Three days before Christmas in 2010,
76-year-old Michael Faherty died in a house fire in the picturesque Irish city of Galway.
People die in fires all too often, but this case was, shall we say, unusual.
What was once Michael's body was now a pile of ash, as though he’d been consumed by a
towering inferno... but that made absolutely no sense. Because aside from the armchair in
which his body was found, the rest of his house was practically untouched.
Investigators were also struggling to figure out how the fire had started in the first place -
there was no source of flame nearby, nor a trace of accelerant amidst the debris. Stranger still,
a foul-smelling oily residue coated the walls and ceilings of the entire ground floor.
To put it mildly, the entire incident was a mystery. A mystery that deepened when
the coroner declared that Michael had died from spontaneous human combustion.
In other words, Michael Faherty hadn't been
the tragic victim of a house fire - he was the house fire.
Strange though it was, Michael's death is far from unique - cases
of spontaneous human combustion - people bursting into flames
without an external source of ignition - have been chrocicled for centuries.
One of the first was in 1731 when Italian Countess Cornelia Bandi, went to bed feeling unwell.
The following morning her bedchamber was covered in an oily residue and a pile of ashes was found
by the bed. The noblewoman's body had been almost entirely devoured by what must have been a very
small, very concentrated fire - all that was left were her lower legs and a few stray fingers.
One of the most famous victims of spontaneous human combustion is Mary Reeser, a 67-year old
Florida resident, whose apartment became her funeral pyre in 1951. Her landlady
noticed that the door handle was hot to the touch and discovered Mary’s charred remains
inside. Only her left foot - still wearing a slipper - survived the blaze. Once again,
the walls and ceilings were covered in a smelly oily residue.
These are just a couple of examples among hundreds of strangely similar cases,
all sharing a few key details:
1. The victim's bodies are almost entirely destroyed by the fire, even the bones
2. The lower legs and feet usually survive completely unharmed, and are often still
wearing unburnt clothing or shoes 3. A mysterious oily residue
is found on surfaces nearby 4. And the unusually localised fire that caused
the damage appears to have no external source: it would seem the victims just... burst into flames.
So, what the hell is going on here? We still don’t know for sure,
but some have blamed excessive alcoholism whilst others have deemed it to be divine
retribution dished out to sinners. That was the angle Charles Dickens went with when he killed
off alcoholic rag and bone man and all round arsehole Mr. Krook in his novel Bleak House.
Other theories include poltergeist activity, a buildup of static electricity, ball lightning,
the effects of an undiscovered subatomic particle tentatively titled the pyrotron,
or possibly just holding in your farts (you can thank South Park for that one).
There is of course another school of thought - that the entire idea human
beings can just burst into flames at random is complete horsepiss.
As for who's right... well, the answer to that question might just surprise you.
Let’s start by highlighting the obvious, we know humans can combust because we burn millions of
them every year... in crematoriums. It’s just the spontaneous part that’s controversial.
We also know spontaneous combustion in general is possible. For example,
exothermic reactions in large piles of compost or hay can generate enough heat to ignite,
and the same can be said of coal, charcoal, and cotton.
So, humans burn and sometimes things randomly catch on fire - is spontaneous human combustion
really such a stretch? Actually, yeah it kind of is. As of today, there is quite simply no
proven process by which a human body - which is about 60% water - could suddenly catch on fire.
For that reason, the vast majority of scientists
discount the notion of truly “spontaneous” human combustion.
A 1984 study of 30 historical cases found that almost all the bodies were
discovered near some kind of flame - an open fire, a candle, a lit pipe,
that sort of thing. They also found that many of the victims were smokers,
and almost all were elderly, had serious health conditions, or were alcoholics.
The conclusion was pretty simple - a stray ember from a nearby fire or
dropped cigarette lands in the victim's lap, and they're either too old, too ill,
or too drunk to react before the fire gets out of hand.
Take Mary Reeser as a prime example - she was a heavy smoker who took sleeping pills. While
spontaneous human combustion can't be ruled out, it’s much more likely that she fell into
a pill-induced sleep, whilst holding a lit cigarette and thermodynamics did the rest.
It's also a bit bloody suspicious that the vast majority of victims 'spontaneously combust' when
they're home alone without any witnesses. In the age of the smartphone and Big Brother-style CCTV,
if people really could just catch on fire for no reason you'd expect to
see some decent footage. You've Been Framed would pay good money for that kind of thing.
Proponents of spontaneous human combustion frequently cite incidents where no source of
fire was found nearby. But as Carl Sagan once said - absence of evidence does not
mean evidence of absence. In other words, just because an external source of ignition isn't
found near the body, it doesn't mean there wasn't one to begin with - whatever sparked
the fire could have been completely consumed by the subsequent flames.
OK, so… case closed, right? It’s all just a myth... well,
let's not get ahead of ourselves. Because even if the 'spontaneous'
part is starting to look a little sus, what happens next is still utterly baffling.
As we've seen, the remains left behind in these cases
are very distinctive - the torso is utterly destroyed, while the legs or feet survive.
Crematorium furnaces reach temperatures approaching 1000 degrees celsius for roughly
90 minutes to incinerate your average human - using a tremendous amount of fuel in the
process. Even then, fragments of bone remain that have to be mechanically pulverised.
So here's the million dollar question: how could a mere cigarette or errant ember falling
onto someone's lap achieve similar results to an industrial furnace? And how can a fire
that's hot enough to turn bones to ash leave other parts of the body completely untouched?
Not only is this stuff seriously weird, it's also the exact opposite of what we typically
see with victims of house fires. Normally the limbs go firstand the torso tends to survive.
For a long time, these twin enigmas remained
unexplained until an unexpected source provided a clue - the humble candle.
Everyone knows how candles work - the wax provides a steady flow of fuel, which is delivered to the
flame by way of the wick, resulting in a slow, even burn that can last for hours.
Something similar could be happening with spontaneous human combustion
A spark ignites a victim's clothing, which acts like the wick. And then the
wax - aka fuel - is supplied by human body fat, which is highly flammable.
If a small clothing fire is left unchecked because the victim is incapacitated (or dead from natural
causes), the skin beneath can rupture, allowing melting body fat to seep into the clothing. This
fat fuels the fire, which melts more fat, and perpetuates the cycle until there's
no more fuel to burn. In effect, the victim becomes a human candle.
This gruesome process is known as the Wick Effect, and it illuminates a lot
of the weirdness we’ve seen so far. A small, intense fire with a low flame that won’t easily
spread beyond its source of fuel seems like a perfect fit for spontaneous human combustion.
The distinctive destruction of the torso also starts to make sense - that's where
we carry most of our body fat. The legs survive partly because they're below the fire where it's
considerably cooler, and partly because they don't contain enough fat to fuel the flames.
The wick effect also explains where that odd brown residue comes from - gruesomely enough,
it's just partially burnt body fat.
But as good as the wick effect appears to be in
explaining all the oddities of these cases, there is one small problem.
In 2016, BBC's Earth Lab conducted an experiment to demonstrate the efficacy
of the wick effect on a human body. But things didn't proceed as planned.
They wrapped a dead pig in a blanket, and dropped a cigarette onto the fabric.
A fire began to smoulder almost immediately, but it proved too small to melt the body fat
below. In the end, the team had to intervene by dousing the fire in a liquid accelerant and
actively fanning the flames - two things that most certainly would *not* happen in the real world.
The wick effect did eventually kick in, creating a small,
self-sustaining fire focused on the torso, which burned for six hours straight.
The pattern of burning was shockingly similar to spontaneous human combustion,
but the damage was far less severe - the 'pig in blanket' was nicely charred and would have
been lovely with your Christmas turkey, but it was nowhere near turning into a pile of ash.
Now, it may simply be that the experiment wasn't close enough to the real thing - a pig is a pretty
good substitute for a human, but it isn't perfect. Nevertheless, it did cast doubts - doubts which
only grow when you explore some of the more extreme cases of spontaneous human combustion.
On a September evening in 1982, Jeannie Saffin was sitting at the kitchen table of her parent's house
in north London with her father and brother-in-law when she suddenly caught fire. According to the
brother-in-law, Jeannie was engulfed by a raging inferno within seconds - there were even flames
shooting out of her mouth, Smaug-style. She died in hospital not long afterwards.
In another case, 5 years later, what remained of Barry Soudain was found on his kitchen floor
in Folkestone, Kent. As we’ve seen before, Barry was but a big pile of ash with a couple
of feet sticking out. It should have been a textbook case of the wick effect in action,
except for one small problem - bubbling away on the hob nearby was a pan of water.
It’s thought the wick effect requires roughly 12 hours to reduce a human to ash. But if Barry
had been burning away for half a day or more, why hadn't the pot on the stove boiled dry?
Other victims appear to have been fully conscious when meeting their spontaneously
fiery fate. Homeless man Robert Bailey was found in an abandoned building in London in 1967. His
still-burning body was bent in agony at the foot of a flight of stairs, and it appered he’d been
writhing around before succumbing to the flames. His pain had been so great that he'd bitten
into a solid wooden bannister so forcefully that Firefighters had to pry his jaw open..
It doesn’t take forensic science to suss that
the wick effect alone cannot explain these cases.. So, what are we missing?
According to research biologist Brian Ford,
the final piece of this macabre puzzle is, of all things, nail polish remover.
Ford was never convinced the wick effect alone could turn a non-flammable human
into a pile of ash overnight, so he tried to come up with feasible scenarios that
could increase our body’s flammability. And it turns out he actually found one.
When the human body is starved of carbohydrates,
it begins to burn stored fat instead. The resulting metabolic state is called
Ketosis because it results in elevated levels of ketone bodies in the bloodstream and urine,
one of which is acetone - the key ingredient in nail polish remover.
Acetone is extremely flammable,
and can accumulate in fatty tissues at high concentrations during ketosis.
Ford believes that, under the right circumstances, a person in ketosis may become flammable.
To test his theory, he made a bunch of tiny model humans out of pork meat marinated overnight in
acetone - as you do. He dressed these mini meat men in tiny clothes, then set them on
fire - every single one of them burned to ash in under 30 minutes, leaving only their limbs behind.
Notably, Ford's pork soldiers burned with a bright blue flame. Most spontaneous human
combustions happen behind closed doors, but the few folks who have witnessed one almost always
mention blue flames. Incidentally, the low flames produced by the wick effect are invariably orange.
It's pretty compelling evidence, but once again questions remain. Ketosis isn't an elusive
metabolic state - most of us experience it on a fairly regular basis: after a session at the gym,
when we're ill, or when we haven't eaten for a while. Plenty of people enter ketosis
on purpose in an attempt to burn fat and lose weight - it’s called the Keto diet.
So, if ketosis really does make the human body flammable, why isn't some poor soul going up
like a firework every five minutes? For now, we don't have a good answer to that question.
If you're starting to spot a pattern, I'm right there with you - there simply isn't
enough evidence to either confirm or debunk any of these theories. Cases of spontaneous
human combustion are incredibly rare, and since burning old people is apparently
considered unethical, it's difficult to create meaningful experiments in the lab.
We can probably rule out the more extreme theories, but there isn't
really enough evidence to definitively confirm the more sensible ones either.
So yeah, all I can say is, until we meet again, please,
please try really hard not to burst into flames.
Thanks for watching.