<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Spontaneous human combustion (SHC for short) is the mysterious ignition of a person's body without any apparent external source of flame. Many believe that SHC occurs only when a person's entire body bursts into flames, yet there have been cases of SHC in which only minor or moderate burns occurred. The explosion of an entire body into flames is more frequently documented due to its extreme nature.

Many believe that SHC is documented as long ago as biblical times, but scientists regard such evidence as too secondhand to be considered reliable. Over the past 300 years, more than 200 cases of SHC have been documented in real-life cases and in many famous books.

Early documented cases of SHC were recorded by Jonas Dupont, who was inspired to write a book named De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, which is filled with cases of SHC, after encountering records of the Nile Millet case. Millet had been charged with the murder of his wife but the charges were dropped when the court became convinced that she was killed by SHC. Later, Millet was found reduced to ashes on his straw bed, leaving only his skull and a few fingers. The straw bed was only lightly damaged.

Possibly the most famous case of SHC was in St. Petersburg, Florida. On July 1, 1951, Mary Hardy Reeser, a 67-year-old widow, spontaneously combusted in her easy chair. The next morning a neighbor stopped by, found the doorknob hot to the touch and went for help. Mary Reeser was found—or what was left of her—in a blackened circle four feet in diameter. Little remained of the 175-pound woman—a skull about the size of a baseball, a backbone, a black slipper, and about 10 pounds of ash. The police attributed Ms. Reeser's death to a cigarette that fell onto her highly flammable nightgown. But a medical examimer determined that 3,000 degrees of heat would be needed to do this kind of damage to the human body, which would have destroyed the rest of the apartment. Yet only minor damage had been done to the apartment—soot on the ceiling and the walls. No chemical accelerants were found.

Witnesses to SHC usually say that the victim suddenly bursts into flames, with no sign of ignition. In some rare cases, the victim does not seem to burst into flames.

In cases in which witnesses are in adjacent rooms, no one reports hearing cries of pain or for help. In the few rare cases that SHC has proved nonfatal, the victims have stated that they never felt any pain, smelled any smoke, saw any flames, or felt any heat.

Theories

Alcoholism: Many of the victims have been alcoholics but experiments determined that the person would also need to be under extreme heat for the alcohol in their systems to set them afire.

Divine Intervention: In documented cases of the distant past, most people believed SHC was a sign of God's divine punishment.

However, the generally accepted theory for SHC is the wick effect, wherein a person's own body fat acts as the fuel source, with the clothing acting as a wick, thus creating a sort of human candle. Upon ignition by a cigarette or some other source, the fat melts into the clothing, or drips down into the chair, acting as a continuous fuel supply, which can easily raise the temperature to that required to destroy bone. When all the fat is used up, the fire goes out, without damaging much of the surroundings.

Support for this theory comes primarily from an experiment performed by Dr. John de Haan in 1998 (see the external link below). Opponents to the theory as an explanation for all cases of SHC cite cases where the burning appearances to have happened too quickly, and witnesses to cases that do not seem to fit this explanation.

Appearances in Fiction

• Charles Dickens has a character spontaneously combust in his novel Bleak House.

• In the first season episode of CSI entitled Face List, an apparent case of SHC is investigated. The wick effect is considered.

• In the 2005 Burning Man episode of the Night Stalker series, victims burst into flames.

External Links

1998 BBC Article on the Wick Effect