The Bizarre Phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion: Is It Real or Myth?

I didn’t give my inevitable demise too much thought as a child, but when I did, I presumed I would go out in one of three pretty specific ways:

1. Death by Swallowing Gum

I don’t remember who told me this but I was pretty certain as a kid that if you swallowed chewing gum or bubble gum, you would die. Why I continued to merrily chomp away on Hubba Bubba and Orbit when I knew I was dancing with the devil on a very slippery slope I have no idea. I think I thought it would somehow settle over my windpipe or something but anyway, cue blind panic when I accidentally swallowed a piece while on holiday with my grandparents. I spent a couple of minutes in floods of tears because I’d never see my parents again, about 30 seconds feeling relieved that I was, in fact, still alive, and the rest of my life forgetting all about it.

2. The IRA

Living quite near London in the 80s and early 90s, I was vaguely aware of terrorist bombings happening not too far from my home so getting blown up by the IRA was always a low-level threat on my radar. Every time a bomb went off it would be kind of scary for a while. I would be reluctant to go outside, even to the nearby park to take the dog for a walk as it had a bin in it that I thought could house a deadly explosive.

I even briefly considered sleeping with a knife under my pillow. How this would protect me from the IRA I have no idea, and luckily I was more worried about accidentally hurting myself in the night so I never went through with this plan. Then, after a while, probably like a day or two in actuality, I decided that I couldn’t live my young life in fear anymore so eff you, IRA, I was going to take my dog for a walk.

Also, my dad probably just told me to take the dog out and, being an obedient child, I did what I was told.

3. Spontaneous Human Combustion

If you know, you know. As a child, I had many a book from charity shops or local fetes about paranormal, supernatural and unexplained things but there was one particular image that has stayed in my memory from the instant I saw it. A shoe, a leg, and nothing above apart from ashes. The unfortunate occupant of the only-lightly-damaged room had, apparently, been a victim of spontaneous human combustion, where a person can basically just go up in flames at any time.

So what we’re trying to find out today is: Is this really a thing? Was I justifiably worried about it happening to me? Or are there other, more reasonable explanations to be found? Also, do not google this if you do not want to see some pretty disturbing images.

Luckily my retinas were burned many years ago so I could handle it but maybe don’t go looking if you’re just about to eat. OK, let’s get to the burning questions.

What Is Spontaneous Human Combustion Anyway?

If you’ve never heard of this or aren’t quite sure what we’ve been going about, here’s a bit more information. Spontaneous Human Combustion is a rare but documented phenomenon, with approximately 200 examples of it in the last three hundred years or so. It’s basically where a person will suddenly catch fire for no apparent reason, with no apparent outside sources — hence the “spontaneous” part.

The body of the person will burn at such a high and intense temperature that they are soon reduced to a pile of ash, although, creepily, unburned lower legs and hands are often found at the scene. Nearby furnishings and other items often remain unburned and there is not a trace of any accelerant or external source of the fire. While it’s popped up in literature from time to time as a way to create a slightly ridiculous character death, spontaneous human combustion as a real thing is an idea that has refused to totally die off in our cultural consciousness.

A coroner in Ireland gave a ruling of spontaneous human combustion as recently as 2011, for heaven’s sake. Let’s take a look at some famous examples of victims of spontaneous human combustion and see if we can learn anything more about why it may occur.

Some Examples

Apparently, the earliest documented example of someone going up in flames for no obvious reason comes from Italy in around 1470. A knight called Polonus Vorstius was drinking wine with his parents when all of a sudden he started belching fire. If this wasn’t bad enough, he then burst into flames and died in front of them. Yikes.

Scooting forward a few centuries we find another Italian victim, Countess Cornelia Zangari Bandi. In March 1731, the Countess went to bed and when her maid came to wake her the next morning, she found nothing but a pile of ash where her mistress used to be. Actually, that’s not quite correct. As well as the pile of ash, there were also both legs complete with stockings intact below the knees, three fingers and the front of the Countess’s skull.

And listen to part of this translated report from Reverend Joseph Bianchini about the state of the Countess’s room:

The whole Furniture, as well as the Bed, was spread over with moist and ash colour Soot, which had penetrated into the Chest-of-drawers, even to foul the Linnens: Nay the Soot was also gone into a neighbouring Kitchen, and hung on the Walls, Movables, and Utensils of it. From the Pantry a Piece of Bread cover’d with that Soot, and brown black, was given to several Dogs, all which refuse to eat it. In the Room above it was moreover taken notice, that from the lower Part of the Windows trickled down a greasy, loathsome, yellowish Liquor and thereabout they smelled like a Stink, without knowing of what ; and saw the Soot fly around.

It was remarkable, that the Floor of the Chamber was so thick smear’d with a gluish Moisture, that it could not be taken off; and the Stink spread more and more through the other Chambers.

Gross. The “gluish moisture” by the way, was the melted remains of the Countess.

One of the most famous recent examples attached to the theory of Spontaneous Human Combustion is that of Florida resident, Mary Reeser. In July 1951, after having had a social evening the night before, Mary did not answer the door when a telegram was delivered to her. Her landlady went to check on her and found the front door knob to her apartment to be very hot.

Worried her tenant was trapped in a burning home, she got help to break the door down. Inside, they found the charred remains of Mary Reeser in a fire-damaged chair but the rest of the apartment had got off pretty lightly. According to the landlady, Mrs.

Carpenter: “Mrs. Reeser’s 170 pounds had been reduced to less than ten pounds of charred material. Only her left foot remained intact, still wearing a slipper, burnt off at the ankle but otherwise undamaged.

Also found were her liver, now fused to a lump of vertebrae, and, stranger still, her skull… shrunk to the size of a baseball by the intense heat.”

Official lab reports stated there were: “no signs of oxidizing chemicals, petroleum hydrocarbons, or other substances used to initiate or accelerate combustion.”

The circumstances and state of the body seemed to flummox the police who contacted the FBI to investigate further. As well as asking for specific tests on various bits of evidence, Chief of Police J.R Reichert ends the request by saying: “We also request any information or theories that could explain how a human body could be so destroyed and the fire confined to such a small area and so little damage done to the structure of the building and the furniture in the room not even scorched or damaged by smoke.”

The FBI did do an investigation into the death and while they agreed that no accelerants or other evidence of a fire starting could be found, they recorded that the fire likely started from an external source and therefore was not a case of so-called spontaneous human combustion. Eventually Mary Reeser’s cause of death was given as accidental.

Another famous case was that of Pennsylvanian, Dr. John Irving Bentley. In December 1966, a man popped round to read Dr. Bentley’s meter and, as the 92 year old was getting on a bit, he’d said the meter reader could let himself in.

Down in the basement, the man found a pile of ash, could smell something kind of sweet and could see a light blue smoke. A bit worried, he went upstairs to check on Dr. Bentley and found only Bentley’s right lower leg, with slipper attached, his walking frame and a hole in the floor. It seems that Dr.

Bentley had burned up with such intensity that the fire burned a hole through the floor. The ash in the basement was the cremated remains of the doctor. While it seemed likely that he had set himself alight because he was a pipe smoker, his pipe was actually found in the room next door.

I’m fairly sure it’s the picture of the remains of Dr. Bentley that I saw in that book of mine but I couldn’t find a picture online that exactly matched what I thought my memory was. Believe me, I looked at a LOT of images that come up for spontaneous human combustion and wasn’t 100% sure if I was, in fact, remembering the image I’d seen correctly, but this was probably the closest one.

One example that was actually witnessed by someone else happened to poor Jeannie Saffin in September of 1982. While the 61 year old was sitting in a chair at home in Edmonton, England, her father and brother-in-law witnessed her suddenly burst into flame. While they managed to put it out and get her to a hospital, she died a few days later from conditions arising from her burns. This case is held up as a major example of spontaneous human combustion as Jeannie was reported to have had sparks flashing from her eyes, her clothes were unburned and there was no external heat source anywhere near to where she was sitting.

The recent example from Ireland where the coroner gave a verdict of spontaneous human combustion happened in Galway in December 2010. 76 year old Michael Flaherty, or possibly Faherty, was found burned to a crisp in his home with no other damage to the room apart from the floor and ceiling directly above and below him. He was lying on his back with his head near a fireplace — a fireplace, you say? Yes!

And there was a fire burning in it too! — however, after thorough examinations by fire officers, it was determined that this was not the cause of his death. No traces of accelerant or evidence of foul play were found, leading to the coroner, Kieran McLoughlin, to record this surprise verdict: “This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation.”

Some Adequate Explanations

Come on, people, there must be some reason why these people have gone up in flames? Let’s just think about this. If spontaneous human combustion was a real possibility that could happen to practically anybody at any time, why doesn’t it happen more often?

There have been around 200 reported cases but a lot of these are pretty anecdotal or have been tacked on even though the cause of death might have been something else. Although, to play devil’s advocate for a second, there are also some examples that don’t make the tally as a coroner decided that spontaneous human combustion, or SHC as we’ll refer to it, just wasn’t a believable explanation. How many more examples would there be of bodies inexplicably bursting into flames if coroners were a bit more open minded?

I have no idea but my research indicated that at least a couple more could be thrown on the pile — still not exactly a statistically probable thing to happen to anyone.

I also saw somewhere that if it were possible for humans to spontaneously combust i.e. catch fire with no external source, then surely it would be possible for animals to do so too. And we never see that happening. And there are lots of animals around, think of all the ants you see — ever seen one of them go out in a blaze of glory that wasn’t induced by a magnifying glass? Surely someone somewhere would have witnessed just one animal self-cremating at some point in time? Don’t all call out at once.

So anyway, there’s no doubt that all these people did, in fact, catch fire and their bodies ended up burning a crazy amount, like way more than they should. Let’s look at some of the reasons people have thought of over the years to explain how a person’s body might set itself on fire.

Going way back, one of the common explanations for SHC given was that it was divine or maybe even supernatural intervention. You know, old Johnny Briggs was being a mean old miser so the lord did strike him down and reduced him to a pile of ashes with one leg sticking out. Let’s face it, if this was a way of striking down evil-doers, it probably would be happening a bit more frequently and to people who were actually known to be evil rather than just a few random pensioners minding their own business at home.

Supernatural or divine intervention aside, is there something going on internally in our bodies that could, in fact, cause us to combust? It’s a pretty scary thought as who knows what’s bubbling away inside there? We produce gasses, that’s true, so is there a chance these gasses could somehow ignite and cause us to go up like a Roman candle?

You may have witnessed people lighting their farts, for example, heck, you may have done it yourself. I have thankfully never been a witness to this tomfoolery but I know that it’s definitely possible. There be methane, oxygen and hydrogen in them there farts which, if introduced to some source such as a cigarette lighter, can briefly be set alight. It’s not a great idea to do this, by the way.

I also don’t think the victims of so-called SHC were sitting around flagrantly lighting farts in the privacy of their own homes and it all just got way out of hand.

Here’s a scary side note though — in Japan in 2016 a woman was having laser treatment on her cervix when a fire started, causing her to get burned. The hospital said all their equipment was in working order and blamed the woman for farting which led to the laser igniting a fire which quickly spread to other material in the operating room. How unlucky was she?

I bet people fart all the time, especially in uncomfortable or nerve wracking situations such as being in an operating room. This is something usually performed under local anesthetic so maybe she didn’t have that much control over the situation. Also, I personally suffer from Nervous Toot Syndrome (NTS), which is something I totally made up just now but it’s a real issue — if something’s about to happen that I’m a bit worried or nervous about, well, expect to smell a little smell from my general direction.

Usually I can get away with it but I’ve just remembered that at university I did a weekly radio show which I was always nervous about — shout out Just a Phase on U.R.B. There were also at least 2 other people in the very small studio at the same time but luckily we were all friends so I didn’t die of shame every time it happened. Sorry, Katrina.

OK, so maybe it’s not farts causing SHC but what about the build up of gasses or some sort of internal reaction? It’s not plausible. Over half of the human body is made up of water, meaning that a fire is not going to be able to start inside you, no matter how many bean burritos you might have eaten.

And if we’re talking methane build-up, why aren’t cows bursting into flame all over the place? There is one theory that maybe a tiny particle called a “pyrotron” could be the culprit. In a 1995 book called “Ablaze!

The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion” — what an attention-grabbing title by the way, author Larry Arnold posits that a tiny energy unit he calls a pyrotron is all around us all the time but occasionally fuses with human atoms within the body causing a chain reaction capable of totally burning up a human being in the blink of an eye. Before you get all alarmed, there is no evidence for the existence of this pyrotron and even if this was true, it would presumably have happened a lot more often and in front of actual witnesses over the course of history.

What else is flammable and we come into contact with all the time? Hows about alcohol? In literary examples especially, it seems that victims of SHC were generally drinkers if not full blown alcoholics. So does a long period of heavy drinking somehow saturate your cells and make your entire body more likely to catch fire, whether by internal combustion or via an outside source?

Not exactly. Drinking alcohol by itself does not cause one to become more flammable. Even if you’re saturated in ethanol, it would just burn off, not reduce you to a pile of ashes.

One of the earliest founders of organic chemistry, Justus von Liebig, experimented with whether the human body was flammable all the way back in 1851. His conclusion: it wasn’t. Anatomical specimens were usually preserved in solutions of 70% ethanol, but when he tried setting fire to them, the ethanol eventually burned off but the tissues weren’t really burnt in any significant way. In a piece by Brian J.

Ford for “The Microscope”, titled “Solving the Mystery of Spontaneous Human Combustion”, Ford also states that Justus von Liebig “injected ethanol into rats over a prolonged period before trying to set them on fire but found that even the rats didn’t burn.” Zoicks. Well, I guess that proves that.

Alright, I think we’ve explained that it’s unlikely if not impossible that a human being can just catch fire spontaneously i.e. without the introduction of an external source. Putting that aside for a moment, let’s now focus on what happens during so-called Spontaneous Human Combustion i.e. the fact that a body is reduced to ashes in a short space of time with the exception of the lower legs and sometimes the hands. How is this possible? Does it happen so fast that the victim has no time to get help?

Why is it localized to a body while much of the surrounding room remains intact? Are there commonalities between victims that we can point to to help with our explanation? What has kept mediocre actor Keanu Reeves on the A-list as of late? The answer that covers all these questions is: the wick effect.

Hope you got it, Simon.

The Wick Effect

Scientists’ favourite rebuttal, or explanation, for the phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion is something called the wick effect. You might be thinking of a candle wick — well, you are correct. You know how a candle burns slowly and for an extended period of time, the wick giving the flame something to feed on and the wax melting due to the heat of the flame?

You know, a candle. Well, given the right circumstances, that’s what can happen to a human body. Basically the wick effect is when a human body is ignited somehow, with the clothing catching on fire first.

If the person remains immobile for whatever reason, the fire will start burning the body, melting the body’s fat and this then serves as more fuel for the fire, eventually turning the body to nothing more than ash and maybe a lot of melted fat. This process can take several hours but could be sped up if there is accelerant on the clothing such as gasoline or spilled spirits or if the victim has a higher body fat ratio. Overall, the effect of the human candle is a long, slow burn.

In Brian J. Ford’s piece for Microscope, he also suggests that it’s actually naturally-occuring acetone that is the main culprit in the burning process. Experiments conducted with pig abdomens soaked in acetone and set alight provided an almost immediate fireball with results mirroring those found in SHC victims and evidence of a blue flame also reported by some witnesses.

While you might be familiar with acetone as a nail polish remover, it’s also present all over the place and we breathe it out all the time as fat breaks down in our body. Pregnancy may increase acetone levels in the body and higher amounts may be present in people with diabetes, people who drink alcohol, people on various diets and people who are just a bit run down. Acetone can also ignite super easily even at room temperature.

In fact, it has a flashpoint of -17.8 degrees C (0 degrees fahrenheit) which means it can basically start a fire in an igloo, never mind your regular furnished home.

In case you’ve been wondering, a crematorium reaches temperatures of over 980 centigrade or 1800 degrees fahrenheit to reduce a body to ashes in a couple of hours. Body temperatures reached during a “wick effect” burning aren’t quite so high but the bodies are generally burning for several hours, if not overnight.

Fire also prefers to burn upwards rather than laterally, which explains why there isn’t much fire damage caused to other items in the room, even if they are quite near to the victim. Once the fire has consumed the human fuel, it just goes out, leaving damage above and below the victim and to whatever the person was sitting on, but rarely travelling to other areas. Think about it — unless it’s a raging inferno with lots of highly flammable things right next to it, you can get pretty close to a normal fire without fear, unless you have Nervous Toot Syndrome, I guess.

How close have you stood to a fire to toast marshmallows, throw stuff in it or whatever? Most of the time, the fire stays where it is and is actually quite hard to keep alight.

Experiments have been done to confirm this wick effect. Because pigs’ bodies are quite close to humans, they are usually first in line to be burned on the pyre in the name of debunking spontaneous human combustion. In a test for the BBC’s QED program in 1998, a dead pig was wrapped in a blanket and set on fire in a furnished room. It actually took a while to get the pig to ignite but it was left to burn for several hours before being put out.

Mmmmm, I bet that room smelled good. The remains of the pig were comparable to victims of SHC in that the main part of the body was nothing but ash, but the pigs trotters remained. Also, not much else in the room was damaged apart from a melted tv.

So let’s talk about those remaining limbs. The things that haunts anyone who’s seen a photo of SHC, never mind actually seeing it in real life, are the legs. There are quite a few different photos of SHC victims online and in every one you can see at least one leg or foot, completely untouched. How is this possible?

There are a couple of reasons here. As previously stated, fire burns upwards so if it starts in the middle of the body somewhere, by the time it’s reached the top, all the useful body fat fuel has been consumed. Typically, people’s legs don’t have as much fat as their trunks and hands and feet especially are just skin and bone, not giving the fire anything to feed on. Also, it could be that as the fire burns through the leg higher up, the lower legs just drop off, becoming the only identifiable sign that a human was there.

Can we link most of the cases with several common factors that can help us explain this phenomenon better? Why, yes we can. Most of the reported cases occurred in older people, let’s say 60 plus. Most of the cases happened when the victim was alone in their own home or room.

Most of the victims were not paragons of a healthy lifestyle, having been known smokers, having been witnessed having a tipple the night before or with known medical conditions. In most cases the victim does not appear to have actively sought help. In many cases, an external fire source was near the victim, such as a fire in the fireplace, a cigarette lighter, matches etc.

Let’s decode a little further. We can explain all of these SHC cases by saying that an external ignition source, whether that be a cigarette, open fire, even a spark from static electricity, caused the victim to catch fire and due to their immobility and other conditions such as body fat content, clothing material etc, they eventually became the aforementioned grisly human candle. But why wouldn’t they be running around beating those flames out like a mad person?

Well, maybe they were already dead, or at least unconscious. Think about it: an elderly woman sits down in her favourite chair with a night time cigarette, has a stroke — not a euphemism — or a heart attack, drops the cigarette and turns into a human candle. There’s nothing left to autopsy so the cause of death cannot be determined.

Even if the person is still alive when the burning starts, the rising smoke and flames would soon render them unconscious or dead pretty fast.

Decoding SHC

Alright, we had some examples of SHC at the beginning of the episode, let’s get some further info on them in case you were holding out that they were genuine unexplainable mysteries. We’ll start with the fire-breathing knight, Polonus Vorstius. Well, this happened so long ago that we can’t exactly rely on the story to be very accurate. Also, it didn’t even appear anywhere until around 1640, nearly 200 years later. So yeah, not exactly a contemporary account.

How about the 18th century Countess Cornelia Zangari? She left quite a gross mess for her maid to clean up if you recall. There were candles in her room and she had reportedly felt “dull and heavy” earlier that evening. Her bed cover was thrown back so she may have felt unwell, got up in the night and passed out or died, coming in contact with a lit candle on the way down and slowly melting all night long.

In the case of Mary Reeser, no accelerants were found and the strange circumstances of a cremated body with not much damage to the rest of the apartment caused the chief of police to call the FBI. There were blankets and stacks of newspapers near Mary that remained untouched. Paint on the wall behind her was not damaged. Ball lightning was thrown into the mix as a possible cause of death but has never been considered that likely.

Ball lightning is a real thing but it only happens very rarely and there was no evidence that it had entered Mary’s apartment as the window would have been broken. Also, investigators found no evidence of faulty or fried electrics or anything that may have started the fire. But it’s actually quite easily explained if you take the landlady’s report into account.

Pansy Carpenter popped in to see Mary Reeser on the evening before her body was discovered. She said Mary had told her she was a bit upset over something and had taken two Seconal tablets. This is a sleep medication and Mary also apparently said she might take more later. So basically she was going to be pretty much out cold.

She was also wearing a nightgown made of rayon. During the FBI investigation, they found something that they thought was probably the melted remains of a cigarette lighter. So Mary had been smoking, dozed off and dropped the lit cigarette on her nightgown. Rayon burns slightly slower than cotton so this would have been perfect conditions for the wick effect to take place.

Dr. John Bentley was next on our list. He was a known pipe smoker and while his pipe was found in a different room to his body, it’s not impossible that he got lit embers on his clothes without immediately realising — maybe he had dozed off while smoking in bed and woke up to find himself alight. He left the room before being overcome by smoke, going into shock, falling or coincidentally dying from another cause. He would also usually have matches on him somewhere so these would have contributed to the fire.

Regarding Jeannie Saffin, she had witnesses to her supposed spontaneous human combustion episode. Her brother-in-law and father claimed there were no heat or fire sources anywhere near her and that her clothes were mysteriously unburned. This tidbit comes from a book called “The Entrancing Flame” by John Heymer, however, it was related by Jeannie’s brother-in-law over a decade after the event.

In a written report made at the time of her death, her brother-in-law had stated that her clothes were definitely burnt. Police responding to the scene also reported removing burnt clothing. While the source of the fire has never been definitively proven, Jeannie’s father was a pipe smoker and apparently a window near Jeannie was open.

If a lit ember had landed on her clothing, the breeze could have fed it and her nylon outfit would have gone up, causing severe burns. While she was 61 years old, Jeannie had the mental age of a child so may not have been able to respond quickly enough to her situation or understand what was happening until it was too late. She also didn’t display the traditional characteristics of SHC as there wasn’t enough time for the wick effect to take place.

A police officer on the scene, however, thought that SHC could be a reason for her catching fire and her family then brought this up with the coroner. He was a no-nonsense sort of guy, however, and said: “I sympathise with you but I cannot put down SHC because there is no such thing. I will have to put down misadventure or open verdict.”

He ended up going with misadventure.

Jeannie’s brother-in-law also stated that her father’s pipe was unlit and had fresh tobacco in, presumably to discount it as a source for the fire. If it had fresh tobacco in it, though, doesn’t that mean that her dad had been smoking it before? Maybe the men knew very well the source of the blaze and just felt so guilty they tried to pass the blame on to the pseudo scientific explanation of SHC.

Now on to the most recently called case of SHC — Michael Flaherty. I mean, surely the fire in the fireplace is the smoking gun here, so to speak?? I don’t know how the coroner and investigators managed to rule it out, there are any number of ways the man could have set himself alight.

Maybe he tried to retrieve something that accidentally fell in, maybe some burning coal or wood fell out, maybe he accidentally fell or passed out very close to the fire, then regained consciousness and moved further away only to collapse again. If there was some physical connection between his body and the fire, it would probably have been burned up, leaving no obvious trace. Or maybe he just set himself alight with a cigarette after having a medical episode.

Spontaneous Human Combustion: Should I Be Worried?

If you’re still concerned about the possibility of SHC happening to you, let’s go through a quick checklist.

• Are you over the age of 60? This appears to happen to older people more frequently.
• Do you live alone? This is probably a biggie as I’m sure many more cases of SHC would have cropped up if a friend or family member hadn’t been around to quickly help extinguish an accidental clothing fire.
• Do you smoke or have an open fireplace?

If you answered no to all three questions, congratulations, you have zero percent chance of dying from spontaneous human combustion in your home. Actually, if you answered yes to any of the questions, you also have zero percent chance of dying from spontaneous human combustion in your own home. I also think that smoke detectors could probably help stop a lot of so-called SHC cases in their tracks as neighbors may be alerted earlier on in the proceedings. Most of the famous cases covered happened in an era before smoke detectors were the norm.

As I grew up, the threat of SHC receded from my mind and indeed I no longer believe it is a valid cause of death. Plus, I currently live in the USA so have got far more things to worry about than my innards suddenly combusting.

Basically, flammable clothing plus external ignition source plus lack of movement from the victim can equal the wick effect with an almost totally burned up body apart from some practically untouched extremities.

I feel like the biggest takeaway from this episode is: don’t smoke.

Let’s wrap up with a quote from forensic pathologist Roger Byard who says: “The reality is that people combust — but not spontaneously.”

What a relief! Thanks, Roger. Spontaneous human combustion: one less thing to worry about.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is spontaneous human combustion?

Spontaneous Human Combustion is a rare but documented phenomenon where a person will suddenly catch fire for no apparent reason, with no apparent outside sources. The body of the person will burn at such a high and intense temperature that they are soon reduced to a pile of ash, although unburned lower legs and hands are often found at the scene.

How many documented cases of spontaneous human combustion are there?

There are approximately 200 documented examples of spontaneous human combustion in the last three hundred years.

What are some famous examples of spontaneous human combustion?

Some famous examples include Polonus Vorstius in Italy around 1470, Countess Cornelia Zangari Bandi in 1731, Mary Reeser in 1951, Dr. John Irving Bentley in 1966, Jeannie Saffin in 1982, and Michael Flaherty in 2010.

What is the wick effect?

The wick effect is a theory that explains how a human body can be reduced to ashes in a short space of time. It suggests that if a person’s clothing catches fire and they remain immobile, the fire will start burning the body, melting the body’s fat and serving as more fuel for the fire, eventually turning the body to ash.

What role does acetone play in spontaneous human combustion?

Acetone, which is present in the body and can be breathed out as fat breaks down, can ignite easily even at room temperature. Experiments with acetone-soaked pig abdomens showed results mirroring those found in spontaneous human combustion victims.

What are the common factors in most spontaneous human combustion cases?

Most cases occurred in older people, when the victim was alone in their own home or room, and the victims were not paragons of a healthy lifestyle. An external fire source was often near the victim, such as a fire in the fireplace or a cigarette lighter.

Why do the lower legs and hands often remain unburned in spontaneous human combustion cases?

Fire burns upwards, so by the time it reaches the top of the body, all the useful body fat fuel has been consumed. Typically, people’s legs don’t have as much fat as their trunks and hands and feet especially are just skin and bone, not giving the fire anything to feed on.

What is the most likely explanation for spontaneous human combustion?

The most likely explanation is the wick effect, where an external ignition source causes the victim to catch fire, and due to their immobility and other conditions, they eventually become a human candle. This is often due to an elderly person smoking in bed and dropping a lit cigarette.

What can be done to prevent spontaneous human combustion?

To prevent spontaneous human combustion, avoid smoking in bed, ensure you have smoke detectors in your home, and be cautious with open flames and flammable materials. Most cases involve older individuals who live alone and have unhealthy lifestyles.

What did forensic pathologist Roger Byard say about spontaneous human combustion?

Roger Byard stated, ‘The reality is that people combust — but not spontaneously.’ This means that while people do catch fire, it is not due to spontaneous combustion but rather due to external ignition sources and the wick effect.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Bizarre Phenomenon of Spontaneous Human Combustion: Is It Real or Myth?
• Hero image source by European Parliament from EU / openverse, by.