Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Fan Death

Text: “In Korea you cannot sleep with the fan on in a closed room. You will die. My mom would come into my room at night and turn the fan off, and if she found me sleeping with it on, she would wake me up and get mad.” IW explained that some say the fan creates a vacuum and you suffocate, some say it lowers your body temperature too much and you get hypothermia and die. The fans they sell in Korea come with a built-in timer for this reason.

Context: IO is a Korean American student whose parents are first-generation immigrants from Korea. She heard the belief from her mother growing up. Within South Korea the belief is widespread enough that mainstream Korean newspapers have historically reported “death by electric fan” as a cause of overnight death, that the Korean Consumer Protection Board has issued formal warnings. IO does not really believe the fan can kill her, but she will not sleep with one running and still uses one that features a timer. 

Analysis: Fan death is one of the cleanest cases of a modern technological folk belief. Electric fans are 20th-century technology, so the belief cannot be ancient, yet it has matured remarkably quickly. Already a namesake of parent-to-child transmission at bedtime, multiple proposed mechanisms (of death) that vary by account, and a thick web of social and material reinforcement, from newspaper death reports to government warnings to the physical timers built into the fans sold in Korea. 

Don’t Give an Umbrella as a Gift

Text: I had mentioned to KH that I had gotten someone an umbrella as a gift, and she stopped me. “You’re like not supposed to do that, right?” she said. The word for umbrella, 伞 (sǎn), sounds nearly identical to 散 (sàn), which means to scatter. To give someone an umbrella is to wish the two of you scattered, dispersed. There is a workaround: if the recipient gives the giver a coin, even a penny, in return, the umbrella becomes a transaction rather than a gift, and the negative implications no longer apply.

Context: Told to me by my friend KH, a Chinese American student, after I mentioned that I had bought an umbrella as a gift. She had heard the rule from her parents, who emigrated from China. The homophone pair is 伞 / 散: 伞 (sǎn, umbrella) and 散 (sàn, to scatter) differ only by tone. 

Analysis: This same homophonic logic shows up commonly in Chinese culture, where a linguistic sign is read as a small contagion that invokes the outcome it names. The umbrella case is a good example because the prohibition attaches to one ordinary household object and to one specific verb. An exchanged coin transforms the gift into a purchase, and the relabeling alone is held to neutralize the linguistic risk. It’s not always the case that these homophonic folklores have such convenient workarounds. The changing “gift” to “purchase” suffices to break the spell.

Asking Mom If It’s a Good Day for a Haircut

Text: My friend AH, who has on multiple occasions described himself as “not religious” and does not actively observe Hindu practice, casually mentioned that he needed a haircut and added that he had to text his mom first to find out whether the day was a good day to get one. When I pressed him on what made a day good or bad for haircuts, he was vague and unsure: something his mom kept track of, something about certain days being unlucky. He did not subscribe to the system or the belief but thought it worth it to ask. 

Context: AH’s family is Tamil (South India), and he has been raised in California. He identifies as essentially secular but retains a small handful of inherited practices that he observes operationally even if he doesn’t subscribe to the backing religion. Checking on haircut days is one of them. His mother keeps the schedule, and he checks by texting her. 

Analysis: I became curious of the schedule AH is alluding to, I pulled most of the following from online resources. The Tamil Hindu framework rests on the panchangam, the almanac that maps each weekday to a planetary deity. Tuesday (Sevvāy/Mars) and Saturday (Sani/Saturn) are the days most strictly avoided: Tuesday because Mars is held to govern blood and vitality, and Saturday because of an old rule that a Saturn-day haircut shortens one’s life by seven months. The folkloric move here is AH’s deferral to his mother: a Hindu astrological ritual surviving in California as a text message to mom, with the operational practice shifted from the individual consulting an almanac or priest to a son texting his mom, who functions as a keeper of the schedule. This is a common pattern in diaspora households: the ritual knowledge stays with the older generation of the family, but those born into the new setting struggle to internalize the framework as well. In AH’s case he explains that he is not doing it necessarily because he believes in it, but more out of respect for his mother and her beliefs. 

Left-Handed People Are Evil 

Text: My roommate JS’s grandmother believes that left-handed people are evil. JS himself is left-handed.

Context: Told to me by JS one evening in our apartment. His grandmother’s family is from Texas, and the belief came down through her own family’s Catholic-inflected Mexican folk tradition. JS describes the belief as something his grandmother says with a considerable degree of humor, often teasingly, often when the topic of left-handed people comes up. They laugh together about the contradiction between the stated belief and his own existence as her left-handed grandchild. 

Analysis: What is interesting about JS’s case is that the belief is doing none of the work it was originally meant to do, and yet it still circulates, just in a different way. She says it teasingly, often when JS is in the room, and the two of them laugh about the obvious contradiction between the rule she is pretending to hold and the left-handed grandson she is pretending to call evil. The belief has been domesticated into a running family joke. The “left as evil” belief is one of the most widely distributed folk beliefs in the world, showing up in Latin Catholic, Chinese, Islamic, and Hindu traditions with varying degrees of severity. The Latin American Catholic version draws on the Latin sinister (left meaning unlucky in Roman augury), the goats placed on the left at final judgment in the bible, associations of the left hand with the devil’s preferred side. What JS and his grandmother share is the belief’s late life: a folk rule that has lost its teeth, but is yet useful, here as the setup of a joke that grandmother and grandson perform together.

A Rattlesnake’s Rattle Has the Devil in It 

Text: The belief: the rattle of a rattlesnake is associated with the devil. You should never keep one. The legend that authorizes it: a man once found a rattle in the brush, thought it looked cool, and slipped it into his pocket. He carried it with him for some time. It made him slowly insane. He could not sleep well and would sometimes hear the rattle shaking in his pocket when no one else could hear it. One night he got up in the middle of the night, took a knife, and killed his entire family. He was found in the morning on his porch, rattle in hand, without memory of what he had done. 

Context: Told to me by my roommate JS, who attributes the story to his grandmother. JS’s grandmother is a devout Catholic and Tejano, who grew up in Texas. The legend, as his grandmother framed it, is a general cautionary tale, not something that happened to anyone she knew personally. JS does not believe the rattle is cursed but says he would not pick one up. 

Analysis: This is a classic example of a folkloric rule and a story that demonstrates the consequences of breaking it. The underlying idea is that the rattlesnake’s danger does not leave when the snake dies. The rattle keeps it, and whoever picks it up carries it home. The legend’s shape (find, want, keep, lose your mind, lose your family) is familiar among Latin American cursed-object stories, where the trouble begins whenever someone takes home an object that should have been left where it was. The story’s real work is what it did to JS, and through him to me: neither of us believes a rattle is literally dangerous, and yet neither of us would ever pick one up. The “devil” reading the grandmother gives the rattle is a Catholic name for an older unease, as the rattlesnake as a charged figure predates even the arrival of Catholics to the new world. The geography is also significant: the Texas-Mexico border is where the snakes have a real material presence, and Anglo and Tejano traditions have been swapping folkloric material about them for some time. The dangers of a live rattlesnake are clear, but the story extends the good form of avoiding them even to dead rattlesnakes.