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On July 2nd 1951 remains were found of a 67 year old widower named Mary Reeser. Her burnt smouldering remains were found by her Neighbor and some house painters. She had been sitting in an easy chair when the incident happened. Her left foot still wearing a slipper remained intact and only the corner of the room and the chair she was sitting in had been burnt. Firemen, police and pathologists examined Mrs. Reeser's remains and also found her liver which was fused to a lump of vertebrae and her skull which had been shrunk to the size of a baseball by the unusually intense heat.

ABOVE; Firemen mop up Mrs. Reeser's remains

The the walls of the apartment were covered with a greasy substance, plastic switches had melted along with two candles which the wicks had been left unburnt. There was only a small circular burn area which encompassed the remains of Mrs. Reeser and her chair. For such a cremation experts say that a temperature of 2500 degrees is necessary. A cigarette accidently dropped whilst asleep would never of caused such heat. The true cause of the burning death of Mrs. Reeser is still unknown. She is the most famous case of Spontaneous Human Combustion.

Spontaneous Human Combustion is a phenomenon where a living person suddenly bursts into flames for no apparent reason. The first reported case was thought to have been in 1763. A Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of Spontaneous Human Combustion cases. The belief in SHC continued on well into the 1800's, Charles Dickens used SHC in his novel "Bleak House" to kill off a character. It was generally believed in the 1800's that SHC was caused by alcoholism. They believed that the accumulation of alcohol in the body tissues would dramatically increase the combustibility of the body. It was also thought that the body metabolized alcohol to produce hydrogen and other inflammable gases which were then stored in the body tissues. A spark produced by the body's own electricity would then ignite the body. However as more knowledge of the metabolism of the body was discovered this theory was soon dismissed as they discovered that you would die of alcoholic poisoning before you would get to the stage of being saturated with alcohol.The public interest in SHC lost all it's appeal until 1951 when the Reeser case became public knowledge.

SIMILARITIES
The following facts are common to all SHC cases

Eighty percent of the victims are female

Most of the victims were overweight and/or alcoholics

The body is very badly burned, but the room the body was found in is pretty much intact except for a fine layer of soot

A yellow, foul smelling oil is usually surrounding the body

The torso, including the chest, abdomen and hips tend to be totally consumed, sparing portions of the extremities and the head - the clothing can also be intact

The victim was always on their own - no shouts or screams could ever be heard

The victim had usually been drinking heavily prior to the death.

SOME FAMOUS CASES

There are quite a few reported cases of SHC, I've included the more interesting ones here -

October 1938
Maybelle Andrews was with her boyfriend dancing at a nightclub. Suddenly flames erupted from her back, chest and shoulders. Her boyfriend was severely burned trying to put the flames out. He said that at the time there were no other flames in the room anywhere and that they had come from Maybelle herself. Maybelle died of her injuries on the way to hospital

January 31st, 1959
Jack Larber who was a 72 year old patient at the Laguna Honda Home in San Francisco had his clothing catch fire a few minutes after being fed. His attendant was out of the room at the time it happened but attempted to put out the fire when returning back into the room. Mr. Larber died of 3rd degree burns on February 2nd 1959. No explanation was found for the fire - Mr Larber was a non-smoker.

December, 1959
An autoworker by the name of Billy Peterson was found dead in the front seat of his car in Pontiac, Michigan. At first it appeared that Peterson had attempted suicide for the exhaust pipe had been bent to lead into the car's front seat. However Peterson's body had third-degree burns on his back, legs and arms, his flesh was severely burnt but neither his clothing or the front seat were damaged. It was also noted that hairs on the charred portions of the body were not even singed. On the death certificate the cause was noted as carbon monoxide poisoning but the burns were ignored

December 1966
92 year old Dr. Joh Irving Bentley was last seen alive on the evening of December 4th, 1966 by friends visiting to say goodnight at about 9.00pm. The following morning Mr. Gosnell, a meter reader let himself into Mr Bentley's house to go to the basement to check the meter. Mr Gosnell had permission to enter Mr. Bentley's house because Mr Bentley had limited mobility and could only move about with the help of a walker. Once in the basement Mr Gosnell could smell a strange smell and then could see a light blue smoke. Worried, he went upstairs to investigate. Mr. Bentley's bedroom was filled with smoke and in the bathroom there lay the charred remains of Mr. Bentley. All that was left of the old man was the lower half of his right leg with his slipper still on it. The rubber stoppers on his walker which lay beside his remains were still intact and the bathtub was hardly scorched. Gosnell ran for help. It was first thought that Mr. Bentley set himself on fire with his pipe, but it was soon discovered that his pipe was still on it's stand by the bed in his bedroom. The coroner noted his death was caused by asphyxiation and 90% burning of the body.

ABOVE; remains of Dr. Bentley

January 6th, 1980
Blackwood, Ebbw Vales, Wales - the police and forensic officers discovered a mans body burnt beyond recognition in his living room. The armchair that he was sitting in had hardly been damaged along with some nearby plastic objects. The fire that had killed the man had been so intense that it left a coating of vaporized flesh on the ceiling

October 1980
An airwoman by the name of Jenna Winchester burst into flames whilst sitting in a car next to a friend in Florida. Her friend saw yellow flames coming from Jenna and heard her scream "Get me out of here!" and saw her trying to beat out the flames with her bare hands. The car crashed into a telephone pole. Jenna survived the experience with 20% of her body covered in burns

24th March, 1997
Co Kerry, Irish Republic. 76 year old John O'Connor was found dead in his living room at Gortaleen by the community nurse who regularly visited him. Mr O'Connors charred remains were in a chair positioned some distance from his hearth. Only his head and upper torso along with his feet remained unburnt. There was little smoke damage to the room or furniture. The Local priest who attended the scene described it as "if somebody had poured petrol into his lap".

WHAT THE SKEPTICS SAY
Spontaneous Human Combustion:
No Longer a Burning Issue A recent two-year investigation by Dr. Joe Nickell, a private detective and Dr. John Fisher, a forensic analyst with the crime laboratory of the Orange County Sheriff's Office in Orland, Florida revealed even more significant correlations behind the thirty most significant spontaneous human combustion cases.

Nickell and Fisher found that in those instances where the destruction of the body was relatively minimal, the only significant fuel source seems to have been the individual's clothes, but where the destruction was considerable, additional fuel source i.e. chair stuffing, wooden flooring, floor covering, and so on augmented the combustion. Such materials under the body appear also to have helped retain melted fat that flowed from the body and then volatilized and burned, destroying more of the body and yielding still more liquefied fat to continue the burning process.

In the cases that Nickell and Fisher researched they always found plausible sources of ignition - proximate candles, cigarettes, lamps, fireplaces, etc. This sort of evidence would seem to demonstrate an external rather than an internal source of ignition.

The 92-year-old pipe-smoking Dr. Bentley frequently dropped burning ashes. This was evident from the many burns found on his bedroom rug. Evidently he tried to make his way into the bathroom with his walker in a futile attempt to extinguish his burning robe. His robe was found smoldering in the bathtub.

In the case of Mrs. Reeser: She was last seen sitting in an overstuffed chair wearing a nightgown and housecoat and was smoking a cigarette. In addition, she had told her son that she had taken two sleeping pills.

The poor woman probably fell asleep in her chair and the burning ashes fell on her chair and ignited, but they only smoldered, which is not unusual. Smoldering heat can consume entire pieces of furniture without any flames breaking out.

Nickell and Fisher also found that the fire did spread in Mrs Reeser's apartment. An adjacent end table and lamp were destroyed and a ceiling beam had to be extinguished when firemen arrived. The floor was untouched because it was made of concrete.

Nickell and Fisher found that the proponents of spontaneous human combustion often omitted such important details in their published accounts. After all, you can make a mystery out of anything by leaving out half the facts."

ABOVE :Burnt remains of a woman in London

History of Spontaneous Human Combustion
Many people believe that Spontaneous Human Combustion was first documented in such early texts as the Bible, but, scientifically speaking, these accounts are too old and secondhand to be seen as reliable evidence.

Over the past 300 years, there have been more than 200 reports of persons burning to a crisp for no apparent reason.

The first reliable historic evidence of Spontaneous Human Combustion appears to be from the year 1673, when Frenchman Jonas Dupont published a collection of Spontaneous Human Combustion cases and studies entitled De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis. Dupont was inspired to write this book after encountering records of the Nicole Millet case, in which a man was acquitted of the murder of his wife when the court was convinced that she had been killed by spontaneous combustion. Millet, a hard-drinking Parisian was found reduced to ashes in his straw bed, leaving just his skull and finger bones. The straw matting was only lightly damaged. Dupont's book on this strange subject brought it out of the realm of folkloric rumor and into the popular public imagination.

On April 9, 1744, Grace Pett, 60, an alcoholic residing in Ipswich England, was found on the floor by her daughter like "a log of wood consumed by a fire, without apparent flame." Nearby clothing was undamaged.

In the 1800's is evidenced in the number of writers that called on it for a dramatic death scene. Most of these authors were hacks that worked on the 19th century equivalent of comic books, "penny dreadfuls", so no one got too worked up about it; but two big names in the literary world also used SHC as a dramatic device, and one did cause a stir.

The first of these two authors was Captain Marryat who, in his novel Jacob Faithful, borrowed details from a report in the Times of London of 1832 to describe the death of his lead character's mother, who is reduced to "a sort of unctuous pitchey cinder."

Twenty years later, in 1852, Charles Dickens used Spontaneous Human Combustion to kill off a character named Krook in his novel Bleak House. Krook was a heavy alcoholic, true to the popular belief at the time that SHC was caused by excessive drinking. The novel caused a minor uproar; George Henry Lewes, philosopher and critic, declared that SHC was impossible, and derided Dickens' work as perpetuating a uneducated superstition. Dickens responded to this statement in the preface of the 2nd edition of his work, making it quite clear that he had researched the subject and knew of about thirty cases of SHC. The details of Krook's death in Bleak House were directly modeled on the details of the death of the Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate by this extraordinary means; the only other case that Dickens actually cites details from is the Nicole Millet account that inspired Dupont's book about 100 years earlier.

In 1951the Mary Reeser case recaptured the public interest in Spontaneous Human Combustion. Mrs. Reeser, 67, was found in her apartment on the morning of July 2, 1951, reduced to a pile of ashes, a skull, and a completely undamaged left foot. This event has become the foundation for many a book on the subject of SHC since, the most notable being Michael Harrison's Fire From Heaven, printed in 1976. Fire From Heaven has become the standard reference work on Spontaneous Human Combustion.

On May 18, 1957, Anna Martin, 68, of West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was found incinerated, leaving only her shoes and a portion of her torso. The medical examiner estimated that temperatures must have reached 1,700 to 2,000 degrees, yet newspapers two feet away were found intact.

On December 5, 1966, the ashes of Dr. J. Irving Bentley, 92, of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, were discovered by a meter reader. Dr. Bentley's body apparently ignited while he was in the bathroom and burned a 2-1/2-by-3-foot hole through the flooring, with only a portion of one leg remaining intact. Nearby paint was unscorched.

Perhaps the most famous case occurred in St. Petersburg, Florida. Mary Hardy Reeser, a 67-year-old widow, spontaneously combusted while sitting in her easy chair on July 1, 1951. The next morning, her next door neighbor tried the doorknob, found it hot to the touch and went for help. She returned to find Mrs. Reeser, or what was left of her, in a blackened circle four feet in diameter.

All that remained of the 175-pound woman and her chair was a few blackened seat springs, a section of her backbone, a shrunken skull the size of a baseball, and one foot encased in a black stain slipper just beyond the four-foot circle. Plus about 10 pounds of ashes.

The police report declared that Mrs. Reeser went up in smoke when her highly flammable rayon-acetate nightgown caught fire, perhaps because of a dropped cigarette.

But one medical examiner stated that the 3,000-degree heat required to destroy the body should have destroyed the apartment as well. In fact, damage was minimal - the ceiling and upper walls were covered with soot. No chemical accelerants, incidentally, were found.

In 1944 Peter Jones, survived this experience and reported that there was no sensation of heat nor sighting of flames. He just saw smoke. He stated that he felt no pain.

Theories about Spontaneous Human Combustion

Alchoholism - many Spontaneous Human Combustion vicitms have been alcoholics. But experiments in the 19th century demonstrated that flesh impregnated with alcohol will not burn with the intense heat associated with Spontaneous Human Combustion.

- Deposits of flammable body fat - Many victims have been overweight - yet others have been skinny.

- Devine Intervention - Centuries ago people felt that the explosion was a sign from God of devine punishment.

- Build-up of static electricity - no known form of electrostatic discharge could cause a human to burst into flames.

- An explosive combination of chemicals can form in the digestive system - due to poor diet.

- Electrical fields that exist within the human body might be capable of 'short circuiting' somehow, that some sort of atomic chain reaction could generate tremendous internal heat.

No satisfactory explanation of Spontaneous Human Combustion has ever been given. It is still an unsolved mystery.

What Remains After a Spontaneous Human Combustion Event- The body is normally more severely burned than one that has been caught in a normal fire.

- The burns are not distributed evenly over the body; the extremities are usually untouched by fire, whereas the torso usually suffers severe burning.

- In some cases the torso is completely destroyed, the bones being reduced completely to ash.

- Small portions of the body (an arm, a foot, maybe the head) remain unburned.

- Only objects immediately associated with the body have burned; the fire never spread away from the body. SHC victims have burnt up in bed without the sheets catching fire, clothing worn is often barely singed, and flammable materials only inches away remain untouched.

- A greasy soot deposit covers the ceiling and walls, usually stopping three to four feet above the floor.

- Objects above this three to four foot line show signs of heat damage (melted candles, cracked mirrors, etc.)

- Although temperatures of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit are normally required to char a body so thoroughly (crematoria, which usually operate in the neighborhood of 2,000 degrees, leave bone fragments which must be ground up by hand), frequently little or nothing around the victim is damaged, except perhaps the exact spot where the deceased iginited

Types of Spontaneous Human Combustion
Some events of Spontaneous Human Combustion are witnessed but some are not.

All reported cases have occurred indoors.

The victims were always alone for a long period of time.

Witnesses who were nearby (in adjacent rooms) report never hearing any sounds, such as cries of pain or calls for assistance.

In the witnessed combustions - people are actually seen by witnesses to explode into flame; most commonly. Here the witnesses agree that there was no possible source of ignition and/or that the flames were seen to erupt directly from the victim's skin. Unfortunately, most of the known cases of this type are poorly documented and basically unconfirmed. Sometimes there are no flames seen by the witness.

Non-fatal cases - Unfortunately, the victims of these events generally have no better idea of what happened to them than do the investigators; but the advantage to this grouping is that a survivor can confirm if an event had a simple explaination or not. Thus, there are far fewer cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion with survivors that can be explained away by skeptics without a second look.

Sometimes victims develop burns on their bodies that have no known external cause. These strange wounds commonly start as small discomforts that slowly grow into large, painful marks.

Sometimes the victim will exhibit a mysterious smoke from the body. In these odd and rare occurences smoke is seen to emanate from a person, with no associated fire or source of smoke other than the person's body.
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There have been many cases of spontaneous human combustion recorded, one such being a woman who apparently burst into flames while sat in a chair in her living room, all that remained was her skull, a slipper, and a pile of ash. Photos of this case have been published in many a book that documents these cases. The strange thing being in the with the lady written about above her remains were within a 4ft radius nothing outside that circle was even singed. Experts calculate a crematorium reaches a temp of 2500 deg F and takes 3-4 hours to cremate a body, even then it sometimes takes pulverization to reduce remaining bones to powder. So what actually occurs to reduce a person to a pile of ash in apparently no time at all? Theres various theories which have been mentioned here, the inner fermentation due to moisture which occurs in haystacks, bales of paper etc and has caused fires dosent convince the medical profession its possible in humans.

Its a strange phenomena

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