Korean Superstitions — Why the 4th Floor Is "F," Red-Ink Names, and the Fan Death Myth (2026 Edition)

Do Koreans Still Believe in Superstitions?

It is more habit than belief. Poll after poll shows that the behavior — “we’ve just always done it this way” — outlives actual belief by a wide margin.

In Hankook Research’s 2025 religion survey, 40% said they had consulted fortune-telling, saju (Korean astrology), or horoscopes. 36% said they had checked for an auspicious day when setting a wedding or moving date, and 32% had considered feng shui. The gap between the religious and the non-religious was small.

The key point is that none of these numbers mean people “believe in ghosts.” Most people who pick an auspicious moving day do it not because of spirits but because their elders will ask about it. Ask about superstition in Korea and the most common answer is a single line: “I don’t believe it, but there’s no point in tempting fate.”

Why Isn't There a Fourth Floor in Korean Elevators?

Because the Chinese character for four (四) is pronounced exactly like the character for death (死). So rather than writing 4, buildings adopted the habit of engraving F, from the first letter of the English word “four.”

Let’s clear up the easily confused parts first.

🛗 Three ways the number 4 is handled on elevator buttons

F does not remove a floor — it only changes the label. The floor above F is still the fifth, and someone living on F writes “4th floor” on their mail. But in places where death is close at hand, like hospitals and funeral homes, the number is sometimes skipped outright. In that case the physical floor count and the labeled floor count no longer match.

The avoidance doesn’t stop at floor numbers.

• Apartment unit numbers and hospital rooms: units with stacked 4s, like 404 or 444, are said to trade at a disadvantage, and some hospitals avoid a room 4.
• License plates: combinations like 4444 are seen as undesirable.
• Public vehicle numbers: Korail once started numbering locomotives from 4401 but skipped 4444, and the navy has a practice of not using 4 in hull numbers.

Will Sleeping With a Fan On Actually Kill You?

No. There is no confirmed scientific basis for the claim. What is genuinely interesting is how the story survived nearly a century in Korea.

Since this one is tangled up with real deaths, let’s stick strictly to the facts, in order.

Where It All Began

Fear of the fan dates to the 1920s and 30s, when electric fans first arrived in Korea. In 1927 a newspaper ran a piece along the lines of “the fan’s strange harm,” with an explanation that the air in front of the spinning blades became a near-vacuum and cut off the oxygen supply — almost exactly the explanation circulating today.

A popular conspiracy theory says the government spread the story during the 1970s oil shock to save electricity, but the 1927 article already exists, so the dates don’t fit.

Why It Stuck Around

The big driver was the recurring summer headline: “found dead after sleeping with a fan on.” The problem is that most of those stories offered no evidence the fan was the cause. Even a 2011 English-language article, while recounting cases, added that “there is no evidence the fan caused the deaths.” On top of that, in 2006 the Korea Consumer Agency published summer safety guidance recommending timer use, citing 20 suffocation reports involving fans and air conditioners between 2003 and 2005. The number of reports and the causal link are two different things, but the guidance was long quoted as proof that “the government admitted it.”

Where Things Stand Today

A few domestic experts used to leave the door open to the possibility, but after fact-checking spread online in the mid-2000s, attitudes shifted sharply. Ask Koreans in their 20s and 30s today whether they seriously believe in fan death and most will laugh. And yet the habit survives: every summer, parents still say “set the timer before you sleep.”

Why Shouldn’t You Write Names in Red?

Because writing a living person’s name in red evokes the way the dead are recorded.

The most common explanation is that the practice came from China: red ink was said to be used on execution orders and lists of the condemned, and the custom reached Korea. On top of that, family registers and genealogies marked the deceased in red, cementing the association “red name = dead person.”

What about now? In everyday life it hardly matters. Teachers grade in red pen, and marking a name in red on a list is common. But when writing someone’s name on a handwritten letter or card, or writing a name in front of older people, some still care. Black or blue ink solves it.

Korean Superstitions: How Seriously Are They Taken Today — The Full List

The last column in the table below rates how seriously each belief is taken in practice, as of 2026, on a five-point scale. These are editorial estimates of how widespread each practice is, not survey figures, and they vary by generation and region.

5 = built into institutions and buildings · 4 = generally followed · 3 = depends on the situation · 2 = rare · 1 = effectively dead

📋 Korean superstitions — the belief, its origin, and how alive it is today

Why Skip Seaweed Soup Before an Exam?

Because seaweed is slippery. Slippery → you slip → you fall. The reverse logic made yeot and chapssal-tteok, which are sticky, gifts for “sticking” to a passing score.

The connection is close to a pun, and almost nobody genuinely believes it now. Yet as a custom it is remarkably sturdy. Ahead of the college entrance exam, held on the third Thursday of November, convenience stores and bakeries set up exam-wish yeot and chapssal-tteok displays, and families don’t cook seaweed soup that morning. It is a textbook case of a gift market and a meal routine keeping a custom alive after the belief is gone.

• Skip the seaweed soup — on exam-day morning. Some households avoid it for days before.
• Give yeot and chapssal-tteok — sold at school gates, temples, and convenience stores. China and Japan have similar exam-wish rice-cake cultures.
• Don’t wash your hair / gift a fork — the idea that washing rinses away what you studied, and the pun that a fork lets you “pick” the right answer. Both are now jokes.

As a side note, in Korea seaweed soup is also the birthday-morning food. It is what mothers eat after giving birth, so eating it on your birthday honors your mother. Seaweed soup itself is not an unlucky food — it is avoided only on exam day.

Why Can't You Move on Just Any Day?

Because of son eomneun nal, the “no-spirit day.” Here, son (損) means the malevolent spirits said to do people harm, and son eomneun nal is a day when those spirits are absent in every direction, so nothing you do invites trouble.

The calculation is simple. It is the days ending in 9 and 0 on the lunar calendar — lunar days 9, 10, 19, 20, 29, and 30. About six days a month, in other words, and moves, shop openings, weddings, home repairs, and reburials are all scheduled within them.

From here on is what actually matters for travelers and residents. Whether or not you believe in son eomneun nal, it affects prices. Elders often insist on those dates, so demand clusters, moving-company reservations get scarce, and the same job costs more — as the industry will tell you. Weekend son eomneun nal during the spring and fall peak seasons are especially bad.

Conversely, avoiding son eomneun nal means a cheaper, more relaxed move. If you ever rent a home and move in Korea, this is practical information worth knowing.

Rules People Keep Around the House

Bed orientation also comes up often. The rule against sleeping with your head to the north is explained by the traditional funeral practice of laying the dead facing north — but these days a studio or apartment only has one or two places a bed can go, so few people actually follow it. At the dining table there are really only two things you’ll get corrected on: not sticking chopsticks upright in rice, and not shaking your legs. The latter is phrased as “your luck shakes out,” but in practice it is used more as a manners correction than a superstition.

Reading Numbers, Colors, and Dreams

Seven is treated as a lucky number. Though this owes more to Western influence than to tradition. Traditionally, three (as in samsebeon, or “three times,” and the birth-goddess Samsin) and odd numbers were the auspicious ones, and banquet and rite dishes were served in odd counts.

Color flips completely depending on the occasion — and this is where foreigners get most confused.

🎨 Envelope color by occasion — combinations you must never mix up

Korea is unusual among China and Japan in that the envelopes for both wedding money and condolence money are white. The distinction is not the color but the wording printed on the envelope. They’re sold separately at convenience stores and stationery shops, so mix-ups are rare. The rule against wearing a white dress as a wedding guest arrived with Western wedding culture, though the broader principle — avoid outshining the bride — applies more widely.

Dreams are still discussed with real enthusiasm. Dreaming of a pig dream is read as money luck, and plenty of people rush off to buy a lottery ticket. It’s a relic of the era when a pig meant property, and it’s now half a game. A taemong is a different animal. It links a symbolic dream around pregnancy to the child’s temperament, and survives less as belief than as a family story. It’s common to hear, even as an adult, “your taemong was like this.” Samjae is especially hot at the start of each year. According to the zodiac, bad luck runs for three years out of every twelve, with the first year called deul-samjae, the second nul-samjae, and the third nal-samjae. During a samjae year, some people postpone big contracts, moves, and business launches.

Are There Gifts You Should Avoid?

Yes, though most are mild. These three are worth understanding.

🎁 Gifts that carry meaning in Korea

To sum up, the one gift taboo that is still firmly alive is the white chrysanthemum. The rest are at the level of “the recipient might mind,” and watches or handkerchiefs almost never cause real problems.

What Travelers Should Actually Know

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Do younger generations still keep the superstitions? The items have changed. Fan death and thresholds have essentially disappeared, but self-interpretation content like saju, tarot, and MBTI is actually more active among people in their 20s. It’s more accurate to say the form has changed than that superstition has shrunk. Saju, tarot, and fortune shops are covered in detail in a separate article.

Q. Does superstition come into naming or changing a name? Yes — naming shops fill in the “missing element” of a person’s saju with the right Chinese character, and adults commonly petition the court to change their name. That said, most name-change reasons are about pronunciation, teasing, and administrative hassle rather than fortune.

Q. If the fourth floor is labeled F, does that cause mail or delivery problems? No. The administrative address is registered as the fourth floor, and F is only the elevator-button label. The one caveat: in buildings that actually skip the fourth floor, like hospitals, the physical floor and the labeled floor diverge, so it’s worth double-checking stairwells and floor-directory signs.

Q. Is it okay to bring up superstitions with Koreans? Yes — it’s actually a good conversation topic. Just don’t start from a premise like “Koreans are very superstitious,” which tends to provoke pushback. Most people think they don’t believe while still keeping the habits, and they’re well aware of the gap themselves.