Strangest Mysteries of the World and Beyond !

Spontaneous Human Combustion

Spontaneous Human Combustion  

The cinder Lady; July 1st 1951, 67 yr old widow, Mary Reeser (1881 – 1951).The last time Mary had been seen alive was at 9pm on the night of the fire. Her son, Dr. Richard Reeser, and her landlady, Mrs Pansy Carpenter, had visited Mary and said their farewells at about 9:00 pm, leaving Mary sitting comfortably in her easy chair. July 2nd, the morning after the fire, Mrs Carpenter found the door handle to Mary’s apartment was hot to the touch. Suspecting a fire had taken place she immediately called the police.Upon entering Mary’s apartment, a grisly sight confronted them. The freakish remains of Mary were discovered on a burned out chair with only the charred, coiled springs remaining. The only parts of her left, were her left foot, which still had a slipper on, her backbone and a mysteriously shrunken skull. Mary’s body, which weighed 170 lbs had been reduced to less than 10lbs. The only damage to the apartment was a small, circular burned area. At the side was a plastic wall socket which had melted and caused her clock to stop at 4:20am. These findings and the remains of Mary baffled the firemen, police, and pathologists who examined them.

This is a Phenomenon in which an individual is thought to spontaneously ignite and burn to death in a very hot, intense and quick fire that reduces the victim to cinders while leaving other items in the same room untouched.

It has been well-documented and people who have died due to this phenomenon have been studied and their corpses examined thoroughly. For the last 300 years, the cases of a human body igniting itself without any definite known cause of a fire nearby have been almost too many to just brush away as mere coincidence or accident. Almost 200 cases of people dying of catching fire by themselves have been reported and written about. And in some cases in front of witnesses!

To make the whole phenomenon even more puzzling and mind-boggling is the fact that in quite a few of the cases, only the body of the person burned or got charred without anything else nearby getting burnt. In fact the clothes on the person were left unharmed!

The first recorded cases of spontaneous human combustion dates back to the 17th century as found in old medical reports.

And over four decades that followed the initial written accounts, the incidents vary slightly regarding the damage that remained after the body was on fire. In some cases, the entire body got burned without much damage to the chair or bed on which the victim was in contact with. While in some cases, the whole body was burned but a foot or fingers remained un-charred.

The initial belief about why this horrific kind of fate may be someone’s destiny was because it was a punishment for sins committed by the person. Then there is the supernatural explanation. Something evil was responsible for the firing up of the person possessed by an evil spirit or an evil spirit was unhappy with that person.

While some had been sitting near a fireplace, some cases were near a fire. In fact, some were driving a car while some people got ignited while walking. Science does not accept the idea that people can self-ignite. To completely get burnt, a human body would need temperatures almost over 300 degrees Fahrenheit! As to how the clothing and nearby objects remain unburnt, the mystery is just termed as “unsolved”.

According to scientists, how can a human body that consists mostly of water get burnt by itself to the point of being charred? When a dead body is cremated or burnt, it requires huge amounts of heat and a fire kept burning for many hours.

Then there is the ‘candle wick effect’. Dr John de Haan, from the California Criminalistics Institute, conducted an experiment in which a dead animal was wrapped in a blanket and a small amount of gasoline was dropped on the blanket and then the blanket was set fire to. After five hours of burning, the animal was completely burnt. Since the fat content in the body of the particular animal was the same as in a human being, Dr De Haan explained that the damage that the dead animal’s body went through is exactly the same as that of a person burning up from spontaneous human combustion.

Theories abound that the dead person was drunk and went to sleep with a cigarette burning in his hands, or that an elderly lady sat too close to her fireplace, etc., but then these do not explain the bizarre scenario that is the mystery.

Instances-

One is especially intriguing. Since January 5, 1820, spontaneous fires were going up all over the house of John Wright. This occurrence was mostly around his mother Mrs Wright. Now as it happened, most of the time that the fire started, a servant girl in the household was in the same room. But she did not physically start the fire. It only happened by her being around in the house.

Wright once heard screams from the kitchen. He raced there to see his mother on fire and the maid was in the kitchen as well. He sent for his sister to sit with the mother who was in bed recovering from her burns. As soon as they left her sleeping in her room, they heard her screams and ran to her room to once again see her in flames. The servant girl was sacked and after she left there were no more mysterious fires in the house. Strangely, Mrs Wright never blamed the girl for the evil occurrence.

Then 11-month old Peter Seaton of London was sleeping in his bed in the evening of January 1939. A guest sitting in the living room downstairs heard screams. He rushed up to the child’s room to see huge flames all around. Firemen were called and the fire was put out. Nothing inflammable was found in the nursery and most of the furniture was hardly damaged.

Another incident of horror due to this strange phenomenon involves six people on the 27th of December 1976. It was written about in the Nigerian Herald. In a small wooden room six people got spontaneously burnt in the room while they were asleep while the rest of the room remained intact, including two cotton mattresses. The mother of the family said that someone had sprinkled gasoline on the sleeping people but investigation did not show any evidence of such a claim.

Serious-minded individuals and scientists do not agree that such a phenomenon exists at all. Otherwise, they say, why is the number of people dying, as claimed due to this reason, so small? After all, there are almost five billion people on the planet, so there should be many more occurrences to make it a possibility, which does make sense. But then what happened to the people who died in this mysterious way?