This is a mystery even Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be able to solve.
Imagine coming home one day to your partner.
You put the key in the door and say something along the lines of, “Hi honey, I’m home.”
There’s no reply.
You go to the kitchen, and she’s not there.
So you enter the living room, only to be met by the most gruesome thing you’ve ever seen
or will ever see.
Your nearest and dearest is a pile of smoldering ashes on the floor.
Well, there’s a foot, still wearing the Nike shoes she just bought.
Besides the immediate area under her, the rest of the room is fine.
It’s as if she just went up in flames, combusted, all by herself.
You as well as the investigators that later arrive have no idea how this happened.
A week later the newspapers state, “Cause of death unknown.”
That might sound something like a tale from the Twilight Zone, but it has happened before,
many times in fact.
The term used for it is Spontaneous Human Combustion, which just means someone seemingly
going up in flames possibly without external factors being to blame.
You’ve likely seen such a thing in horror movies, but it’s not something we expect
to see in real life.
First we’ll present to you a case of this happening and then we’ll try and find out
why it happens.
The year was 1951 and it was a steamy hot summertime in Florida, USA.
The landlady of a woman named Mary Hardy Reeser had a telegram for her renter and so she went
around to the house.
Only she put her hand on the doorknob and it felt kind of hot.
That worried her, and so she called the cops.
The police opened the door and had the shock of their lives, because when they entered
the living room what they witnessed was pretty much a bunch of smoldering ashes in a burnt
out chair.
The only part of the woman not incinerated was the bottom part of her leg.
One black shoe was still on her foot.
We’ve seen the photo, and you can only imagine how this perplexed the cops.
No one had broken into the house, and the fire had completely destroyed the woman from
what seemed like within.
It was like she had just gone up in flames, and not even moved from the chair.
In that chair lay some backbone and shrunken skull along with other bits of bone fragments.
The news reports actually said her skull was shrunk to the size of a cup.
Police, the fire department, and pathologists were baffled.
Had she had caught fire she would have moved or called for help.
How could a body just burn like that.
It seemed to some people as if she had burned from the inside and that she must have gone
up in a very intense blaze.
It would have taken extremely high temperatures to cremate a person on the spot.
The U.S. media was in a frenzy about this, with one outlet calling it the case of the
“cinder woman mystery.”
And a mystery it was.
Perhaps, the media said, the loving mother had been somehow hit by a freak lightning
strike.
Someone wrote into one newspaper, saying, “A ball of fire came through the open window
and hit her.
I seen it happen.”
No one was sure, although some outlets started to peddle the theory of internal human combustion.
It wasn’t a new thing.
There were reported cases of it happening for centuries.
The investigation found no trace of accelerants such as gasoline or other combustible fluids.
It really seemed like she had just gone up in flames.
One of the investigators said it was “the most unusual case I’ve seen during my almost
25 years of police work.”
That same investigator then turned to anyone who might have knowledge of this, issuing
a note that read, “We request any information or theories that could explain how a human
body could be so destroyed and the fire confined to such a small area and so little damage
done to the structure of the building and the furniture in the room not even scorched
or damaged by smoke.”
And so came back a theory, although one that a lot of people didn’t really accept.
The theory was called the, “Wick Effect”.
To explain this you need to know some things about our dearly departed Mary.
One, she took sleeping pills, and two, she was said to be a very enthusiastic smoker
of cigarettes.
She was also on the large side, and let’s just say she was flabby.
Hey, she was 67 and lived alone, she liked to eat.
So, the theory goes that she might have taken some of those pills and then fallen into a
deep sleep.
As she hardly ever had a cigarette out of her hand – her daughter would later confirm
this – she might have fallen asleep with that smoke still going.
She was wearing a nightgown made of rayon acetate, which could have easily gone up in
flames.
So, said the theorists, her smoke caused the gown to catch fire and then as she couldn’t
wake up she slowly burned until she melted much like a candle left to burn.
Beside the chair there was no where for the fire to go so it just consumed her.
As she had so much fat on her that could have helped the smoldering process as fat burns.
Does that explain things for you?
Likely not, and it didn’t impress a lot of scientists, either.
One skeptical scientist said the obvious thing, in that for such a cremation to happen she
would have had to burn at several thousand degrees for several hours.
He added, “I cannot conceive of such complete cremation without more burning in the apartment.”
He also asked about the shrunken skull, in a normal fire it would have exploded.
He wrote, “In presence of heat sufficient to destroy soft tissues, the skull would literally
explode into many pieces.
I have never known any exception to this rule.”
That, along with the case in general, has remained a mystery.”
If you were indeed Sherlock Holmes, you might come up with another theory which is perhaps
darker but less mysterious.
Maybe she was killed by a murderer who had some kind of crematorium device.
He then decided not to finish the foot, bring the body back to the house, then burn the
chair to make it look like the event had happened in the room.
Oh, and of course not a person saw this.
Yep, that doesn’t sound too plausible, either.
Like we said, this case it seems is immutably unsolved.
As you will see, there are many such unsolved cases like this one.
You won’t be surprised to hear that a lot of people think something out of this world
made this happen.
It does sound like the work of a demon, and hey, if you’ve seen the horror movie “Hereditary”
you’ll know demons allegedly get up to such things.
You might call this an outlier in terms of theories.
It seems that from the first reported case in the 18th century to the present date there
have been 200 cases that looked like internal human combustion.
Most experts have no explanation for this, in the scientific sense, so they say it doesn’t
exist.
Meaning there has to be external factors at work.
At the same time people indeed have “seemingly” burned from within and there has been no easy
explanation.
People haven’t stopped trying to explain, though, and for quite some time.
Back in the 19th century some scientists thought it might have had something to do with alcoholism,
but they didn’t say exactly how booze could create the mortal bonfire.
It just seemed a lot of those incinerated folks were partial to a drink… or ten.
It was a recurring theme, at least.
In the British Medical Journal in 1938 one man wrote that alcoholism seemed to be a factor
in most cases.
He also said that when it occurred it usually happened to older women.
In more recent investigations it was written that in most cases the people were, like Mary,
likely close to a fire source, whether that was a cigarette or a lamp or a candle or an
open fire.
Add to that the booze, or in Mary’s case, the sleeping pills.
They catch fire but are too zonked or drunk to wake up, and then it’s possible the material
around them caused a bigger fire.
In turn, their body fat seeped into the material and caused a fire to burn at a higher temperature.
And that, say some people, is how they melt on the spot.
The only things spared are the extremities, such as that shoe.
We’ve seen a few pictures when almost entire legs survived, but nothing else.
The photos show just ash and legs.
There are also more recent cases.
Yep, that doesn’t sound too plausible, either.
Like we said, this case it seems is immutably unsolved.
As you will see, there are many such unsolved cases like this one.
You won’t be surprised to hear that a lot of people think something out of this world
made this happen.
It does sound like the work of a demon, and hey, if you’ve seen the horror movie “Hereditary”
you’ll know demons allegedly get up to such things.
You might call this an outlier in terms of theories.
It seems that from the first reported case in the 18th century to the present date there
have been 200 cases that looked like internal human combustion.
Most experts have no explanation for this, in the scientific sense, so they say it doesn’t
exist.
Meaning there has to be external factors at work.
At the same time people indeed have “seemingly” burned from within and there has been no easy
explanation.
People haven’t stopped trying to explain, though, and for quite some time.
Back in the 19th century some scientists thought it might have had something to do with alcoholism,
but they didn’t say exactly how booze could create the mortal bonfire.
It just seemed a lot of those incinerated folks were partial to a drink… or ten.
It was a recurring theme, at least.
In the British Medical Journal in 1938 one man wrote that alcoholism seemed to be a factor
in most cases.
He also said that when it occurred it usually happened to older women.
In more recent investigations it was written that in most cases the people were, like Mary,
likely close to a fire source, whether that was a cigarette or a lamp or a candle or an
open fire.
Add to that the booze, or in Mary’s case, the sleeping pills.
They catch fire but are too zonked or drunk to wake up, and then it’s possible the material
around them caused a bigger fire.
In turn, their body fat seeped into the material and caused a fire to burn at a higher temperature.
And that, say some people, is how they melt on the spot.
The only things spared are the extremities, such as that shoe.
We’ve seen a few pictures when almost entire legs survived, but nothing else.
The photos show just ash and legs.
There are also more recent cases.
There is one recent alternative theory, though, and this was posited by a British biologist
named Brian J. Ford.
In 2012, he tried to answer the question in The New Scientist of “Why humans spontaneously
combust?”
He doesn’t believe the Wick Effect, or anything close to the paranormal.
He doesn’t buy any of the theories put forward so far.
He believes that the phenomenon could be down to diet and something called acetones being
produced by the body.
This might happen as a result of a certain diet, diabetes, and/or boozing.
This is what he wrote about these things in a long paper on the subject of going up in
flames: “Acetone is familiar as nail-polish remover
and may seem to be an unusual compound to find in metabolic cycles, but it is always
present in the body in small amounts, and it can be used as an energy source by living
cells.”
It is highly flammable, he said, and is present on the breath.
He added that it also collects in layers of fat and on clothes.
He said even static electricity produced by combing your hair or removing certain clothes
might ignite this stuff, not to mention lighting a cigarette.
And voila, the conflagration commences.
He actually put this to the test in the lab, and concluded:
“For the very first time we have a plausible model for spontaneous human combustion, which
offers a natural metabolic explanation for this well-documented phenomenon.”
Are you convinced by any of these theories?
Or do you have your own?
Tell us in the comments.
Now go watch our episode on the “Weirdest Brain Disorders” Thanks for watching, and
as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.