For over three hundred years the debate has raged; does the phenomenon Spontaneous Human Combustion (S.H.C.) really exist and if so what is it? Can a living, breathing person just burst into flames without warning or any sign of outside cause and be reduced to nothing more than a pile of ashes and the odd indiscriminate body part, while leaving the surrounding area relatively untouched?
Scientists have been reluctant to admit that S.H.C. is real, as have coroners who tend to prefer to record an open verdict, but firefighters and police disagree, for it is they who examine the grisly scenes first, and they can offer no other possible explanation for the remains they find.
There are generally believed to have been dozens of S.H.C. cases in the last three years alone, but one pathologist, Dr. David Price, stated that he has seen a case roughly every four years. It would appear to be more common in the U.K. than it is elsewhere, but there is no obvious reason for this, though some people believe that the U.K. is criss-crossed by “Fire Leynes“ and it is along these fire leynes that cases of S.H.C. occur. These same people also claim that S.H.C. occurs in cycles which they can predict, but if you want to find one of these people then don't bother to look in Birmingham, England in the year 2004 because you won't find them there!
The phenomenon has been around for a long time, and the first medieval reference to S.H.C. appears in “Acta“ written by Thomas Bartholia, a Danish medical writer, and was published in Copenhagen in 1673. It was thought, in those days, that it was caused by alcohol, and that the victims were drunkards "who had saturated their bodies with spirits." Bartholia recounts the case of a Parisienne woman whom he said "used to drink spirit of wine (brandy) plentifully for the space of three years, so as to take nothing else. Her body contracted such a combustible disposition, that one night, when she lay down on a straw couch she was all burned to ashes except her skull and the extremities of her fingers."
In the French town of Rhiems in the year 1725 Nicole Millet was found burned to death in an armchair, that was otherwise untouched by the fire, and her husband was arrested and convicted of her murder but on appeal the verdict was changed to S.H.C. which inspired a scholar, Jonas Dupont, to gather together all of the evidence that he could find for S.H.C. and he published his work in Leyden in 1763, it was entitled “De Incendis Corporis Humani Spontaneis.”
One case of S.H.C. that is included in just about every article, magazine and book on Spontaneous Human Combustion first appeared in the “Gentleman's Magazine” in 1746 and it is that of the 62 year old Countess Cornelia Bandi in 1731. The Countess' body was found lying approximately four feet from her bed, which she had got out of, as the covers were turned back, or perhaps it may be more accurate to say that what was left of the Countess' body was found. Her arms and legs remained almost intact beside a pile of ashes and what was left of her skull. The authorities blamed her death on "internal combustion" despite the Countess having no close relationship with the bottle, but the gossip around the town was that she would often wash her body down with "camphorated spirit of wine" whenever "she felt herself indisposed." Perhaps the locals felt that there had to be a link with alcohol somehow, even if it was only that a person may be more careless and accident prone where fire is concerned, and doctors would warn their patients that drank to remain clear of naked flames, and obviously not to cool themselves with camphorated spirit of wine.
As the death toll rose, temperance movements began to warn of the perils of alcohol, and they said that death was caused by an inner fire which water could not extinguish. They burned from within and destroyed nothing else but the victim, and the smoke was different to any other as it would leave behind an oily, sticky soot deposit on anything it came into contact with.
As the phenomenon slowly became more accepted, many works of nineteenth century fiction alluded to death by S.H.C., some of the less obscure examples include Washington Irving's “Knickerbocker History of New York“ (1809), Mark twain's “Life On The Mississippi” (1883), Herman Melville's “Redburn” (1849) and Frederick Marryat's “Jacob Faithful” (1833) in which Marryat based the account of the death of the hero's mother on a London “Times” report from 1832 which reduced the body to "a sort of unctuous pitchy cinder" but perhaps the most celebrated account of all the Victorian fiction is that found in Charles Dickens' 1853 book “Bleak House” in which the miserly and alcoholic villain “Krook”’s death is described in "sickening" detail. The account sparked angry reaction from many readers who wrote to Dickens claiming that he had given "currency to a vulgar error" but he responded by saying that he was merely speaking from experience as he had attended an inquest into just such a death when he had been a young reporter for the “Morning Chronicle” twenty years earlier.
The medical profession would come to consider Marryat's description as a classic one as it contained five features which are typical of S.H.C.:
The reality of the phenomenon was slow to gain acceptance, and it still has got to do so in certain circles, but as the number of occurrences increases certain facts come to light about who and when it will strike. For instance, it was found in a recent survey that most of the victims were middle aged females who would fall prey to S.H.C., with 58% of victims being female, 23% being over 70 years of age and over half, at 52%, being over 50 years of age. They would most often be struck in the hours of darkness, with 51% of incidences occurring between midnight and 6am, and a staggering 75% between dusk and dawn in the twelve hours from 6pm to 6am. Still, doctors as a whole did not believe that it could happen, and a recent survey found that only 12% of the U.K. adult population believe that people can sometimes catch fire for no apparent reason. Doctors, being doctors, prefer to rely on alternative causes for S.H.C. such as carelessly discarded cigarettes or sparks from a fire, and as the Editor of the “Fortean Times” Bob Rickard says, "Faced with the alternative - a nightmare out of the dark ages - it is not surprising that they are accepted." but the evidence could clearly not be ignored.
Spontaneous combustion is known to occur in flammable materials such as coal, paper or straw without a direct source of ignition when a process called oxidisation occurs. This is when the oxygen in the air combines with the reactive surface particles which causes smouldering until there is enough heat to cause a flame. The process is very difficult to detect in its early stages because there is very little or no energy lost in heat or light before the flame itself appears - the flash point. Chemical reactions in other forms also produce heat such as the many bush fires we see each year throughout the world. Dr. Peter McCartney, a hyperbaric physician, has found that the Baobad tree of Western Africa will combust spontaneously when two of the chemicals stored in two separate chambers inside it come together. He has also found that old cannonballs when they are raised from ancient ship wrecks after many many years totally immersed in the salt water will generate heat when they meet the air. What is not clear is whether or not this heat is generated by the elements in the water reacting with the air, or the algae clinging to the relics, but even so the generation of heat and spontaneous combustion in flammable materials is quite far removed from the spontaneous combustion of the human body.
Throughout its early history the phenomenon constantly met with complete scientific rejection, for example in 1873 Dr. Alfred Swaine Taylor wrote “Principals and Practise of Medical Jurisprudence” in which he stated that: "The hypothesis of such a mode of destruction of the human body is not only unsupported by any credible facts, but is wholly inconsistent with all that science has revealed" and "In the instances reported which are worthy of credit, a candle, a fire, or some other ignited body has been at hand, and the accidental kindling of the clothes of the deceased was highly probable" but by the time that the book had reached its 8th edition in 1928 the doubts are beginning to appear as the editor had added that while still "absolutely rejecting any doctrine of spontaneous combustion" "it must be admitted, on the other hand, that there are cases recorded by credible authorities which require some explanation to account for the unusual amount of destruction which has been produced in a human body by what are at first sight very inadequate means."
The "amount of destruction" varied from total to very minor, and in the book “Fire From Heaven” Michael Harrison looked at a particular case of S.H.C. and put forward a truly original, if not completely preposterous, idea which proposed that S.H.C. could somehow be linked to intelligence and that it would not strike the “better educated” and he used the case of a professor of mathematics at the University of Nashville, Tennessee, James Hamilton.
Hamilton was standing outside his house when he felt a stabbing pain in his left leg - "a steady pain like a hornet sting, accompanied by a sensation of heat." - He looked down and saw a bright flame shooting out from his trouser leg and he tried to beat it out with his hands but this had no effect. He knew that what was happening to him could not, or rather should not, happen, but also he knew that when a fire is deprived of oxygen it cannot burn, so he cupped his hands around the flames until they died and went out.
Fortunately, for the rest of us, it isn't only the "better educated" that survive an attack of S.H.C., there are several reports of other people who have also had a close brush with a fiery death. One such person was a nineteen year old computer operator from London, England named Paul Hayes. Hayes was walking through Stepney Green, East London late on May 25th, 1985 when he was struck. He described it as "like being plunged into the heart of a furnace. My arms felt as though they were being prodded by red hot pokers from my shoulders to my wrists. My cheeks were red hot, my ears were numb. My chest felt like boiling water had been poured over it. I thought i could hear my brains bubbling. I tried to run, stupidly thinking I could race ahead of the flames." After running he lay down on the ground and curled himself into a ball, and thirty seconds later the flames died as quickly as they had started and he stumbled into the nearby London Hospital and was treated for burns.
On November 15th 1974 Jack Angel stopped for the night in his mobile home at Ramada Inn, Savannah, Georgia, and when he woke the next morning he found that his right hand was badly burned and blistered. He also found that he had similar burns on his chest, back, groin, leg and ankles. He had felt nothing during the night and clearly had not woken when it had happened, but he was more puzzled by the fact that his bedclothes and his pyjamas were left unmarked by the burns. He staggered out of his home into the motel building and collapsed to the ground. When he next woke he was lying, in great discomfort, in a hospital bed, and the doctors told him that his burns had originated inside his body but they had no idea how. They had also performed the necessary surgery which included the amputation of his burned hand and lower forearm. With the aid of a renowned Georgia law firm Angel sued the manufacturer of his mobile home for $3 million in damages, but after three years of investigation including the complete dismantling of the mobile home the cause of the fire could not be determined.
Charles Fort of the “Fortean Times” recorded a case in 1929 of a woman named Lily White from Alberta, Antigua whose clothing would often burn to a crisp while leaving her skin completely untouched, and this happened with such regularity that she had to rely on hand me downs from family members, friends and neighbours in order to keep herself clothed.
It is often said that Tibetan monks can affect their bodies in many ways, and one such way they can do so is to produce an "inner heat" and there are many tales recounted by travellers about when they had walked past meditating monks deep in trance who were not being affected by the freezing cold air around them, or by the falling snow which melts the very instant it touches their skin, but how on earth can they do this? According to Hinduism there is an untapped reservoir of energy which lies in the “Astral Body” known as the “Kundalini”. The Kundalini is represented as a coiled up serpent situated at the base of the spine, and it lies dormant unless it can be tapped into by practising “Kundalini Yoga.” It is said that the astral body fits "hand in glove" with the physical body and the two meet at several major points on the body which are known as “Chakras.”
The chakras are located at the base of the spine, the root of the genitals, the navel, the heart, the base of the throat, the "third eye" (between the eyebrows) and on the crown of the head, and when the kundalini is released the energy flows through these chakras.
Oriental medicine and acupuncture both locate the body's “Manipura Chakra” or “Fire Centre” in the solar plexus, and an advanced practitioner of Kundalini Yoga can stimulate his chakra to such an extent that it will glow, and in the Tibetan practise of “Tumo,” adepts have been seen to generate so much inner heat that the snow around them will melt. Could this manipulation of the chakra rage so far out of control as to completely devour the body in fire? The discipline of Kundalini Yoga is between 3,000 and 4,000 years old, and practitioners seek to release the Kundalini in order that they can open up the vast areas of the brain which normally go unused.
It is a very long and complex process which takes many years of meditation to achieve and it is believed to be very dangerous both physiologically and psychologically, and students are warned only to practise under the guidance of a competent teacher. When the release occurs, after systematic physical exercise, concentration techniques, visualisation and controlled rhythmic breathing, the effects are said to be a warm feeling at the base of the spine, the “mulaphara”, which begins as warm and changes to hot, then a sensation of burning heat passes throughout the body. It is at this point that the "serpent fire" unless carefully directed can become a destructive force, and the tutor will guide his pupil to control the flow through his chakras. Though the majority of subjects can take years to reach this transcendental state, others can achieve it in a matter of weeks, but it is believed that it can also occur spontaneously without the subject having any practise at, or even knowledge of, Kundalini Yoga, so obviously they have no guidance through the dangerous process where the serpent fire is released.
A research scientist, Itzhak Bentov, has carried out some testing on this "awakening" and feels that the altered states of consciousness may be brought about by the effects of vibration frequencies on physiology, and he goes on to say that Kundalini energy could be released in anybody by environmental stimuli such as mechanical vibration or electromagnetic waves. These he says, can alter the "body rhythm" and "bio-magnetic field." He suggests that the Kundalini may be a development of the central nervous system, but could the influence of the environmental stimuli cause a sensation of great heat to such an extent that it may result in S.H.C.?
Generally the body temperature rises when a person enters a state of trance, and an Italian healer from the town of Foggia, southern Italy named Padra Pio, whose body temperature was usually slightly lower than most, would enter into a trance and his body temperature would rise off the scale of a clinical thermometer to 118.4 degrees Fahrenheit, but this is far from hot enough to devour a body. It was also said of Pio that while in a trance he seemed to glow.
Some people have a high tolerance for heat, such as the nineteenth century medium Daniel Dunglas Home who would perform feats with fire such as handling hot coals as though he were wearing asbestos gloves. He would also take a hot lamp which he would hold a match against, and as soon as the match came into contact with the lamp it would ignite, he would then place the lamp between his lips and hold it there without feeling any pain or showing any signs of burning. Fire walkers are able to walk barefoot over red hot coals without burning their feet, but it has been shown that just about anybody can do this with practise and the right frame of mind, in theory at least, but there are those who take their abilities to the limit.
Gabrielle Moler and Marie Sonet were two "convulsionnaires" (those who claim to have undergone miraculous cures after experiencing convulsions at the tomb of a highly esteemed deacon known for his kindness and humility). Moler would put her face into a blazing fire and take it out again untouched, or she would put her feet in until her shoes and socks were burned away but her feet would be left unmarked. Sonet would lie over a fire with her head and ankles supported on stools and, wrapped only in a thin sheet to hide her nakedness, she would remain in this position for hours. As with fire walking this is a "trick" which can be learned, but fire raising, pyrokinesis, is a wholly different matter, nobody knows how or why a person may have pyrokinetic abilities.
An early reported case occurred in 1882 when Dr. L. C. Woodman tested and studied 27 year old Mr. W. M. Underwood from Paw Paw, Michigan who had "fiery breath,” and the case appeared in “Scientific American.” Mr. Underwood was able to ignite pieces of paper or handkerchiefs simply by breathing on them, and when he went on shooting trips he would gather together a pile of dry leaves and then breath on them to start a fire which he could use to dry his socks. He had discovered his "gift" by accident when smelling a scented handkerchief which burst into flames. Dr. Woodman could find no explanation for this but he was able to rule out trickery as he would take certain precautions before any experiment. He would make Mr. Underwood wash his mouth out thoroughly, wash his hands, and he would then examine him completely.
Another celebrated case of pyrokinetic ability happened in Hunan, China in 1990 when four year old Tong Tangjiang started to emit smoke from his trousers. His family examined him and found that his underpants had set on fire so they took him to hospital where he was treated for burns, but he " ignited " a further three times over the next two hours and in the process caused further injury to his hands, armpits and genitals. The doctors suggested that four year old Tong seemed to generate high amounts of electric current which increased when he was excited or agitated.
An earlier case of a young boy, this time a little older, happened in Formia, near Rome, in 1982 to sixteen year old Benedetto Supino who was reading a comic in a dentist's waiting room when it set on fire. From then on it seemed that everything Benedetto looked at caught fire. He would ignite books as he read them, he looked at a plastic object that his uncle was holding and it set alight, and he would walk past the furniture and it would begin to burn. Dr. Giovanni Ballesio, Dean of Physical Medicine at Rome University, investigated to see if Benedetto was generating high levels of electricity, but he found no evidence of it, and now Dr. Demetrio Croce is working with the boy to try and help him to control his fire raising abilities.
On December 12th 1983 in Livorno, Italy, pyrokinesis went on trial, or rather an exponent of it did, in the form of Carol Compton. Compton was a young Scottish nanny who stood accused of five charges of arson and one of attempted murder. She was escorted into court by armed soldiers and locked inside a steel cage that was usually reserved for terrorists.
Compton had begun work as a nanny the previous year and had been sacked from her first position in the Ricci household after three fires had broken out. The first one had destroyed the Riccis’ living room, and the following two had occurred while they were all staying in temporary accommodation as repair work was carried out on their home. Carol was blamed for the fires despite there being no evidence to link her to them, in fact at the time of the first one she had been dining with the family in another room.
Next she took a position as nanny to three year old Agnese Cecchini whose wealthy parents worked in television, and on August 1st, 1982 the child's grandfather's bed was found burning, and the following morning Agnese was pulled tearful but unhurt from her burning cot. The police were called and Carol was arrested, charged and refused bail due to the previous charges. Again there was no evidence to connect her to the fires, and again she had been sat in another room with the rest of the family at the time.
During her trial both the prosecution and the defence tried to steer clear of making any mention of fire raising and the supernatural but the media did not. An elderly clairvoyant told them that the spirit of an eighteenth century girl had given Carol the "power of fire" and the woman arrived in court shrouded in black, muttering incantations and brandishing a large crucifix.
The Jury heard evidence from a fire officer with 38 years experience in which he testified that the fires had been unusually hot and they appeared to have burnt downwards. His testimony was supported by that of Professor Vitolo Nicolo of Pisa University who said that "In all my years of experience of this kind of investigation I have never seen fires like this before. They were created by an intense source of heat, but not a naked flame." Forensic tests showed that both mattresses that had burned in the Cecchini house, though made from different materials, had burned in the same way, on the surface only, and neither had been started with a naked flame or any kind of fuel or chemical. The first fire that had destroyed the Riccis’ living room apparently had its source at a wooden stool yet the stool itself was only slightly damaged, and this fire had also spread unusually in that it had moved sideways and downwards, and at one point even into a cupboard drawer.
Despite the lack of evidence connecting Carol Compton to any of the five fires, the jury returned after just six hours with a guilty verdict on two charges of arson and "not proven" on the count of attempted murder.
Though there is no obvious link between pyrokinesis and S.H.C. the two may or may not be connected. One characteristic that they both share is the swiftness and the intensity of the flames. In a case of S.H.C. the body is almost totally devoured, and what isn't devoured in the flames begins to decompose very quickly. The intensity of the fire is unimaginable as the human body is made up of approximately 75% water, yet it is reduced to a pile of ashes in a very short time. When contemplating this we must consider that in a crematorium furnace the temperature is maintained at at least 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit in a forced draught. If there is no forced draught then the temperature must be kept at 3,000 degrees for several hours, but even at 2,000 degrees there are recognisable bones remaining after a period of eight hours, so surely to consume a body as completely as S.H.C. does, the temperature must be hotter than this, but why then are surrounding combustible materials not also incinerated, such as the chair the victim is sat in or the bed they are lying in?
A pathologist, Dr. David Gee of St. James' Hospital, Leeds had one of his papers, “A Case of Spontaneous Combustion” published in “Medicine Science and Law” (Vol. 5 1965), and in it he describes fully his experiments into what he calls "The Wick Effect". Ironically though Gee only mentions the term “Spontaneous Combustion” once in the article, and that is in the first paragraph.
He said that what may happen is that an elderly woman may collapse due to a heart attack or some similar affliction and land in the fireplace or near some other means of ignition, and since these cases usually occur in the winter the woman would be wearing a lot of clothing which will act as an external wick around the body which acts as the candle. As the fire burns part of the clothing it melts some of the nearby body fat which then soaks into the clothing and fuels the flames further which in turn melts more body fat and so on. He added that as the victims were most often women and their clothing usually ends around the knee area, this would explain why very often the feet are left untouched.”
What Gee did was to coat a test tube with human fat and then in human skin to form an eight inch long “candle” which he then wrapped in cloth to simulate clothing. Gee's article continued "one end [of the fat candle] was ignited by a bunsen flame, the fat catching fire after about a minute. Although the bunsen flame was removed at this point, combustion of the fat proceeded slowly along the length of the roll, with a smoky yellow flame and much production of soot, the entire roll being consumed after about one hour." The candle burned in the draught of an extractor fan which ensured that an adequate supply of oxygen reached the flame, and the “much production of soot" indicates incomplete burning, and that the flame temperature was low.
Gee said that melted human fat will burn at 250 degrees Centigrade, which is true, but this is "clarified" fat without it's normal water content. Fat has a high water content and won't burn until enough of this water is "burned" off which leaves behind the "clarified" fat that will burn.
When asked if his candle had any bone in it Gee replied that it hadn't but the bone in the body would be saturated with fat in the same way that the clothing would, so it would burn using the same wick effect. This is not actually the case as the bone content will burn but the outer bone structure will not absorb fat in the same way, and so it will not be destroyed, and bodies in all sorts of "natural" fires such as house fires or vehicle fires still have a largely intact bone structure, as do those which are burned in crematoriums which means that they then have to be crushed in a rotating drum with heavy metal balls in order to reduce them to ash.
Gee's candle experiment was performed in an environment with a forced draught of air providing plenty of oxygen and a bunsen flame applied for a minute, and it still only produced a low temperature flame which burned incompletely for an hour with mostly fat and clothing. It is very unlikely if not impossible that this concoction could be reduced to a pile of ashes when you add into the mixture bones, flesh and blood, and when you remove the enforced draught and add the ten and a half gallons of water found in the average human body. Despite its obvious flaws, Gee's wick theory was and still is widely accepted in many circles, but it doesn't really prove very much. For instance, it doesn't explain how people can ignite without a prolonged flame, or why they don't wake themselves up and put the fire out.
Two researchers, Vincent Gaddis and Ivan Sanderson, came up with a possible theory in which the mind state of a person can alter their "flammability." They say that it can begin with a feeling of loneliness, illness or some emotion that leads to a negative state of mind which affects the victim's metabolism in such a way that phosphagens are produced (phosphagen is a substance like nitro-glycerine which, in the right circumstances, is very combustible). They say that ignition could be caused by electricity in the atmosphere which may be generated by sunspots, magnetic storms or possibly even tectonic stress. Livingston Gearheart published an article in 1975 in the Journal “Pursuit” which showed that a high percentage of spontaneous human combustion cases took place at local peaks in the earth's magnetism and it is possible that this may contribute to ball lightning, which in turn may generate short radio waves similar to microwaves and radar equipment. Some S.H.C. victims appear to have been burned from the inside outwards which is the way a microwave oven works, and radar aerial sites are always fenced off because if you got too close to a powerful radar as it sweeps , it would cook your liver.
Let's look at some of the most celebrated victims and see some of the damage that S.H.C. can do. On the morning of December 5th, 1966,Don Gosnell entered the basement of an apartment building in Couldersport, Pennsylvania to read the gas meter. In the basement his boots disturbed a pile of ashes in the corner and there was a light blue smoke with a strange odour hanging in the air. On his way inside he had received no reply to his calls, so he decided to look in on the old man who lived on the ground floor, Dr. John Irving Bentley. There was no sign of Bentley in the bedroom but there was more of the same strange blue smoke so Gosnell peered around the door to the bathroom, and he was confronted with a sight that he would never forget. On the floor was a hole that had been burned through the floorboards and exposed the joists and the pipes below. Around the hole there was a pile of ash, protruding from which there was the remains of the doctor's leg from the knee down, "like that of a mannequin." The retired Dr. Bentley had been a pipe smoker, but this could not by any stretch of the imagination, account for the almost total destruction of the body, and no heating or electrical faults were found in the property.
Another famous case is that of the elderly widow Mary Reeser. Reeser was originally from Pennsylvania, but when her husband died in 1947 she moved to an apartment at 1200 Cherry Street, St. Petersburg to be near her son Dr. Richard Reeser and his wife Ernestine. She found herself feeling very homesick for the large house and the wide social circle she had left behind in Pennsylvania, and also the hotter climate in St. Petersburg didn't agree with her. She was very upset at the fact that she was unable to find herself suitable accommodation in her home town, and on the last day of her life she went to Richard's house and offered to look after their youngest child while they went off to the beach. Out of concern for her they came back after only an hour and Richard found her sitting in a chair crying. She asked him to take her home which he said he would do as soon as he had had a shower, but by the time he had finished his mother had already left and begun walking by herself. Richard asked Ernestine if she would go and look for her, and when she did she found that she had already made it home so she stayed with her for about an hour before returning home. At around 8pm Richard went round to see her and he found her sitting in her armchair in her nightie while smoking a smoking a cigarette. She hadn't eaten and had taken two Seconal sleeping pills and Richard felt that she was content and relaxed. Her neighbour and landlady Mrs. Carpenter also visited her later that evening but found her to be upset and felt that it was because of a family feud, so to cheer her up she went to buy her some ice cream, but when she returned she saw that Mary's lights were off, as was the radio so she decided not to bother her any further and retired for the night.
On the next morning, July 1st, 1951, at about 5 am Mrs. Carpenter was woken by a dull thud similar to a door slamming and she could detect a burning smell not unlike an electric motor burning too hot, so she turned off the water pump in her garage and found nothing else to be amiss. At 6:30am the newspaper boy arrived but didn't notice any burning smell, and at 8am a package arrived for Mary but the delivery man didn't know which was her apartment so he left it with Mrs. Carpenter who said she would deliver it for him, but when she did so she noticed that the handle on Mary's screen door was very hot but the door was unlocked, so she called out to the delivery man to go in with her but he didn't hear. Some painters working across the road “did” hear and one of them came over and looked around the door for her, but he backed out again and told her to call the fire service which she did before alerting Richard Reeser.
On the floor inside the apartment was a pile of ashes, a few teeth, a skull, a charred liver stuck to a piece of backbone, a large bone possibly from the hip and a velvet slippered left foot which Richard used to identify his mother's remains.
Though this case will always be connected to S.H.C. Dr. Richard Reeser believes that his mother had fallen asleep in the easy chair after taking two Seconal and dropped her cigarette end on to the chair which then went up in flames and destroyed both the chair and her body. This doesn't explain though, the strange nature of the fire which, as in S.H.C. cases, left a nearby pile of newspapers untouched, and Fire Investigators said that no ordinary fire could have possibly reduced Mary Reeser to ashes and left the newspapers untouched.
Another case where surrounding combustibles remained untouched occurred on March 22nd, 1908 in the seaside town of Whitley Bay. Margaret Dewar managed to summon neighbours when she found her elderly sister Wilhelmina upstairs in bed, she was severely charred apparently without waking as she lay in bed. The bedclothes wrapped around her had not been burned. At the inquest the coroner could not accept the evidence that Margaret gave and asked her to think again but she would not change her story, even after a policeman told the court that she had been drunk at the time. The court was adjourned to "give Margaret more time to think" and reconvened a few days later. Obviously some pressure had been brought to bear on Margaret because she now said that she had been wrong and had initially found her sister downstairs, burned but still alive, and had helped her upstairs to bed where she had finally died. The court accepted this change of heart from Margaret and didn't concern itself with the matter of how Wilhelmina had ignited and continued to burn without the bed catching fire as well, nor was there any sign of fire anywhere else in the house.
Coroners still find themselves in the same quandry as very few cases actually refer to spontaneous human combustion, preferring to steer clear of it, and they look for other causes such as flying sparks, discarded cigarettes or children playing with matches, and this is hardly surprising really when you consider the evidence that they are faced with.
One theory that was doing the rounds in the eighteenth century was that a substance known as phlogiston was the principle or element of heat which was inherent in all matter, and this phlogiston could either be latent or operative. Whenever it was operative it was believed to be able to produce all the effects of combustion, however this theory didn't stand the test of time, so modern chemistry has tried to come up with a few. Various chemical reactions can produce explosive effects, for example, if metallic sodium comes into contact with water the sodium will explode violently, or if phosphorous comes into contact with air it will burst into flames. Could there be some sort of chemical reaction within the body which causes it to violently, and very suddenly, destroy itself, and if so then shouldn't it happen much more often than it does? We know that Doctor Price said that he came across it on average once every four years, but could it be more common than this? If so could many cases be hidden by the fact that S.H.C. is not recorded as a cause of death, but rather by an "open verdict" or "accidental death” but how common can it be? One statistic quoted is that 1938 alone saw no fewer than 17 cases, that is roughly one every three weeks.
So far we have seen several of the better known and more commonly quoted cases of death by S.H.C. but we have not yet seen an eye witness account, and there is a good reason for this, they are extremely rare. A report in the “Washington Post” on May 29th, 1990 said that an operating theatre at U.C.L.A. Medical Centre had to be evacuated in mid-operation as "the sheets just caught fire" and the patient, 26 year old Angela Hernandez, died. No explanation could be found for the sudden blaze, and the Fire Department Chief, Pat Marek, formed the opinion that the fire was "bizarre.” Another eye witness account comes from an American physician, Dr. B. H. Hartwell who reported what he saw to the Massachusetts Medico-Legal Society. Dr. Hartwell was driving through Ayer, Massachusetts when his car was flagged down and he was led into a nearby wood. There in the wood was a woman crouched down, she was engulfed in flames and neither he nor the other people standing there could see any cause for the fire.
It is possible that S.H.C. is far more common than it would first appear, and perhaps many more professional people, doctors, coroners and pathologists alike would report more cases if the phenomenon was more widely accepted and they weren't therefore putting their professional reputation at stake, and the irony is that they themselves could make it more widely accepted by reporting more cases. They could also hold valuable information regarding exactly what S.H.C. is and why it occurs, but more importantly how we could prevent it happening again.
Clearly, looking at the facts of the matter, the physical and practical side is that there is a very sudden and extremely intense fire that destroys the body very quickly indeed, and it is also very localised as it does little or no damage to surrounding combustibles. In some cases there is a possible cause of fire such as an open fire, a heater, the pipe and cigarettes smoked by Bentley and Reeser, but none of these could cause an "unconventional" fire, so there must be some cause that can, and I think that the most common sense solution is likely to be found within the human body itself.
Rather than a fire having fuel to burn and thus using it up in the process and also any other fuel it reaches, wood, paper, carpet, bed sheets etc., perhaps there may be some sort of chemical reaction which takes place within the body and this causes it to burn, not so much as we know it in the conventional sense, but to destroy itself through this chemical reaction being triggered, very suddenly and very violently.
At any one time there are an almost countless number of chemicals present in the human body, some of them are released by the brain such as endorphins, could it be, as has been suggested many times in the past, that S.H.C. is caused by a person's state of mind, i.e. loneliness, illness, tiredness or depression, or, like Tong Tangjiang who would generate electric current when he was agitated or excited, and not as was earlier thought due to a person's familiarity with the bottle. There is a case which may possibly suggest an internal cause and not an external cause of a conventional fire.
John Heymer is a forensically trained scenes of crime officer with the Gwent Police C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Department) and in 1980 he was called out to a house fire at Ebbw Vale. The council houses on the Rassau estate were not centrally heated at that time, but he noticed how warm the house was despite the front door being open, and he began to suspect that a practical joke was being played on him when he could see no signs of the alleged house fire. An Officer pointed him to a closed door and told him that the fire was inside. What immediately struck Heymer was that there were no tell tale signs of fire having been in the room. Even before he had entered it he noticed that there were no deposits of soot around the frame of the door which are left as the smoke escapes from the room, and in fact the gloss paint work was as clean as it should have been. When Heymer entered the room, the lounge, he saw all that remained of Henry Thomas, a small pile of ashes, two disembodied feet and a discoloured skull. The remains were lying on a rug on top of the foam backed fitted carpet, and both the rug and the carpet had only been burned where they were in touch with the ashes, and both were also found to be saturated with melted human body fat.
Beneath the carpet were thermo plastic tiles which would be permanently marked if something hot is placed on them yet they were completely untouched, and the room was still, despite the sub-zero temperatures outside, emitting enough heat to warm the whole house even with the front door open. The chair that the victim had been sat in was burned to ash apart from a part of the right hand side of the wooden frame and part of the fabric cushion.
In the fireplace was a partially burnt fire and on the hearth was a bundle of sticks for starting a new one, these were untouched by the blaze as were the victim's plastic rimmed spectacles which also lay on the hearth. There was no sign of a hot coal having fallen out of the grate and staring the fire, and besides which the fire had gone out through lack of attention. Heymer is certain that it would not have burned very brightly because of the lack of air flow in the room which would also have contributed to its going out only half burned.
Heymer found that no smoke or soot had escaped from the room because the windows did not allow a draught in or out of the room, nor did the door which sealed very tightly when closed, so if the smoke couldn't escape then air could not get in, so the only thing to have burned in the "sealed" room full of combustible materials apart from the chair was made up of 75% water, Henry Thomas.
Heymer came to the conclusion that Thomas had been sat in his chair when the fire had erupted and, as he had burned, he had ignited the chair which burned until it gave way beneath him and ceased burning, leaving part of it undamaged. Thomas had fallen to the floor but continued to burn until only ash remained - apart from his feet and blackened skull. From this he also concluded that the fire had begun in the region of Thomas' abdomen and burned outwards so the extremities were untouched. This left him with the curious and baffling knowledge that the burning chair and the fire in the grate had gone out due to a lack of oxygen in the room, possibly also making Thomas sleepy at the time, but meanwhile the body had continued to "burn."
Could Thomas have triggered it off himself somehow? The Post Mortem showed that he had been alive at the time that the blaze began which is evident in the pink colour of the remaining muscle tissue which shows that there is carbon monoxide present in the blood. This is caused when a person inhales "the products of combustion shortly before death." Surely this must be evidence of a “different” type of fire which is caused within the body and doesn't require an external supply of oxygen in the same way, and it would seem to disprove the "wick effect" as the rug and carpet were soaked in fat but didn't burn, which is of course the basis of Gee's theory.
Heymer came up with a theory that he feels may explain how such a blaze may operate, and this theory also seems to overcome what is often seen as the biggest stumbling block in S.H.C., the amount of fluids in the human body. He proposed that somehow the water could split into its two components of oxygen and hydrogen in gas form.
Hydrogen burning in oxygen produces a colourless flame, but if this flame were to consume something then it would burn in a variety of colours, the colour depending on the material being consumed. He goes on to say that the process of hydrogen gas burning in oxygen gas will produce as much water as it consumes, but this would be in the form of super-heated steam which will expand so much that it is forced up a chimney, leaving no evidence of it having been there apart from slight condensation on the windows.
Heymer also quotes the example of the 1989 B.B.C. Television programme “Tomorrow's World” which featured a portable steel cutting tool that used water as its power source. One litre of water is able to produce 2,000 litres of hydrogen and oxygen per hour, and the tool which was easily carried with one hand burns a combination of hydrogen and oxygen producing about as much heat as a crematorium. This shows that the practical physics of it works, the problem is just how it could occur in the body of its own accord.
Another thought is that it could be caused by the digestive system which would explain why many fires seem to start in the abdominal region and peter out when they reach the outer extremities of the limbs. In a 1986 issue of “New Scientist” Sidney Alford, an explosives engineer, theorised that methane gas might be produced in the body. Outside the body it is produced by anaerobic bacterial decomposition and is what is known as “marsh gas.” Coal miners refer to it as “firedamp” because it becomes combustible when it is mixed with air and it is a major component of natural and coal gas. Rotting matter also produces phosphine which again combusts spontaneously when mixed with air, and in marshy areas it is known as “Will o' the wisp”.
The food that our stomach digests gives us the energy that our body needs to survive, and in starvation the body will lose a huge amount of heat which is what sometimes causes death. Could there some kind of “malfunction” which creates far too much heat and possibly combines with a combustible gas?
In cattle there is a condition which produces excessive amounts of methane gas in the gut, which bloats it so much that it causes great discomfort. This pressure can only be released by a veterinary surgeon making an incision to allow the gas, which is combustible, to escape.
Larry Arnold has suggested that the cause of S.H.C. could be a subatomic particle called a Pyrotron that vaporises the body by an internal subatomic chain reaction, a process known as “cold fusion.” The fusion of hydrogen atoms has been reported during the electrolysis of water with potassium salts which releases huge amounts of heat and it was publicly demonstrated in March 1989 by Dr. Martin Fleischmann and Professor B. Stanley Pons. However, when scientists tried to recreate their experiments and failed, it seemed that cold fusion was a bit of a “damp squib," but there are varying opinions on it around the world.
While cold fusion is accepted as fact in Japan, other researchers in the west have had their funding withdrawn, and Fleischmann and Pons continue their work in a research facility in southern France owned by the Toyota Motor Company. One physicist has speculated anonymously that "it seems likely that of the elements found in the body, potassium or sodium are the most likely to be involved in a fusion reaction. The tissues with the highest potassium levels are the brain, spinal cord and skeletal muscles, and this would suggest that the feet and hands would be least affected and the head the most.
If the process is nuclear it would start at a point, so in the case of potassium it would be the head, spine or skeletal muscles. It would be very hot, maybe incandescent, and this would hardly affect surrounding materials as a slow burn seemingly would, and it would all be over in seconds or a few minutes at most. There just might be residual radio activity and it would be surprising were there not, but there wouldn't necessarily be a lot."
Arthur C. Clark says that he believes cold fusion experiments are "tapping into” “zero-point energy” created by subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence."
While there are many chemicals and chemical reactions in the body, it is very unlikely that such an everyday process as digestion would be the cause for S.H.C. as it is quite infeasible for it to generate enough heat to ignite the gases present in the stomach, and as the process occurs almost continuously in every person, then there would surely be far more instances of it than there are. However, I think that a chemical reaction of some sort is the most likely cause for S.H.C., but just which particular one is difficult to say. Possibly it could be partly brought on by the activity in the brain which produces various chemicals under different circumstances, so it could be that certain moods are more dangerous than others. We know that it must satisfy certain criteria, i.e. It must envelope the body very quickly and quite completely. It must be very hot and it must leave very little evidence.
The possibility that such power of destruction is housed within the human body itself, like the ultimate parasite, is extremely worrying to say the least in that it means that spontaneous human combustion could strike any one of us at any time, and apparently without any warning.
Scientists have been reluctant to admit that S.H.C. is real, as have coroners who tend to prefer to record an open verdict, but firefighters and police disagree, for it is they who examine the grisly scenes first, and they can offer no other possible explanation for the remains they find.
There are generally believed to have been dozens of S.H.C. cases in the last three years alone, but one pathologist, Dr. David Price, stated that he has seen a case roughly every four years. It would appear to be more common in the U.K. than it is elsewhere, but there is no obvious reason for this, though some people believe that the U.K. is criss-crossed by “Fire Leynes“ and it is along these fire leynes that cases of S.H.C. occur. These same people also claim that S.H.C. occurs in cycles which they can predict, but if you want to find one of these people then don't bother to look in Birmingham, England in the year 2004 because you won't find them there!
The phenomenon has been around for a long time, and the first medieval reference to S.H.C. appears in “Acta“ written by Thomas Bartholia, a Danish medical writer, and was published in Copenhagen in 1673. It was thought, in those days, that it was caused by alcohol, and that the victims were drunkards "who had saturated their bodies with spirits." Bartholia recounts the case of a Parisienne woman whom he said "used to drink spirit of wine (brandy) plentifully for the space of three years, so as to take nothing else. Her body contracted such a combustible disposition, that one night, when she lay down on a straw couch she was all burned to ashes except her skull and the extremities of her fingers."
In the French town of Rhiems in the year 1725 Nicole Millet was found burned to death in an armchair, that was otherwise untouched by the fire, and her husband was arrested and convicted of her murder but on appeal the verdict was changed to S.H.C. which inspired a scholar, Jonas Dupont, to gather together all of the evidence that he could find for S.H.C. and he published his work in Leyden in 1763, it was entitled “De Incendis Corporis Humani Spontaneis.”
One case of S.H.C. that is included in just about every article, magazine and book on Spontaneous Human Combustion first appeared in the “Gentleman's Magazine” in 1746 and it is that of the 62 year old Countess Cornelia Bandi in 1731. The Countess' body was found lying approximately four feet from her bed, which she had got out of, as the covers were turned back, or perhaps it may be more accurate to say that what was left of the Countess' body was found. Her arms and legs remained almost intact beside a pile of ashes and what was left of her skull. The authorities blamed her death on "internal combustion" despite the Countess having no close relationship with the bottle, but the gossip around the town was that she would often wash her body down with "camphorated spirit of wine" whenever "she felt herself indisposed." Perhaps the locals felt that there had to be a link with alcohol somehow, even if it was only that a person may be more careless and accident prone where fire is concerned, and doctors would warn their patients that drank to remain clear of naked flames, and obviously not to cool themselves with camphorated spirit of wine.
As the death toll rose, temperance movements began to warn of the perils of alcohol, and they said that death was caused by an inner fire which water could not extinguish. They burned from within and destroyed nothing else but the victim, and the smoke was different to any other as it would leave behind an oily, sticky soot deposit on anything it came into contact with.
As the phenomenon slowly became more accepted, many works of nineteenth century fiction alluded to death by S.H.C., some of the less obscure examples include Washington Irving's “Knickerbocker History of New York“ (1809), Mark twain's “Life On The Mississippi” (1883), Herman Melville's “Redburn” (1849) and Frederick Marryat's “Jacob Faithful” (1833) in which Marryat based the account of the death of the hero's mother on a London “Times” report from 1832 which reduced the body to "a sort of unctuous pitchy cinder" but perhaps the most celebrated account of all the Victorian fiction is that found in Charles Dickens' 1853 book “Bleak House” in which the miserly and alcoholic villain “Krook”’s death is described in "sickening" detail. The account sparked angry reaction from many readers who wrote to Dickens claiming that he had given "currency to a vulgar error" but he responded by saying that he was merely speaking from experience as he had attended an inquest into just such a death when he had been a young reporter for the “Morning Chronicle” twenty years earlier.
The medical profession would come to consider Marryat's description as a classic one as it contained five features which are typical of S.H.C.:
- The victim was an elderly female.
- The victim was an alcoholic.
- A lamp (which may or may not have started the fire) was present.
- Nearby combustible materials remained untouched.
- There was a sticky residue.
The reality of the phenomenon was slow to gain acceptance, and it still has got to do so in certain circles, but as the number of occurrences increases certain facts come to light about who and when it will strike. For instance, it was found in a recent survey that most of the victims were middle aged females who would fall prey to S.H.C., with 58% of victims being female, 23% being over 70 years of age and over half, at 52%, being over 50 years of age. They would most often be struck in the hours of darkness, with 51% of incidences occurring between midnight and 6am, and a staggering 75% between dusk and dawn in the twelve hours from 6pm to 6am. Still, doctors as a whole did not believe that it could happen, and a recent survey found that only 12% of the U.K. adult population believe that people can sometimes catch fire for no apparent reason. Doctors, being doctors, prefer to rely on alternative causes for S.H.C. such as carelessly discarded cigarettes or sparks from a fire, and as the Editor of the “Fortean Times” Bob Rickard says, "Faced with the alternative - a nightmare out of the dark ages - it is not surprising that they are accepted." but the evidence could clearly not be ignored.
Spontaneous combustion is known to occur in flammable materials such as coal, paper or straw without a direct source of ignition when a process called oxidisation occurs. This is when the oxygen in the air combines with the reactive surface particles which causes smouldering until there is enough heat to cause a flame. The process is very difficult to detect in its early stages because there is very little or no energy lost in heat or light before the flame itself appears - the flash point. Chemical reactions in other forms also produce heat such as the many bush fires we see each year throughout the world. Dr. Peter McCartney, a hyperbaric physician, has found that the Baobad tree of Western Africa will combust spontaneously when two of the chemicals stored in two separate chambers inside it come together. He has also found that old cannonballs when they are raised from ancient ship wrecks after many many years totally immersed in the salt water will generate heat when they meet the air. What is not clear is whether or not this heat is generated by the elements in the water reacting with the air, or the algae clinging to the relics, but even so the generation of heat and spontaneous combustion in flammable materials is quite far removed from the spontaneous combustion of the human body.
Throughout its early history the phenomenon constantly met with complete scientific rejection, for example in 1873 Dr. Alfred Swaine Taylor wrote “Principals and Practise of Medical Jurisprudence” in which he stated that: "The hypothesis of such a mode of destruction of the human body is not only unsupported by any credible facts, but is wholly inconsistent with all that science has revealed" and "In the instances reported which are worthy of credit, a candle, a fire, or some other ignited body has been at hand, and the accidental kindling of the clothes of the deceased was highly probable" but by the time that the book had reached its 8th edition in 1928 the doubts are beginning to appear as the editor had added that while still "absolutely rejecting any doctrine of spontaneous combustion" "it must be admitted, on the other hand, that there are cases recorded by credible authorities which require some explanation to account for the unusual amount of destruction which has been produced in a human body by what are at first sight very inadequate means."
The "amount of destruction" varied from total to very minor, and in the book “Fire From Heaven” Michael Harrison looked at a particular case of S.H.C. and put forward a truly original, if not completely preposterous, idea which proposed that S.H.C. could somehow be linked to intelligence and that it would not strike the “better educated” and he used the case of a professor of mathematics at the University of Nashville, Tennessee, James Hamilton.
Hamilton was standing outside his house when he felt a stabbing pain in his left leg - "a steady pain like a hornet sting, accompanied by a sensation of heat." - He looked down and saw a bright flame shooting out from his trouser leg and he tried to beat it out with his hands but this had no effect. He knew that what was happening to him could not, or rather should not, happen, but also he knew that when a fire is deprived of oxygen it cannot burn, so he cupped his hands around the flames until they died and went out.
Fortunately, for the rest of us, it isn't only the "better educated" that survive an attack of S.H.C., there are several reports of other people who have also had a close brush with a fiery death. One such person was a nineteen year old computer operator from London, England named Paul Hayes. Hayes was walking through Stepney Green, East London late on May 25th, 1985 when he was struck. He described it as "like being plunged into the heart of a furnace. My arms felt as though they were being prodded by red hot pokers from my shoulders to my wrists. My cheeks were red hot, my ears were numb. My chest felt like boiling water had been poured over it. I thought i could hear my brains bubbling. I tried to run, stupidly thinking I could race ahead of the flames." After running he lay down on the ground and curled himself into a ball, and thirty seconds later the flames died as quickly as they had started and he stumbled into the nearby London Hospital and was treated for burns.
On November 15th 1974 Jack Angel stopped for the night in his mobile home at Ramada Inn, Savannah, Georgia, and when he woke the next morning he found that his right hand was badly burned and blistered. He also found that he had similar burns on his chest, back, groin, leg and ankles. He had felt nothing during the night and clearly had not woken when it had happened, but he was more puzzled by the fact that his bedclothes and his pyjamas were left unmarked by the burns. He staggered out of his home into the motel building and collapsed to the ground. When he next woke he was lying, in great discomfort, in a hospital bed, and the doctors told him that his burns had originated inside his body but they had no idea how. They had also performed the necessary surgery which included the amputation of his burned hand and lower forearm. With the aid of a renowned Georgia law firm Angel sued the manufacturer of his mobile home for $3 million in damages, but after three years of investigation including the complete dismantling of the mobile home the cause of the fire could not be determined.
Charles Fort of the “Fortean Times” recorded a case in 1929 of a woman named Lily White from Alberta, Antigua whose clothing would often burn to a crisp while leaving her skin completely untouched, and this happened with such regularity that she had to rely on hand me downs from family members, friends and neighbours in order to keep herself clothed.
It is often said that Tibetan monks can affect their bodies in many ways, and one such way they can do so is to produce an "inner heat" and there are many tales recounted by travellers about when they had walked past meditating monks deep in trance who were not being affected by the freezing cold air around them, or by the falling snow which melts the very instant it touches their skin, but how on earth can they do this? According to Hinduism there is an untapped reservoir of energy which lies in the “Astral Body” known as the “Kundalini”. The Kundalini is represented as a coiled up serpent situated at the base of the spine, and it lies dormant unless it can be tapped into by practising “Kundalini Yoga.” It is said that the astral body fits "hand in glove" with the physical body and the two meet at several major points on the body which are known as “Chakras.”
The chakras are located at the base of the spine, the root of the genitals, the navel, the heart, the base of the throat, the "third eye" (between the eyebrows) and on the crown of the head, and when the kundalini is released the energy flows through these chakras.
Oriental medicine and acupuncture both locate the body's “Manipura Chakra” or “Fire Centre” in the solar plexus, and an advanced practitioner of Kundalini Yoga can stimulate his chakra to such an extent that it will glow, and in the Tibetan practise of “Tumo,” adepts have been seen to generate so much inner heat that the snow around them will melt. Could this manipulation of the chakra rage so far out of control as to completely devour the body in fire? The discipline of Kundalini Yoga is between 3,000 and 4,000 years old, and practitioners seek to release the Kundalini in order that they can open up the vast areas of the brain which normally go unused.
It is a very long and complex process which takes many years of meditation to achieve and it is believed to be very dangerous both physiologically and psychologically, and students are warned only to practise under the guidance of a competent teacher. When the release occurs, after systematic physical exercise, concentration techniques, visualisation and controlled rhythmic breathing, the effects are said to be a warm feeling at the base of the spine, the “mulaphara”, which begins as warm and changes to hot, then a sensation of burning heat passes throughout the body. It is at this point that the "serpent fire" unless carefully directed can become a destructive force, and the tutor will guide his pupil to control the flow through his chakras. Though the majority of subjects can take years to reach this transcendental state, others can achieve it in a matter of weeks, but it is believed that it can also occur spontaneously without the subject having any practise at, or even knowledge of, Kundalini Yoga, so obviously they have no guidance through the dangerous process where the serpent fire is released.
A research scientist, Itzhak Bentov, has carried out some testing on this "awakening" and feels that the altered states of consciousness may be brought about by the effects of vibration frequencies on physiology, and he goes on to say that Kundalini energy could be released in anybody by environmental stimuli such as mechanical vibration or electromagnetic waves. These he says, can alter the "body rhythm" and "bio-magnetic field." He suggests that the Kundalini may be a development of the central nervous system, but could the influence of the environmental stimuli cause a sensation of great heat to such an extent that it may result in S.H.C.?
Generally the body temperature rises when a person enters a state of trance, and an Italian healer from the town of Foggia, southern Italy named Padra Pio, whose body temperature was usually slightly lower than most, would enter into a trance and his body temperature would rise off the scale of a clinical thermometer to 118.4 degrees Fahrenheit, but this is far from hot enough to devour a body. It was also said of Pio that while in a trance he seemed to glow.
Some people have a high tolerance for heat, such as the nineteenth century medium Daniel Dunglas Home who would perform feats with fire such as handling hot coals as though he were wearing asbestos gloves. He would also take a hot lamp which he would hold a match against, and as soon as the match came into contact with the lamp it would ignite, he would then place the lamp between his lips and hold it there without feeling any pain or showing any signs of burning. Fire walkers are able to walk barefoot over red hot coals without burning their feet, but it has been shown that just about anybody can do this with practise and the right frame of mind, in theory at least, but there are those who take their abilities to the limit.
Gabrielle Moler and Marie Sonet were two "convulsionnaires" (those who claim to have undergone miraculous cures after experiencing convulsions at the tomb of a highly esteemed deacon known for his kindness and humility). Moler would put her face into a blazing fire and take it out again untouched, or she would put her feet in until her shoes and socks were burned away but her feet would be left unmarked. Sonet would lie over a fire with her head and ankles supported on stools and, wrapped only in a thin sheet to hide her nakedness, she would remain in this position for hours. As with fire walking this is a "trick" which can be learned, but fire raising, pyrokinesis, is a wholly different matter, nobody knows how or why a person may have pyrokinetic abilities.
An early reported case occurred in 1882 when Dr. L. C. Woodman tested and studied 27 year old Mr. W. M. Underwood from Paw Paw, Michigan who had "fiery breath,” and the case appeared in “Scientific American.” Mr. Underwood was able to ignite pieces of paper or handkerchiefs simply by breathing on them, and when he went on shooting trips he would gather together a pile of dry leaves and then breath on them to start a fire which he could use to dry his socks. He had discovered his "gift" by accident when smelling a scented handkerchief which burst into flames. Dr. Woodman could find no explanation for this but he was able to rule out trickery as he would take certain precautions before any experiment. He would make Mr. Underwood wash his mouth out thoroughly, wash his hands, and he would then examine him completely.
Another celebrated case of pyrokinetic ability happened in Hunan, China in 1990 when four year old Tong Tangjiang started to emit smoke from his trousers. His family examined him and found that his underpants had set on fire so they took him to hospital where he was treated for burns, but he " ignited " a further three times over the next two hours and in the process caused further injury to his hands, armpits and genitals. The doctors suggested that four year old Tong seemed to generate high amounts of electric current which increased when he was excited or agitated.
An earlier case of a young boy, this time a little older, happened in Formia, near Rome, in 1982 to sixteen year old Benedetto Supino who was reading a comic in a dentist's waiting room when it set on fire. From then on it seemed that everything Benedetto looked at caught fire. He would ignite books as he read them, he looked at a plastic object that his uncle was holding and it set alight, and he would walk past the furniture and it would begin to burn. Dr. Giovanni Ballesio, Dean of Physical Medicine at Rome University, investigated to see if Benedetto was generating high levels of electricity, but he found no evidence of it, and now Dr. Demetrio Croce is working with the boy to try and help him to control his fire raising abilities.
On December 12th 1983 in Livorno, Italy, pyrokinesis went on trial, or rather an exponent of it did, in the form of Carol Compton. Compton was a young Scottish nanny who stood accused of five charges of arson and one of attempted murder. She was escorted into court by armed soldiers and locked inside a steel cage that was usually reserved for terrorists.
Compton had begun work as a nanny the previous year and had been sacked from her first position in the Ricci household after three fires had broken out. The first one had destroyed the Riccis’ living room, and the following two had occurred while they were all staying in temporary accommodation as repair work was carried out on their home. Carol was blamed for the fires despite there being no evidence to link her to them, in fact at the time of the first one she had been dining with the family in another room.
Next she took a position as nanny to three year old Agnese Cecchini whose wealthy parents worked in television, and on August 1st, 1982 the child's grandfather's bed was found burning, and the following morning Agnese was pulled tearful but unhurt from her burning cot. The police were called and Carol was arrested, charged and refused bail due to the previous charges. Again there was no evidence to connect her to the fires, and again she had been sat in another room with the rest of the family at the time.
During her trial both the prosecution and the defence tried to steer clear of making any mention of fire raising and the supernatural but the media did not. An elderly clairvoyant told them that the spirit of an eighteenth century girl had given Carol the "power of fire" and the woman arrived in court shrouded in black, muttering incantations and brandishing a large crucifix.
The Jury heard evidence from a fire officer with 38 years experience in which he testified that the fires had been unusually hot and they appeared to have burnt downwards. His testimony was supported by that of Professor Vitolo Nicolo of Pisa University who said that "In all my years of experience of this kind of investigation I have never seen fires like this before. They were created by an intense source of heat, but not a naked flame." Forensic tests showed that both mattresses that had burned in the Cecchini house, though made from different materials, had burned in the same way, on the surface only, and neither had been started with a naked flame or any kind of fuel or chemical. The first fire that had destroyed the Riccis’ living room apparently had its source at a wooden stool yet the stool itself was only slightly damaged, and this fire had also spread unusually in that it had moved sideways and downwards, and at one point even into a cupboard drawer.
Despite the lack of evidence connecting Carol Compton to any of the five fires, the jury returned after just six hours with a guilty verdict on two charges of arson and "not proven" on the count of attempted murder.
Though there is no obvious link between pyrokinesis and S.H.C. the two may or may not be connected. One characteristic that they both share is the swiftness and the intensity of the flames. In a case of S.H.C. the body is almost totally devoured, and what isn't devoured in the flames begins to decompose very quickly. The intensity of the fire is unimaginable as the human body is made up of approximately 75% water, yet it is reduced to a pile of ashes in a very short time. When contemplating this we must consider that in a crematorium furnace the temperature is maintained at at least 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit in a forced draught. If there is no forced draught then the temperature must be kept at 3,000 degrees for several hours, but even at 2,000 degrees there are recognisable bones remaining after a period of eight hours, so surely to consume a body as completely as S.H.C. does, the temperature must be hotter than this, but why then are surrounding combustible materials not also incinerated, such as the chair the victim is sat in or the bed they are lying in?
A pathologist, Dr. David Gee of St. James' Hospital, Leeds had one of his papers, “A Case of Spontaneous Combustion” published in “Medicine Science and Law” (Vol. 5 1965), and in it he describes fully his experiments into what he calls "The Wick Effect". Ironically though Gee only mentions the term “Spontaneous Combustion” once in the article, and that is in the first paragraph.
He said that what may happen is that an elderly woman may collapse due to a heart attack or some similar affliction and land in the fireplace or near some other means of ignition, and since these cases usually occur in the winter the woman would be wearing a lot of clothing which will act as an external wick around the body which acts as the candle. As the fire burns part of the clothing it melts some of the nearby body fat which then soaks into the clothing and fuels the flames further which in turn melts more body fat and so on. He added that as the victims were most often women and their clothing usually ends around the knee area, this would explain why very often the feet are left untouched.”
What Gee did was to coat a test tube with human fat and then in human skin to form an eight inch long “candle” which he then wrapped in cloth to simulate clothing. Gee's article continued "one end [of the fat candle] was ignited by a bunsen flame, the fat catching fire after about a minute. Although the bunsen flame was removed at this point, combustion of the fat proceeded slowly along the length of the roll, with a smoky yellow flame and much production of soot, the entire roll being consumed after about one hour." The candle burned in the draught of an extractor fan which ensured that an adequate supply of oxygen reached the flame, and the “much production of soot" indicates incomplete burning, and that the flame temperature was low.
Gee said that melted human fat will burn at 250 degrees Centigrade, which is true, but this is "clarified" fat without it's normal water content. Fat has a high water content and won't burn until enough of this water is "burned" off which leaves behind the "clarified" fat that will burn.
When asked if his candle had any bone in it Gee replied that it hadn't but the bone in the body would be saturated with fat in the same way that the clothing would, so it would burn using the same wick effect. This is not actually the case as the bone content will burn but the outer bone structure will not absorb fat in the same way, and so it will not be destroyed, and bodies in all sorts of "natural" fires such as house fires or vehicle fires still have a largely intact bone structure, as do those which are burned in crematoriums which means that they then have to be crushed in a rotating drum with heavy metal balls in order to reduce them to ash.
Gee's candle experiment was performed in an environment with a forced draught of air providing plenty of oxygen and a bunsen flame applied for a minute, and it still only produced a low temperature flame which burned incompletely for an hour with mostly fat and clothing. It is very unlikely if not impossible that this concoction could be reduced to a pile of ashes when you add into the mixture bones, flesh and blood, and when you remove the enforced draught and add the ten and a half gallons of water found in the average human body. Despite its obvious flaws, Gee's wick theory was and still is widely accepted in many circles, but it doesn't really prove very much. For instance, it doesn't explain how people can ignite without a prolonged flame, or why they don't wake themselves up and put the fire out.
Two researchers, Vincent Gaddis and Ivan Sanderson, came up with a possible theory in which the mind state of a person can alter their "flammability." They say that it can begin with a feeling of loneliness, illness or some emotion that leads to a negative state of mind which affects the victim's metabolism in such a way that phosphagens are produced (phosphagen is a substance like nitro-glycerine which, in the right circumstances, is very combustible). They say that ignition could be caused by electricity in the atmosphere which may be generated by sunspots, magnetic storms or possibly even tectonic stress. Livingston Gearheart published an article in 1975 in the Journal “Pursuit” which showed that a high percentage of spontaneous human combustion cases took place at local peaks in the earth's magnetism and it is possible that this may contribute to ball lightning, which in turn may generate short radio waves similar to microwaves and radar equipment. Some S.H.C. victims appear to have been burned from the inside outwards which is the way a microwave oven works, and radar aerial sites are always fenced off because if you got too close to a powerful radar as it sweeps , it would cook your liver.
Let's look at some of the most celebrated victims and see some of the damage that S.H.C. can do. On the morning of December 5th, 1966,Don Gosnell entered the basement of an apartment building in Couldersport, Pennsylvania to read the gas meter. In the basement his boots disturbed a pile of ashes in the corner and there was a light blue smoke with a strange odour hanging in the air. On his way inside he had received no reply to his calls, so he decided to look in on the old man who lived on the ground floor, Dr. John Irving Bentley. There was no sign of Bentley in the bedroom but there was more of the same strange blue smoke so Gosnell peered around the door to the bathroom, and he was confronted with a sight that he would never forget. On the floor was a hole that had been burned through the floorboards and exposed the joists and the pipes below. Around the hole there was a pile of ash, protruding from which there was the remains of the doctor's leg from the knee down, "like that of a mannequin." The retired Dr. Bentley had been a pipe smoker, but this could not by any stretch of the imagination, account for the almost total destruction of the body, and no heating or electrical faults were found in the property.
Another famous case is that of the elderly widow Mary Reeser. Reeser was originally from Pennsylvania, but when her husband died in 1947 she moved to an apartment at 1200 Cherry Street, St. Petersburg to be near her son Dr. Richard Reeser and his wife Ernestine. She found herself feeling very homesick for the large house and the wide social circle she had left behind in Pennsylvania, and also the hotter climate in St. Petersburg didn't agree with her. She was very upset at the fact that she was unable to find herself suitable accommodation in her home town, and on the last day of her life she went to Richard's house and offered to look after their youngest child while they went off to the beach. Out of concern for her they came back after only an hour and Richard found her sitting in a chair crying. She asked him to take her home which he said he would do as soon as he had had a shower, but by the time he had finished his mother had already left and begun walking by herself. Richard asked Ernestine if she would go and look for her, and when she did she found that she had already made it home so she stayed with her for about an hour before returning home. At around 8pm Richard went round to see her and he found her sitting in her armchair in her nightie while smoking a smoking a cigarette. She hadn't eaten and had taken two Seconal sleeping pills and Richard felt that she was content and relaxed. Her neighbour and landlady Mrs. Carpenter also visited her later that evening but found her to be upset and felt that it was because of a family feud, so to cheer her up she went to buy her some ice cream, but when she returned she saw that Mary's lights were off, as was the radio so she decided not to bother her any further and retired for the night.
On the next morning, July 1st, 1951, at about 5 am Mrs. Carpenter was woken by a dull thud similar to a door slamming and she could detect a burning smell not unlike an electric motor burning too hot, so she turned off the water pump in her garage and found nothing else to be amiss. At 6:30am the newspaper boy arrived but didn't notice any burning smell, and at 8am a package arrived for Mary but the delivery man didn't know which was her apartment so he left it with Mrs. Carpenter who said she would deliver it for him, but when she did so she noticed that the handle on Mary's screen door was very hot but the door was unlocked, so she called out to the delivery man to go in with her but he didn't hear. Some painters working across the road “did” hear and one of them came over and looked around the door for her, but he backed out again and told her to call the fire service which she did before alerting Richard Reeser.
On the floor inside the apartment was a pile of ashes, a few teeth, a skull, a charred liver stuck to a piece of backbone, a large bone possibly from the hip and a velvet slippered left foot which Richard used to identify his mother's remains.
Though this case will always be connected to S.H.C. Dr. Richard Reeser believes that his mother had fallen asleep in the easy chair after taking two Seconal and dropped her cigarette end on to the chair which then went up in flames and destroyed both the chair and her body. This doesn't explain though, the strange nature of the fire which, as in S.H.C. cases, left a nearby pile of newspapers untouched, and Fire Investigators said that no ordinary fire could have possibly reduced Mary Reeser to ashes and left the newspapers untouched.
Another case where surrounding combustibles remained untouched occurred on March 22nd, 1908 in the seaside town of Whitley Bay. Margaret Dewar managed to summon neighbours when she found her elderly sister Wilhelmina upstairs in bed, she was severely charred apparently without waking as she lay in bed. The bedclothes wrapped around her had not been burned. At the inquest the coroner could not accept the evidence that Margaret gave and asked her to think again but she would not change her story, even after a policeman told the court that she had been drunk at the time. The court was adjourned to "give Margaret more time to think" and reconvened a few days later. Obviously some pressure had been brought to bear on Margaret because she now said that she had been wrong and had initially found her sister downstairs, burned but still alive, and had helped her upstairs to bed where she had finally died. The court accepted this change of heart from Margaret and didn't concern itself with the matter of how Wilhelmina had ignited and continued to burn without the bed catching fire as well, nor was there any sign of fire anywhere else in the house.
Coroners still find themselves in the same quandry as very few cases actually refer to spontaneous human combustion, preferring to steer clear of it, and they look for other causes such as flying sparks, discarded cigarettes or children playing with matches, and this is hardly surprising really when you consider the evidence that they are faced with.
One theory that was doing the rounds in the eighteenth century was that a substance known as phlogiston was the principle or element of heat which was inherent in all matter, and this phlogiston could either be latent or operative. Whenever it was operative it was believed to be able to produce all the effects of combustion, however this theory didn't stand the test of time, so modern chemistry has tried to come up with a few. Various chemical reactions can produce explosive effects, for example, if metallic sodium comes into contact with water the sodium will explode violently, or if phosphorous comes into contact with air it will burst into flames. Could there be some sort of chemical reaction within the body which causes it to violently, and very suddenly, destroy itself, and if so then shouldn't it happen much more often than it does? We know that Doctor Price said that he came across it on average once every four years, but could it be more common than this? If so could many cases be hidden by the fact that S.H.C. is not recorded as a cause of death, but rather by an "open verdict" or "accidental death” but how common can it be? One statistic quoted is that 1938 alone saw no fewer than 17 cases, that is roughly one every three weeks.
So far we have seen several of the better known and more commonly quoted cases of death by S.H.C. but we have not yet seen an eye witness account, and there is a good reason for this, they are extremely rare. A report in the “Washington Post” on May 29th, 1990 said that an operating theatre at U.C.L.A. Medical Centre had to be evacuated in mid-operation as "the sheets just caught fire" and the patient, 26 year old Angela Hernandez, died. No explanation could be found for the sudden blaze, and the Fire Department Chief, Pat Marek, formed the opinion that the fire was "bizarre.” Another eye witness account comes from an American physician, Dr. B. H. Hartwell who reported what he saw to the Massachusetts Medico-Legal Society. Dr. Hartwell was driving through Ayer, Massachusetts when his car was flagged down and he was led into a nearby wood. There in the wood was a woman crouched down, she was engulfed in flames and neither he nor the other people standing there could see any cause for the fire.
It is possible that S.H.C. is far more common than it would first appear, and perhaps many more professional people, doctors, coroners and pathologists alike would report more cases if the phenomenon was more widely accepted and they weren't therefore putting their professional reputation at stake, and the irony is that they themselves could make it more widely accepted by reporting more cases. They could also hold valuable information regarding exactly what S.H.C. is and why it occurs, but more importantly how we could prevent it happening again.
Clearly, looking at the facts of the matter, the physical and practical side is that there is a very sudden and extremely intense fire that destroys the body very quickly indeed, and it is also very localised as it does little or no damage to surrounding combustibles. In some cases there is a possible cause of fire such as an open fire, a heater, the pipe and cigarettes smoked by Bentley and Reeser, but none of these could cause an "unconventional" fire, so there must be some cause that can, and I think that the most common sense solution is likely to be found within the human body itself.
Rather than a fire having fuel to burn and thus using it up in the process and also any other fuel it reaches, wood, paper, carpet, bed sheets etc., perhaps there may be some sort of chemical reaction which takes place within the body and this causes it to burn, not so much as we know it in the conventional sense, but to destroy itself through this chemical reaction being triggered, very suddenly and very violently.
At any one time there are an almost countless number of chemicals present in the human body, some of them are released by the brain such as endorphins, could it be, as has been suggested many times in the past, that S.H.C. is caused by a person's state of mind, i.e. loneliness, illness, tiredness or depression, or, like Tong Tangjiang who would generate electric current when he was agitated or excited, and not as was earlier thought due to a person's familiarity with the bottle. There is a case which may possibly suggest an internal cause and not an external cause of a conventional fire.
John Heymer is a forensically trained scenes of crime officer with the Gwent Police C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation Department) and in 1980 he was called out to a house fire at Ebbw Vale. The council houses on the Rassau estate were not centrally heated at that time, but he noticed how warm the house was despite the front door being open, and he began to suspect that a practical joke was being played on him when he could see no signs of the alleged house fire. An Officer pointed him to a closed door and told him that the fire was inside. What immediately struck Heymer was that there were no tell tale signs of fire having been in the room. Even before he had entered it he noticed that there were no deposits of soot around the frame of the door which are left as the smoke escapes from the room, and in fact the gloss paint work was as clean as it should have been. When Heymer entered the room, the lounge, he saw all that remained of Henry Thomas, a small pile of ashes, two disembodied feet and a discoloured skull. The remains were lying on a rug on top of the foam backed fitted carpet, and both the rug and the carpet had only been burned where they were in touch with the ashes, and both were also found to be saturated with melted human body fat.
Beneath the carpet were thermo plastic tiles which would be permanently marked if something hot is placed on them yet they were completely untouched, and the room was still, despite the sub-zero temperatures outside, emitting enough heat to warm the whole house even with the front door open. The chair that the victim had been sat in was burned to ash apart from a part of the right hand side of the wooden frame and part of the fabric cushion.
In the fireplace was a partially burnt fire and on the hearth was a bundle of sticks for starting a new one, these were untouched by the blaze as were the victim's plastic rimmed spectacles which also lay on the hearth. There was no sign of a hot coal having fallen out of the grate and staring the fire, and besides which the fire had gone out through lack of attention. Heymer is certain that it would not have burned very brightly because of the lack of air flow in the room which would also have contributed to its going out only half burned.
Heymer found that no smoke or soot had escaped from the room because the windows did not allow a draught in or out of the room, nor did the door which sealed very tightly when closed, so if the smoke couldn't escape then air could not get in, so the only thing to have burned in the "sealed" room full of combustible materials apart from the chair was made up of 75% water, Henry Thomas.
Heymer came to the conclusion that Thomas had been sat in his chair when the fire had erupted and, as he had burned, he had ignited the chair which burned until it gave way beneath him and ceased burning, leaving part of it undamaged. Thomas had fallen to the floor but continued to burn until only ash remained - apart from his feet and blackened skull. From this he also concluded that the fire had begun in the region of Thomas' abdomen and burned outwards so the extremities were untouched. This left him with the curious and baffling knowledge that the burning chair and the fire in the grate had gone out due to a lack of oxygen in the room, possibly also making Thomas sleepy at the time, but meanwhile the body had continued to "burn."
Could Thomas have triggered it off himself somehow? The Post Mortem showed that he had been alive at the time that the blaze began which is evident in the pink colour of the remaining muscle tissue which shows that there is carbon monoxide present in the blood. This is caused when a person inhales "the products of combustion shortly before death." Surely this must be evidence of a “different” type of fire which is caused within the body and doesn't require an external supply of oxygen in the same way, and it would seem to disprove the "wick effect" as the rug and carpet were soaked in fat but didn't burn, which is of course the basis of Gee's theory.
Heymer came up with a theory that he feels may explain how such a blaze may operate, and this theory also seems to overcome what is often seen as the biggest stumbling block in S.H.C., the amount of fluids in the human body. He proposed that somehow the water could split into its two components of oxygen and hydrogen in gas form.
Hydrogen burning in oxygen produces a colourless flame, but if this flame were to consume something then it would burn in a variety of colours, the colour depending on the material being consumed. He goes on to say that the process of hydrogen gas burning in oxygen gas will produce as much water as it consumes, but this would be in the form of super-heated steam which will expand so much that it is forced up a chimney, leaving no evidence of it having been there apart from slight condensation on the windows.
Heymer also quotes the example of the 1989 B.B.C. Television programme “Tomorrow's World” which featured a portable steel cutting tool that used water as its power source. One litre of water is able to produce 2,000 litres of hydrogen and oxygen per hour, and the tool which was easily carried with one hand burns a combination of hydrogen and oxygen producing about as much heat as a crematorium. This shows that the practical physics of it works, the problem is just how it could occur in the body of its own accord.
Another thought is that it could be caused by the digestive system which would explain why many fires seem to start in the abdominal region and peter out when they reach the outer extremities of the limbs. In a 1986 issue of “New Scientist” Sidney Alford, an explosives engineer, theorised that methane gas might be produced in the body. Outside the body it is produced by anaerobic bacterial decomposition and is what is known as “marsh gas.” Coal miners refer to it as “firedamp” because it becomes combustible when it is mixed with air and it is a major component of natural and coal gas. Rotting matter also produces phosphine which again combusts spontaneously when mixed with air, and in marshy areas it is known as “Will o' the wisp”.
The food that our stomach digests gives us the energy that our body needs to survive, and in starvation the body will lose a huge amount of heat which is what sometimes causes death. Could there some kind of “malfunction” which creates far too much heat and possibly combines with a combustible gas?
In cattle there is a condition which produces excessive amounts of methane gas in the gut, which bloats it so much that it causes great discomfort. This pressure can only be released by a veterinary surgeon making an incision to allow the gas, which is combustible, to escape.
Larry Arnold has suggested that the cause of S.H.C. could be a subatomic particle called a Pyrotron that vaporises the body by an internal subatomic chain reaction, a process known as “cold fusion.” The fusion of hydrogen atoms has been reported during the electrolysis of water with potassium salts which releases huge amounts of heat and it was publicly demonstrated in March 1989 by Dr. Martin Fleischmann and Professor B. Stanley Pons. However, when scientists tried to recreate their experiments and failed, it seemed that cold fusion was a bit of a “damp squib," but there are varying opinions on it around the world.
While cold fusion is accepted as fact in Japan, other researchers in the west have had their funding withdrawn, and Fleischmann and Pons continue their work in a research facility in southern France owned by the Toyota Motor Company. One physicist has speculated anonymously that "it seems likely that of the elements found in the body, potassium or sodium are the most likely to be involved in a fusion reaction. The tissues with the highest potassium levels are the brain, spinal cord and skeletal muscles, and this would suggest that the feet and hands would be least affected and the head the most.
If the process is nuclear it would start at a point, so in the case of potassium it would be the head, spine or skeletal muscles. It would be very hot, maybe incandescent, and this would hardly affect surrounding materials as a slow burn seemingly would, and it would all be over in seconds or a few minutes at most. There just might be residual radio activity and it would be surprising were there not, but there wouldn't necessarily be a lot."
Arthur C. Clark says that he believes cold fusion experiments are "tapping into” “zero-point energy” created by subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence."
While there are many chemicals and chemical reactions in the body, it is very unlikely that such an everyday process as digestion would be the cause for S.H.C. as it is quite infeasible for it to generate enough heat to ignite the gases present in the stomach, and as the process occurs almost continuously in every person, then there would surely be far more instances of it than there are. However, I think that a chemical reaction of some sort is the most likely cause for S.H.C., but just which particular one is difficult to say. Possibly it could be partly brought on by the activity in the brain which produces various chemicals under different circumstances, so it could be that certain moods are more dangerous than others. We know that it must satisfy certain criteria, i.e. It must envelope the body very quickly and quite completely. It must be very hot and it must leave very little evidence.
The possibility that such power of destruction is housed within the human body itself, like the ultimate parasite, is extremely worrying to say the least in that it means that spontaneous human combustion could strike any one of us at any time, and apparently without any warning.
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