Spontaneous Human Combustion
On Dec. 5, 1966, the body of 92-year-old Dr. J. Irving Bentley was discovered in his Pennsylvania home by a meter reader. Actually, only part of Dr. Bentley’s leg and a foot were found. The rest of his body had been burned to ashes in his bathroom. Part of the good doctor’s incinerated robe lay at the site and his walker was left propped against the blackened bathtub. But the most eye-catching clue was a massive hole in his vinyl floor. Measuring 2 feet (.6 meters) wide by 4 feet (1.2 meters) long, it had eaten into the wooden floor beams and left a pile of ashes in the basement below. The rest of the house remained intact.
At first, Bentley’s demise was identified as a careless mishap. The elderly gentleman loved to smoke his pipe and he had a bad habit of carrying matches in his robe pockets. Upon reviewing the scene, the coroner deduced that Bentley had fallen asleep while smoking in the bathroom and was burned alive after some of his clothing caught fire.
But skeptics point to the massive hole in his vinyl floor saying that the fire had to of been extremely hot for it to reduce the floor beams to ash. But if the fire was scalding why didn’t the rest of the house catch?
For some the answer is spontaneous human combustion (SHC)
According to the National Parks Service, spontaneous combustion occurs when an object — in the case of spontaneous human combustion, a person — bursts into flames from a chemical reaction within, apparently without being ignited by an external heat source.
I know this sounds crazy, and to be honest, holes can be poked into the theory that Dr. Bentley’s death was caused by SHC. But what happened to him has happened to others.
At roughly 8 a.m. on July 2, 1951, Marly Reeser’s landlady Pansy Carpenter arrived at Reeser’s door with a telegram. Trying the door, she found the metal doorknob to be uncomfortably warm to the touch and called the police.
Reeser’s remains, which were largely ashes, were found among the remains of a chair in which she had been sitting. Only part of her left foot (which was wearing a slipper) and her backbone remained, along with her skull. Plastic household objects at a distance from the seat of the fire were softened and had lost their shapes.
Reeser’s skull had survived and was found among the ashes, but shrunken (sometimes with the added descriptive flourish of ‘to the size of a teacup’). I don’t think that was the case to be honest. But the extent of this shrinkage was enough to be remarked on by official investigators and was not an illusion caused by the removal of all facial features (ears, nose, lips, etc.).
Now it’s important to note that shrinking of the skull is not a regular feature of alleged cases of SHC, although the ‘shrunken skull’ claim has become a regular feature of anecdotal accounts of other SHC cases and numerous apocryphal stories.
During the investigation, detectives found that Reeser’s temperature was around 3,500 °F (1,930 °C), which puzzled the investigators, as almost everything else in the room in which Reeser was found remained intact.
For those who don’t know, a human body burns at 1,400 to 2,100 °F (760 to 1,150 °C). A complete cremation of a body usually takes 90 minutes to two hours, with larger bodies taking a longer time.
A common theory was that Reeser was smoking a cigarette after taking sleeping pills, and then fell asleep while still holding the burning cigarette, which could have ignited her gown, ultimately leading to her death. Investigators also found that the fire had burned a socket, which stopped a clock at 2:26am, suggesting that Reeser had died at around that time.
SHC believers point to many other cases such as 89-year-old widow Margaret Hogan from Dublin, Ireland. She was found burned almost to the point of complete destruction in 1970.
Plastic flowers on a table in the centre of the room had been reduced to liquid and a television with a melted screen sat 12 feet from the armchair in which the ashen remains were found; otherwise, the surroundings were almost untouched.
Her two feet, and both legs from below the knees, were undamaged. A small coal fire had been burning in the grate when a neighbor left the house the previous day; however, no connection between this fire and that in which Mrs. Hogan died could be found.
Another case is that of Henry Thomas, a 73-year-old man, was found burned to death in the living room of his council house on the Rassau estate in Ebbw Vale, South Wales, in 1980. His entire body was incinerated, leaving only his skull and a portion of each leg below the knee. The feet and legs were still clothed in socks and trousers. Half of the chair in which he had been sitting was also destroyed.
A more resent SHC case is that of Michael Faherty, 76, who died at his home in Galway on December 22, 2010. What’s special about this case is that the coroner ruled the death as SHC.
Mr Faherty had been found lying on his back with his head closest to an open fireplace. The fire had been confined to the sitting room. The only damage was to the body, which was totally burnt, the ceiling above him and the floor underneath him.
Forensic experts found that a fire in the fireplace of the sitting room had not been the cause of the blaze that killed Mr Faherty.
Modern forensic research takes into account at least 4 major factors when reconstructing a scene:
- Identifiable fire pattern damage, or changes to exposed surfaces by heat transfer,
- Human factors including witness accounts, detection, behavior and escape paths,
- Physical forensic evidence of human activity including burns, injuries, wounds, latent fingerprints, shoe prints and blood spatter, and the
- Application of the scientific method based upon relevant scientific principles and research including fire testing, dynamics, suppression modeling, pattern, analysis, and historical cases.
The previous information was taken from Angi Christensen’s master’s thesis on “Debunking the Spontaneous Human Combustion Myth: Experiments in the Combustibility of the Human Body.”
The doctor, Ciaran McLoughlin, made this statement at the inquiry into the death: “This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation.
While all of these cases are bizarre the idea on whether or not human beings can spontaneously combust has been debated for several centuries.
The first known accounts of spontaneous human combustion date all the way back to 1641. Thomas Bartholin has been credited with penning the first written account of SHC. In 1663, he described how a woman in Paris “went up in ashes and smoke” while she was sleeping. The straw mattress on which she slept was unmarred by the fire.
The hundreds of alleged SHC accounts since that time have followed a similar pattern: The victim is almost completely consumed, usually inside his or her home. Coroners at the scene have sometimes noted a sweet, smoky smell in the room where the incident occurred.
Photos that document suspected SHC victims show the corpse’s torso and head are charred beyond recognition, but some extremities remain intact. As you may remember Dr. Bentley’s leg and a foot were found unburned, Ms. Reeser’s foot was unburned, and Mr Faherty’s feet and legs were still clothed in socks and trousers.
Another odd occurrence is a greasy residue is sometimes left behind on furniture and walls.
According to howstuffworks.com, for an object to combust spontaneously, three things need to happen. First, the body must be heated to its ignition temperature — the point at which it will catch fire without being exposed to an external flame or spark. If the heat building up inside the object cannot escape, and if it’s being exposed to a steady flow of oxygen that isn’t rapid enough to cool it down, the stage will be set for spontaneous ignition.
Theories
There are a few theories out there that try explain why SHC happens.
One widespread belief says the fire is sparked when methane (a flammable gas produced by gut bacteria) builds up in the intestines and is ignited by enzymes (proteins in the body that act as catalysts to induce and speed up chemical reactions).
Yet this begs the question of why there are no reported instances of spontaneous combustion in cows, which produce far more methane than people.
Charles Dickens blamed booze. In the 1850s, the writer ignited great interest in SHC by using it to kill off a character in his novel “Bleak House.” The character, named Krook, was an alcoholic following the belief at the time that spontaneous human combustion was caused by excessive amounts of alcohol in the body. American prohibitionists helped spread this notion as they denounced the evils of alcoholism.
In the 1970s, a quasi-Freudian explanation came into vogue suggesting that a person’s depressive emotional states could somehow cause him or her to become enflamed. Others have suggested that sunspots, cosmic storms, gas-producing intestinal bacteria, or even a buildup of the body’s supposed “vibrational energy” may be to blame.
It’s also been suggested that the fire begins because of static electricity building up inside the body or from an external geomagnetic force. A self-proclaimed expert on spontaneous human combustion, Larry Arnold, has suggested that the phenomenon is the work of a new subatomic particle called a pyroton, which he says interacts with cells to create a mini-explosion. But at the time of this recording, there’s no scientific evidence that proves the existence of this particle.
Another theory is the wick effect. When lit by a cigarette, smoldering ember or other heat source, the human body acts much like an inside-out candle. A candle is composed of a wick on the inside surrounded by a wax made of flammable fatty acids. The wax ignites the wick and keeps it burning.
In the human body, the body fat acts as the flammable substance, and the victim’s clothing or hair acts as the wick. As the fat melts from the heat, it soaks into the clothing and acts as a wax-like substance to keep the wick burning slowly. Scientists say this would explain why victims’ bodies are destroyed yet their surroundings are barely burned.
Forensic scientist John DeHaan once watched this gruesome spectacle unfold in real time — to a pig, anyway. In a 1998 experiment that was televised on the BBC, he wrapped a pig corpse in a blanket, then lit the garment ablaze with some petrol. As DeHaan looked on, the animal’s body fat liquified, adding more fuel to the fire. By the time he put out the flames a few hours later, the slow, intense burn had converted a large percentage of the pig’s flesh and bones into ash. (The rest of the room suffered minimal damage.)
Yet the dead pig’s feet remained intact. This is consistent with reports of SHC leaving disembodied feet or hands behind. Extremities don’t contain as much fat as the core of the body does, so they’re less likely to go up in smoke when the wick effect occurs.
Now how does science account for the greasy stains left on walls and ceilings after a spontaneous combustion? Those could simply be the residue that was produced when the victims’ fatty tissue burned.
Finally, one of my favorite theories suggests that aliens, UFOs, or poltergeists are responsible for these unusual deaths, or that victims suffered the wrath of God.
Likely Explanations
Most scientists say there are more likely explanations for what happened to those who died in the cases we’ve discussed.
Almost all postulated cases of SHC involve persons with low mobility due to advanced age or obesity, along with poor health. Victims show a high likelihood of having died in their sleep, or of having been unable to move once they had caught fire.
Cigarettes are often seen as the source of fire, as the improper disposal of smoking materials causes one in every four fire deaths in the United States. Natural causes such as heart attacks may lead to the victim dying, subsequently dropping the cigarette, which after a period of smoldering can ignite the victim’s clothes.
Also SHC can be confused with self-immolation (i-muh-lei-shn) as a form of suicide. Self-immolation is the act of killing oneself by setting fire to oneself with a flammable liquid.
In the West, self-immolation accounts for 1% of suicides, while developing countries can see figures as high as 40%.
So is SHC real?
In my research all answers point to no. None of the proposed scientific explanations for how a body would spontaneously burst into flames have held up to scrutiny. Some of the early proposed mechanisms rely on outdated medical ideas, such as the notion that an ignition could be the result of an imbalance of the bodily humors. The Victorian explanation that alcohol rendered the body flammable doesn’t work either, seeing that the concentrations of alcohol in even the most intoxicated people are much too low and that an external source of ignition would be required.
But it is my personal belief that SHC can happen. I fall more inline with the “wick effect” theory as experiments have been conducted which has produced results that show many of the unusual characteristics associated with SHC.
I also think that science has yet to develop equipment or discover a particle that will lead to the scientific community accepting SHC as a plausible event. For the longest time humans thought the cold was the devil leaving your body and it wasn’t until science developed ways to detect viruses the idea changed. So who’s to say that can’t happen to SHC.
Of corse I would love your opinion on the matter. Do you believe in SHC? If so why? If not, I would love to hear your opinion too.
Be sure to check out my podcast Leave The Lights On for episodes like this and more!
