Known since the middle ages, there is a terrifying killer that strikes without warning, killing its victim and then reducing the body to ash. Hundreds of reports of this mystifying anomaly have been recorded from around the globe, yet even today there appears to be no clear-cut explanation as to its cause. On tonight's episode of BTF, we're going to explore the deadly and misunderstood phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion.
Known since the middle ages, there is a terrifying killer that strikes without warning, killing its victim and then reducing the body to ash. Hundreds of reports of this mystifying anomaly have been recorded from around the globe, yet even today there appears to be no clear-cut explanation as to its cause. On tonight's episode of BTF, we're going to explore the deadly and misunderstood phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion.
SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION
Narrated by Jay Nix
On this episode of Beyond the Fringe we’ll look into one of the most terrifying and misunderstood phenomena in paranormal lore. It has been known since the middle ages when an Italian knight reportedly vomited fire and burned to death before the eyes of stunned witnesses. Since then, hundreds of cases of people bursting into flames have been recorded throughout history and from around the globe. But it was Paul Rolli, writing in Philosophical Transactions in 1746, who coined the phrase by which this frightening anomaly is known today: “spontaneous human combustion”.
The very thought of a human being bursting into flames with no apparent ignition source is a ghastly thing to consider. It seems unthinkable that our body, a biological entity consisting largely of water, could burn itself to little more than ash without external flames or an internal fuel source. Yet since the strange case of the knight Vortsius in the 15th century, there have been over 200 documented cases of spontaneous human combustion on record, the most recent occurring in Ireland in 2010.
Victims are usually alone, having succumbed to their fate while either lying in bed, on a sofa or seated in a chair. The body is almost completely consumed with the bones and soft tissue to ash. Often the only parts of the body that remain after the fire are the lower legs and feet, which are inexplicably untouched by the fire. The area surrounding the victim is often unmarred by the flames. While the furniture upon which they are sitting or lying is severely damaged or even destroyed, the rest of the room is hardly touched. The fire seems focused solely on the victim, leaving other more easily combustible materials nearby unscathed.
If you are new to BTF -- first of all, “welcome” – what we do here is take a purported paranormal phenomenon, in this case SHC, and recount how it is often presented in literature and the media. Then we’ll take a closer look at some of the more compelling case studies to see if we can find any evidence as to a probable cause. Then we’ll see what researchers and scientists have to say on the subject before attempting to tie it all together and making some sense of the whole thing. So, let’s get the show started with the case that has become the bellwether of SHC, the tragic death of Mary Reeser.
Mary Reeser lived alone in an apartment 1200 Cherry St. NE, in St. Petersburg, Florida. On the morning of July 2, 1951 her landlady, Ms. Pansy Carpenter, arrived at Mary’s place to invite her down for their customary chat over morning coffee. She also had a telegram that the Western Union agent had tried deliver to Mary’s apartment, but in that he didn’t receive any answer to repeated knocks he dropped the envelope off with the landlady instead. Like the Western Union boy, Pansy Carpenter knocked on Mary’s door several times, calling out to her friend but receiving no answer. When Ms. Carpenter reached for the doorknob, she recoiled in pain as the fixture was so hot that it blistered her hand and fingers. Fearing something dreadful had happened, Pansy ran outside looking for help. Across the street two house painters were getting set up to work on a neighbor’s home when they saw the woman rush out of the house in a panic. The painters hurried over to the apartment and tried the door. When they too found the doorknob too hot to turn, they forced their way into the apartment by breaking down the door. The scene encountered inside the room caused the three witnesses’ blood to run cold.
In the center of the small living area was a smoldering pile of ashes where a lounge chair had once stood. It was burned to the floor, with only the metal springs remaining. Protruding through the ashes was what appeared to be a human spine, and nearby the skull. Though charred the skull was intact but appeared to have shrunken in the heat of the fire. But the most disturbing aspect of the scene was that one of Mary’s legs from the knee down was completely untouched. It was intact and unburned, with a leather house slipper still covering the left foot. As for the rest of Mary Reeser’s body, there was nothing left but a pile of blackened ash. But what was stranger still was the fact that nothing else in the small room appeared to have been affected by the fire. There were plastic flowers on a counter nearby that had melted and a wall outlet near her chair was also found distorted and the wiring shorted out. But everything else appeared unscathed. Investigators initially believed that this short circuit may have been the cause of the fire, but later determined that the damage to the outlet was a result of the fire, not it’s cause. There was no fireplace from which a stray ember could have popped, no space heaters nearby, no oven left on. The police and fire marshal could find no source for the fire that had consumed Mary Reeser. While the coroner would state that the cause of death was certainly by fire, the cause of that fire and why it only seemed to affect the body of Mary Reeser, remains a mystery.
The Mary Reeser case is to SHC what the Patterson-Gimlin film is to Bigfoot. Proponents claim that it is proof positive that this is a real and verifiable phenomenon and has withstood countless attempts at dispelling it. A human body burst into flames seemingly from within as there was no detectable ignition source. Another mitigating factor pointing to spontaneous human combustion is that only the body and materials in direct contact with the body were the only things burned. If it were a normal fire, why didn’t it burn down the rest of the apartment? Why was the victim unable to move from the place where the fire started, in this case the chair, in an attempt to save herself? And why was the focus of the fire so tightly contained as to reduce the majority of the corpse to ashes while leaving the leg and foot literally untouched and totally intact?
These questions have stumped law enforcement, fire fighters and scientists alike for centuries. The human body is not comprised of highly flammable materials after all, is it consists mostly of water. The very antithesis of flammable. For the body of any living organism to spontaneously erupt in flame runs counterintuitive to all that’s known about anatomy, biology, and thermodynamics. Clothing aside, there’s nothing inside the human body that by all account could conceivably fuel a fire, much less a fire reaching a temperature high enough and over a duration long enough to completely consume that body. So, what’s going on here? Is this phenomenon a frightening reality that can strike the unsuspecting at any moment? Or is there a more down to earth explanation that will allow for these inexplicable fires to occur under just the right circumstances? In that this episode is focusing on a wide-ranging phenomenon and not an individual instance, we might benefit from examining the many different instances of this odd singularity to see if there are any commonalities among them. And I think the perfect place to begin is with the first recorded case and work our way forward to the most recent. Sound good? Okay, so here we go.
As we mentioned earlier it was the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin who first brought this amazing phenomenon to the public’s attention in his book Historiarum Anatomicarum Rariorum. Among the notable case covered in his book was that of the Italian knight in 1663, Bartholin 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. In 1673, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of spontaneous combustion cases in his work "De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis", which roughly translates from Latin into “Spontaneous Human Body Arson”.
But it the actual term "spontaneous human combustion" is credited Paul Rolli which he included in an article written in 1747 concerning the mysterious death of Countess Cornelia Zangheri Bandi. And this segues nicely into a recap of some of the most notable cases of SHC in history, starting with the strange death of this Italian lady.
The Countess Cornelia Zangari Bandi was an Italian noblewoman who lived in Cesena in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. On the evening of March 15, 1731, the countess complained of feeling ill. Others present at that night’s dinner described her as “dull and heavy”. Finally excusing herself from her guests, went up to hear bedroom accompanied by her maidservant. As was apparently her custom, the lady sprinkled camphorated brandy on her body as she believed its properties would alleviate the pain and discomfort she was feeling. Afterwards, the maid stayed with her chatting and praying for several hours before the countess finally drifted off to sleep.
The following day when the maid came down, she did not see her mistress as per the norm as the lady was often up with the servants. Ascending the stairs to the countess’s room, the maid knocked but received no answer. When she opened the door, the maid was met with a gruesome scene. The bedroom was full of soot the body of the countess had been reduced to a pile of ashes three feet from the side of the bed. All that remained were the front part of her skull, three fingers form one hand and both legs below the knees. Incredibly, the legs were all but untouched by the fire that had consumed the body. The bed and the rest of the furnishings were unaffected by the fire, but there was a thick layer of a foul-smelling oily substance coating almost everything in the room. Near the body was an oil lamp, also coated in ash, the well empty. Observers who witnessed the scene noticed that the bedsheets had been moved in such a way as to suggest the countess had risen, or at least attempted to rise, at some point during the night. But local officials were unable to a consensus as to how the countess had come to her fiery end.
In 1725, a Parisian Innkeeper named Millet was convicted of murder after his wife’s body was discovered burned beyond recognition in their kitchen. (Some versions of this story have Nicole dying while seated in a chair). The crime scene was a puzzler in that while the body and the floor / chair on which it rested had been rendered to ash, the table and nearby wooden utensils Nicole Millet had apparently been using were untouched. Unable to come up with any other plausible explanation, the court found Millet’s husband guilty of murder and sentenced him to death. However, on appeal, Millet’s lawyer Nicholas le Cat argued that the cause of the woman’s death was not murder but rather spontaneous human combustion. This counterproposal was accepted by the court and the cause of death amended to ‘a visitation of God”. Millet was subsequently acquitted and freed.
On 28 March 1970, the body of Margaret Hogan was discovered burned to cinders in her home on Prussia Street, Dublin, Ireland. The 89-year-old widow lived alone in the house and was last seen alive the night before by a visiting neighbor. When investigators arrived at the scene, they found that a bouquet of artificial flowers on a table in the middle of the room were melted into a puddle. Twelve feet away from the chair in which the woman’s remains were found was a television, the screen of which was also warped by extreme heat. But apart from Margaret and the chair in which she had been sitting the rest of the room and the rest of the house for that matter were untouched by the fire. Of the body, all that remained were the legs below the knees which were completely intact. The neighbor who had last scene the victim mentioned that a coal fire had been burning the night before, but no authorities could make no direct connection between this fire and the one that consumed Ms. Hogan. The official cause of the lady’s death was recorded as “unknown”.
And our most recent case occurred in December 2010. Michael Faherty was a 76-year-old man who lived in Clareview Park, Ballybane, Galway. The night of the 22nd, a fire alarm sounded in the home of his neighbor, Tom Mannion. After running outside to see form where the fire was coming, he noticed thick smoke billowing out of a window of Faherty’s house next door. Mannion rushed over and banged on the door but received no answer. Mannion then alerted the neighbors, the Gardai (or local police) and the fire brigade was called. Upon entering the Faherty home, investigators discovered the owner’s body in the drawing room lying on his back with his head near the fireplace. The floor beneath the body was severely charred and the ceiling above showed signs of fire damage, but the rest of the room appeared have been unaffected by the blaze. As for the body, it had been reduced to ash from the head down to the knees, with the lower legs still clothed in trousers and shoes still on the feet virtually untouched. Almost as strange as the fire itself was the testimony of Assistance Fire Chief who claimed that the fireplace could not have been the source of the fire. Results of Faherty’s autopsy noted that he suffered from Type II diabetes and hypertension, but that the condition of the body prevented the medical examiner from determining a definitive cause of death. At the inquest, coroner Dr Ciaran McLoughlin stated that no logical explanation could be found and that in his opinion this was a classic case of spontaneous human combustion.
I could go on with perhaps a hundred similar cases of spontaneous human combustion, but there is really no need. From the few instances that we’ve covered here, I trust you’ve noticed a pattern emerging that shows most if not all cases of SHC boast very specific similarities.
Dr. Gavin Thurston, the coroner of Westminster and later the deputy coroner to the Royal Household, wrote a paper about spontaneous human combustion for the British Medical Journal in 1938. In this publication, Dr. Thurston noted several common characteristics in the cases he was able to find in which viable evidence was available. These characteristics were that 1) the victims were alcoholics or at least crank heavily, 2) they were always elderly and often female, 3) an available and nearby source of ignition was present, 4) the fires were localized are rarely damaged any articles not in contact with the body, 5) the feet and often the hands were left intact, and 6) the combustion of the body left behind a greasy fetid residue with a strong odor. Looking back at the few cases we covered in depth, you can easily pick out all of these particulars. And as Dr. Thurston pointed out, these commonalities are consistent throughout the history of SHC.
Most collections of true mysteries seem to have little problem with including these similarities in stories of SHC, with one notable exception. An available ignition source, something that was capable of starting the fire, is almost always omitted in order to lend an air of mystery to the tale. But as we take a closer look into these unexplainable examples, we find that is every case there is mention of a possible ignition catalyst, be it a stove, a fireplace, an oil lamp, a candle or even static electricity.
In 1984, Joe Nickell a senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry along with forensic analyst John F. Fischer imparted on a two-year research project focusing on 30 historic cases attributed to SHC. Confirming Dr. Thurston’s earlier claims, Nickell and Fischer found that in the cases they revied which had occurred over nearly 300 years, the bodies of the victims were near or in direct contact with an ignition source. The researchers also determined that intoxication or other forms of incapacitation had played a prominent role. Now while Victorian writers and investigators had pointed to alcoholism as a prime suspect in SHC cases, in those days they leaned more toward biological and spiritual explanations. Some 19th century theorists claimed that the bodies of heavy drinkers had become saturated with alcohol. And if the methane gas in a victim’s intestines ignited – again, spontaneously -- the alcohol trapped in the body would provide the fuel to burn the body to ashes. Then there were those who, like Nicholas le Cat, argued that those who died by SHC had done so by “divine retribution” or a vengeful act of God as it were.
But Nickell and Fischer argued that alcohol was neither the cause of the fire nor the fuel which kept it burning. They put forward the idea that many victims were intoxicated at the time of their deaths, and this intoxication rendered them of reacting in a timely manner in order to save themselves. Thus, it wasn’t the alcohol itself that caused SHC, but the victim’s inability to save themselves due to being highly inebriated. If the victim had been drunk and fallen asleep on a sofa or in a chair while smoking (ala Jack Cassidy), they probably would not have been aware of the fire that was consuming them before it was too late to act. But alcohol alone is not the only reason why a victim of SHC would be unable to react to a fire. Drug intoxication would also prevent a person from functioning in a manner necessary to save themselves from a fire. Chronic conditions like epilepsy would render a sufferer immobile and unable to respond. If the victim suffered a coronary or a stroke, they may have been dead before the fire killed them.
Then there is the problem with the lower legs and feet. Why, if torched by a chemical reaction from inside the body, would the fire spare the lower extremities? Remember that the victims of SHC are elderly and often women. In women, the lower legs and feet would not be covered and therefore not subject to contact with what turns out to be the true fuel for the fire as it were: the victims clothing.
Curiously, there has never been a reported case of SHC where the victim was naked at the time of death. They were always wearing clothes and, in some cases, draped in a blanket or shawl. Herein lies the turning point in this discussion that will effectively turn the phenomenon of SHC away from the paranormal and toward the commonplace.
When one studies the available photos of victims of SHC -- and you can find them out there on the web if you have a stomach for that kind of thing – you will be immediately struck by two things. 1) the lower legs and feet are still intact and 2) the localization of the fire. Noting that the legs are almost untouched by the fire, we have to ask ourselves why no other parts of the body were spared. What commonality is shared by the rest of the victim’s body that is absent from the lower leg? The answer is simple. Clothing. But would clothing enough be a sustainable source of fuel for a fire hot enough to render human tissue to ash. Some garments might catch fire and burn quickly at a high temperature, but certainly not for the length of time it would take to effectively cremate a body. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, quite the party animals by all indications, the optimum temperature range to cremate human remains is between 1,400- and 1,800-degrees Fahrenheit and takes from 1 to 3 hours to complete. So, a fire needed to reduce a human to ash needs to be super-hot and of long duration. In cases of SHC, the duration question is never a problem in that all the victims were discovered hours or days after having last been seen alive. No one has ever witnessed a human being falling prey to SHC.
Now there is one case, that of the unfortunate Jeannie Saffin, who burned to death in front of her father and brother-in-law in London. But as we’ll see this seems less a case of SHC and more a tragic accident. Jeannie was 61 years old and lived with her parents as she was mentally challenged with the faculties of a child. On the evening 15 September 1982 she was sitting in the kitchen of her home with her father when her brother-in-law Don Carroll stopped by for a visit. As her father Jack arose from the table and went to great Don at the front door, he caught a bright flash of light out of the corner of his eye. When he turned back toward the kitchen, he saw his daughter engulfed in flames. Though the men tried desperately to put out the fire with water from the kitchen sink, the flames had spread so quickly that much of Jeannie’s upper body was critically burned before it could be extinguished. She died of her injuries a few days later.
Though many paranormal researchers are fond of including this incident in the lore of SHC, the facts and circumstances of the case differ significantly from the norms of the phenomena. Firstly, the fire that consumed Jeanie Saffin seemed to erupt from her clothing and burn quickly, not internally and not over a long period of time. She was not alone when the incident occurred, and she was not a heavy drinker or smoker. Her father, on the other hand was a pipe smoker and it was thought that as he had tapped out his pipe before refilling it with fresh tobacco a tiny ember embedded itself in Jeannie’s sweater and smoldered there until erupting into flames. Both the kitchen window and door were open, resulting in a cross breeze sufficient enough to fan the flame. The autopsy concluded that Jeannie died of damage to the esophageal passage, not from a fire that originated from within body. Though tragic, her death was not quite as mysterious as many writers would have you believe.
Okay, so Jeannie Saffin’s death aside, what about all the other cases attributed to SHC. They did happen, no question about that. But what was it exactly that did happen? What caused these conflagrations that seemingly erupted from within the human body?
There have been a number of theories put forward attempting to explain SHC from the fantastic to the more plausible. As I mentioned earlier, writers in the 18th and 19th century proffered two possible causes for spontaneous human combustion. The first was that the fires were an “act of divine retribution”, brought down upon an individual who had somehow or another affronted God. A more secular concept blamed the excessive abuse of alcohol as the likely culprit. While vile drink was surely one reason a vengeful all mighty might smite the wicked, this new theorem suggested that the body somehow stored excess alcohol in the fat and other soft tissues until it could store no more and when it reached a critical level – poof! Charles Dickens utilized this idea as a plot point in his novel Bleak House when his character Mr. Krook was burned ashes due his being “continually in liquor”.
More recently methane gas released by over-active intestinal bacteria was a favorite theory for SHC. But in that there has never been a known case of any cow spontaneously combusting, even though they produce far more methane than humans ever could, shoots this scenario out of the sky. Sunspots, cosmic harmonic vibrations, and even manic depression have been suggested as the root of biological conflagration, all with zero evidence to back up these claims.
Then there’s the theory that acetone occurring naturally inside the human body is the likely perpetrator behind SHC. When the body enters a state of ketosis, acetone is released in minute amounts that some believe could ignite under the right conditions. While it is true that acetone is produced in the body and that this substance is highly flammable, the fact that there was not a spike in SHC cases coinciding with the Atkins craze at the turn of the last century makes this scenario unlikely.
Even more implausible was the suggestion that an unknown subatomic particle known as a pyroton was the instigator. Somehow these tee-niney little wannabe neutrons zipping around inside the body reach a critical mass of sorts or collide with each other and split, causing a fusion/fission reaction resulting in SHC. But if this were the case, we would expect to see people bursting into flames on a regular basis as they walked down the street and would not be pigeonholed to lone elderly victims who struggled with their weight. Again, a fanciful take on the problem but one without a scintilla of evidence to back it up.
For decades, little progress was made in explaining SHC until Gavin Thurston entered the picture. You’ll remember him as the author of the paper who first recognized the many similarities in cases of SHC. He was also the first to suggest that the phenomena of SHC was more likely an aftereffect and not the cause of death. Thurston pointed to an effect that was universally known but still little understood by the general public, and that was the “wick effect”.
This solution is easily demonstrated with a common candle. As the wick of the candle burns, it melts the wax in close proximity to the flame which is then absorbed into the wick and fuels the fire. This slow rendering of the wax into the string increases the duration of the fine, keeping the candle lit much longer than if burned on its own. Thus, in the case of SHC an external, not internal, ignition source like a cigarette, candle or fireplace ember, or even static electricity ignites the victim’s clothes or outer covering like a blanket. This spark slowly becomes a flame as it consumes more material. The temperature of the fire at this time isn’t particularly hot. But as the flame consumes the clothing near the point of ignition, it begins to burn the skin which eventually ruptures exposing the subcutaneous fat beneath. Then as the fat begins to heat up it melts and begins to be absorbed into the clothing, coverings, the upholstery of the furniture on which the victim resides and even the carpeting, in essence turning these materials into a giant wick. This fabric wick fueled by the body’s fat would burn for hours, slowly reducing the victim and the clothing wick to ash. Because the fire is dependent on a reservoir of fat to fuel the flame, it would naturally burn itself out in absence of this fuel source – like when it reaches the junction of the lower leg at the knee. And in that the fire is localized to the victim’s body, the surrounding environment may under the right conditions remain unscathed.
This sounds like a great theory, but is it scientifically practical? Well, when we look at the science behind the wick effect, it seems to make perfect sense. Lamps fueled by fat – normally from animals other than man – are as old as civilization itself. We know fat burns and rather well. We also know it burns very slowly, not like the blowtorch that claimed the life of Jeannie Saffin.
Researcher John DeHaan published an article in the Fire and Arson Investigator journal in June of 1996 which described an experiment he conducted into the viability of the wick effect theory with respect to spontaneous human combustion. In this experiment, which was broadcast by the BBC to a television audience, DeHaan took the course of a pig, wrapped it in a blanket and placed the body in a lab staged to mirror a common bedroom. Then using gasoline as an accelerant, he ignited the blanket and studied the effect on the body of the pig. As viewers watched, the blanket caught fire, but burned slowly as reached the flesh of the animal. As the heat ruptured the skin, the layer of fat lying just below the skin began to melt and was absorbed into the blanket. As predicted, this turned the blanket into a giant pork candle and over the course of three hours burned slowly but steadily until the body of the pig was reduced to ash. The only part of the animal that remained unscathed: the feet.
In that most victims of this phenomenon are overweight, there would be ample fuel to support such a fire. Also, in that the victims are by and large (no pun intended there) elderly and suffering from a myriad of health-related issues, most if not all probably died before the fire started of any number of causes. Coronaries, strokes, seizures, you name it. Only after they died did the fire start from an external source, a spark or stray ember from a fire, that started the process moving. Those who were still alive when the fire began were unable to save themselves from the fire due to incapacitation due to drug or alcohol use or they may have been unconscious or sleeping and awoke too late to extinguish the blaze. For example, our watershed case of Mary Reeser stands as a prime example. Ms. Reeser was not only a smoker but a known to frequently take sleeping pills. The chair in which Mary was sitting when she died was situated away from the wall and not in direct contact with other fuel sources for the fire. If she fell asleep while smoking, which occurs frighteningly more often than one might think, and the cigarette ignited her clothing and the upholstery of her chair, this could easily instigate the wick effect as the fat from her body became absorbed into the chair and her clothing thus continually fueling the fire. Smoking while under the influence of drugs or alcohol is a recipe for disaster and results in hundreds, probably thousands of fire-related deaths annually the world over. Had the fire ignited the carpet, or the drapes, or anything else in the room that would cause the fire to spread beyond the vicinity of the body, then her apartment if not the entire house would have gone up in flames and we wouldn’t be discussing Mary Reeser in this context. It should be noted that her daughter-in-law stated at the time of Mary’s death, "The cigarette dropped to her lap. Her fat was the fuel that kept her burning. The floor was cement, and the chair was by itself. There was nothing around her to burn".
This solution to the problem is borne out in the lengthy report written by Nickell and Fischer which was published in the journal of the International Association of Arson Investigators. Other researchers and scientists alike have since joined the growing chorus in support of the wick effect / SHC correlation. In every instance Nickell and Fischer examined spanning more than 300 years, the circumstances and evidence in each case could be readily explained by this method of incineration.
As to why the fire doesn’t spread beyond the vicinity of the body to the room or ever the entire structure is another consideration. But think about it this way: these 200 or so cases of SHC throughout history are just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. People die at home, alone and near an ignition source of a fire every single day. But for a fire to be considered a case of SHC it would have to 1) occur in a place where a single elderly obese victim resides, 2) having such a person not receive any visitors for upwards of 12 hours, 3) have the victim die or be rendered otherwise incapacitated and therefore unable to save themselves from a fire, 4) have an ember or spark that didn’t ignite flammable materials in contact with the body, 5) have that smoldering fire burn through the materials and skin of the victim exposing the fatty tissue, 6) have the fire hot enough to liquify the fat so that it absorbs into the fabrics surrounding the body resulting in the wick effect, 7) have this body candle burn locally and not ignite any other flammable materials in the room, and 8) burn itself out after consuming all the fatty tissue and thus the rest of the body. All of these things would have to happen in conjunction and in a specific order before a fire matching the conditions ascribed to SHC could occur.
And because fires burn upward instead of outward, there is nothing paranormal or strange about finding a victim in one part of a room burned to death while the rest of the room has little more than smoke damage.
If people truly could suddenly burst into flames due to an internal combustive mechanism, then presumably there would be examples this happening while people were swimming, in a bathtub, or even scuba diving, skydiving, you name it. Yet those cases do not exist.
And if some natural (but unknown) mechanism causes the combustion, why would it only occur in humans? Why wouldn't cows, dogs, elephants, birds, or other animals suddenly, randomly, and inexplicably explode in a ball of flames now and then? Even if the phenomenon is incredibly rare, with billions of mammals on the planet, statistically we should expect to see thousands of them exploding every day all around us. Thankfully, we don’t.
The infinitesimal rarity of SHC – we’re talking 200 cases out more than 110 billion people throughout human history living and dead – speaks to this. The numerical probability is practically zero. How many more cases of SHC would we be able to add to the record had the fire spread just an inch or so farther and ignited a blanket, shawl or pillow that then spread to other furniture, curtains, fixtures and eventually the structure of the home that was subsequently burned to the ground. The rarity of the phenomenon is the direct result of the failure of the localized fire to spread beyond the area of the body. If the house burns down, the oh well it was just a case of some poor soul falling asleep while smoking. But take this same unfortunate circumstance where the wick effect is also localized, but the resulting fire fails to ignite nearby combustible materials, and you have a mysterious case of SHC. Look at it this way: a man is driving his car, suffers a heart attack and dies. This results in the car swerving off the road and striking a tree. Now an autopsy would be able to show that the man likely died of a coronary before the accident. However, if when the car struck the three the car then burst into flames and the body and the vehicle were destroyed, now the likely cause becomes “he must have fallen asleep at the wheel”, because an autopsy would not be able to determine a coronary in that there would be no body to examine. Ergo in certain cases of SHC, the spreading of the initial blaze to the rest of the home which is then subsequently and completely consumed would also destroy any evidence that the root cause of the fire was a case of wicking of the corpse’s fatty tissue and thus an instance of SHC gone wild. So, the rarity doesn’t lie in the phenomenon itself. The rarity lies in the infinitesimally small odds that a fire produced by the wick effect on a human corpse does not spread to the surrounding environment.
Thus, the paranormality of spontaneous human combustion is all smoke and no flame. There is nothing to suggest that this phenomenon is anything other than a tragic consequence of an unbelievably unlikely sequence of events. Science says it’s not possible, common sense agrees. And you know what. I’m okay with that.