Fear of (words that sound like) death

In keeping with its historical position within the Chinese culturo-linguistic sphere, Korea has a taboo against the number 'four', which in its Sino-Korean manifestation is pronounced the same as the Sino-Korean morpheme meaning 'death'.

Four: sa 사 四
Death: sa 사 死

As in Japanese, the two morphemes are completely homophonous. (This is actually not the case in Chinese, where there is a tone difference, cf. Mandarin sì 四 'four' vs. sǐ 死 'death').

The taboo seems to be taken to an architectural extreme in Korea. In many buildings, the "4" button in the elevator is replaced with the letter "F" (from English "Four"), which I suppose is somehow meant to suppress the Korean number from arising in the mind of the elevator user. (Oddly, in deference to Western superstition, many buildings also lack a thirteenth floor.) [Update: I have been alerted to the fact that this very same information was already posted by me over 4 years ago in a comment made on a fascinating post about similar superstitions in China at Mr.  & Mrs. SB's blog.]

Anyway, the avoidance of the number 4 is manifested in a way I've never seen before in the apartment complex where we live. The complex has nine large residential buildings. They are numbered from 101 to 110.

How's that again? Take a look:

Adjacent buildings 103 and 105

There is no 104! Nobody has to live in "Building One-Hundred-DEATH".

Not only that: every building has three entryways, each with a staircase and elevator. On each floor of each entryway are two apartments, one on the left and one on the right, making in all six vertical stacks of apartments in the building, numbered 1 through 7. That's right, again there is no 4.

So, for example, our building has the following apartment numbers on its second floor, grouped in pairs around the three entryways: 201, 202; 203, 205; 206, 207. Thus nobody has to live in an apartment whose number ends in DEATH.

But this may surprise you: The first digit in the apartment number indicates the floor. Each building has five floors. INCLUDING A FOURTH FLOOR. You might think the people living in the fifth vertical stack of apartments in the fifth building consider themselves lucky to have dodged not one but two bullets. Had the designers of the complex not, in their wisdom, skipped the number 4, these folks might have found themselves inside a DEATH apartment inside a DEATH building.

Don't you then feel sorry for the people living on the fourth floor? Some poor soul is in apartment 405. In fact, there are apartments numbered 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 406 in each of the nine buildings. Ending up in one of these apartments must feel like living inside a Twilight Zone episode.