachers grading papers will reach for anything but red near a student’s name, sometimes switching to green or blue mid-stack out of habit. Office workers marking up a contract that has someone’s name printed on it will avoid red pen entirely and correct in blue instead, even when red would technically be the clearer editing color. It’s one of those rules that’s survived because avoiding it costs nothing and ignoring it mildly upsets people who were raised to take it seriously.
Fan Death, or How an Entire Country Decided Electric Fans Could Kill You
I want to be careful here, because this next one gets treated as a punchline online, and it deserves better than that — not because it’s true, but because the history behind it is genuinely interesting. Fan death is the belief that sleeping in a closed room with an electric fan running can kill you, through suffocation, oxygen displacement, or a sudden drop in body temperature. To be extremely clear before I go further: this is not real. Fans do not remove oxygen from a room or “chop it up.” There is no medical mechanism by which a rotating fan asphyxiates a sleeping adult in a sealed bedroom.
And yet the belief has a long paper trail. Reports of mysterious fan-related deaths in Korea go back to the 1920s and 30s, decades before anyone had modern climate control, and the myth picked up serious steam in the 1970s. Korean newspapers ran fan death stories for years, and Korean media reportedly attributed something like twenty deaths to it between 2003 and 2005 alone — almost certainly misreading unrelated causes like heatstroke, alcohol, or an existing heart condition as “the fan did it.” The myth got taken seriously enough, for long enough, that it left a permanent fingerprint on the appliances themselves: to this day, it’s genuinely hard to buy an electric fan in Korea that doesn’t have a built-in sleep timer clicking it off automatically after an hour or two overnight — a hardware feature that exists almost entirely because of a belief with zero medical basis.
My mother-in-law is younger than the myth’s peak but old enough to have absorbed it secondhand, and she still cracks a window if a fan’s running overnight in summer. I’ve learned not to argue physics with her at eleven at night. Belief in fan death has faded hard with younger Koreans — most twenty-somethings think it’s a joke — but that timer switch on nearly every fan sold in the country is a small, permanent monument to how seriously previous generations took it.
Why There’s No Fourth Floor
Fan death shows how a superstition can shape the objects in your house. The number 4 shows how one can get poured into concrete. This is the belief that catches visitors off guard the fastest, because you don’t need to speak Korean to notice it — you just need to ride an elevator. Push the button panel in a lot of Korean buildings, especially hospitals and older apartment blocks, and instead of a clean 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 you’ll see 1, 2, 3, F, 5 — sometimes the panel skips straight from 3 to 5 with nothing standing in for four at all. The F stands in for “four,” and it’s not decorative.
The reason is almost entirely linguistic. The Sino-Korean word for “four” is pronounced sa (사) — and it’s a homophone for the Sino-Korean word for “death,” also sa (死, 사). Same sound, unrelated meaning, but the ear doesn’t care about etymology. Once a sound carries that kind of weight, people give it a wide berth, the same way English speakers avoid certain phrases at a funeral even though nobody thinks the phrase itself is cursed. Hospitals tend to be strictest about this, for obvious reasons — nobody wants to recover from surgery in room 404. Gift sets in fours are rare for the same reason; four of anything reads as an unfortunate number to hand someone.
It’s not universal — plenty of newer buildings, especially ones aimed at younger residents or foreign tenants, just use a normal 4 — but it’s common enough that the first time you notice a lettered floor button, it’s a little unsettling, like spotting a building with no thirteenth floor and immediately understanding why without being told.
Don’t Shake Your Leg at the Dinner Table
If you’ve spent any real time around Korean grandparents, you’ve heard some version of “다리 떨면 복 나간다” — shake your leg and your luck runs out the door. It’s aimed at kids constantly, usually while they’re bouncing a knee under the table without noticing they’re doing it.
The logic ties back to an old folk story about a wealthy landlord with a nervous leg-shaking habit. A fortune teller supposedly told him he was physically shaking his fortune loose, and — in the version of the story that gets repeated at family dinners — had the landlord’s legs injured to stop him. Years later the landlord had become rich. Make of the ethics of that story what you will; it’s clearly meant as a cautionary folk tale rather than a literal instruction manual. But the underlying idea — that legs represent stability and prosperity, and restless legs represent restless, leaking fortune — stuck around long after anyone remembers the landlord’s name.
I’ll admit this is the superstition I’ve internalized the hardest, purely through repetition. I don’t believe my knee is bleeding money onto the floor. I still stop doing it when I catch myself, because thirty years of being told this apparently rewires something.
Small Ones Wrapped Around Gifts and Boundaries
A lot of the smaller, everyday superstitions turn out to be about relationships more than fate — what you can safely hand someone, and what you shouldn’t put out into the air uninvited. Giving someone shoes as a gift carries a whisper of bad luck, on the theory that new shoes will “walk the person away” from you. The traditional workaround is almost sweet in how literal it is: the recipient hands back a small coin, even just 100 won, which technically turns the gift into a purchase and voids the curse. And whistling after dark gets discouraged for a similar boundary-drawing reason — older folklore says the sound calls something over that shouldn’t be called, whether that’s snakes or restless spirits, so plenty of people simply don’t whistle once it’s dark outside, treating it less like a fear and more like a mild, wordless rule of politeness toward the unseen.
Exam Season: Sticky Candy In, Slippery Soup Out
If you want to see Korean superstition running at a fever pitch, watch what happens around the Suneung — the national college entrance exam — every November. This is where food superstition gets genuinely elaborate, and it’s built on a pun so clean it almost doesn’t feel like superstition at all.
The Korean verb 붙다 (butda) means both “to stick” and “to pass” — an exam, an interview, anything with a pass/fail outcome. So sticky foods became stand-ins for good luck: yeot (엿), a hard taffy, and chapssaltteok (찹쌀떡), glutinous rice cake, are the traditional gifts parents, relatives, and even total strangers hand exam-takers in the weeks before test day. The wish embedded in the gift is literal — may your answers stick, may you stick to your target school.
The flip side is just as pointed. Miyeokguk, seaweed soup, gets avoided like it personally offended someone, because seaweed is slippery, and slippery is the opposite of sticking. “미역국 먹었어” — “I ate seaweed soup” — is genuinely used as slang for bombing an exam, completely independent of any actual soup being involved. Some restaurants near major schools quietly pull it off the menu during exam season, and plenty of mothers won’t cook it in their own kitchen for months surrounding results day. It’s a small, almost tender superstition when you sit with it — an entire vocabulary of hope and dread, built out of pantry staples.
New Year’s Eve: Stay Up or Your Eyebrows Turn White
One more that I genuinely love: on the last night of the year, especially around Seollal, there’s an old custom called jeya — staying awake until midnight, or later, rather than sleeping through the transition into the new year. The folk warning attached to it is delightfully specific: fall asleep before the year turns, and your eyebrows will turn white, and you’ll age faster than everyone else.
Nobody I’ve ever met treats this as biologically real, including the grandparents who say it. It reads more like a fairy tale rule than an actual fear — the kind of thing said with a wink to keep kids awake for one more hour of family time. And that’s really the function it serves: it’s an excuse to keep everyone in one room, telling stories, playing cards, until the year actually changes.
FAQ
Is fan death actually dangerous, even a little?
No. There is no verified medical case of a fan alone causing someone’s death by suffocation or hypothermia in a normal room. It’s a debunked urban legend with a long media history in Korea, not a real health risk — though running any appliance safely and not overheating or under-cooling a room is just ordinary common sense, unrelated to the myth.
Do young Koreans still take these superstitions seriously?
It’s mixed and depends heavily on which one. Fan death is mostly a joke to anyone under 40 now. Red ink and the number 4 still get respected fairly broadly, even by people who’d say they don’t believe in superstition, simply because avoiding them costs nothing and ignoring them can genuinely upset an older relative or colleague.
Will I actually offend someone by writing their name in red pen?
You might get a stronger reaction than you’d expect for something so small, especially from someone of an older generation. It won’t ruin a relationship, but don’t be surprised if a Korean friend flinches or gently swaps your pen — it’s less about you specifically and more about a rule they’ve had drilled into them since childhood.
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