FAMOUS
CASES
Spontaneous
Human Combustion
Imagine being at home alone,
watching a movie on TV while curled up on your couch in your most comfortable
clothes. You're not smoking nor burning candles or incense. But, you smell
and then see smoke... How did your shirt catch on fire? You move to put it
out, but suddenly your entire arm is burning with an eerie bluish flame, and
then in seconds, you know no more... the next day, the mailman comes to
deliver a package that won't fit in your mailbox, and he notices a greasy
brownish film on the living room window. He calls emergency services, and
when they enter the house they find a large hole burned to ashes on your
couch, that brownish film on the walls, and instead of your body, they find
only your left forearm with the hand still holding the half full Pepsi can...
There are many such cases
documented through the years. However, Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC)
remains a largely unexplained phenomenon. There are several theories as to
the causes, from a dropped cigarette causing an intense enough flame to reduce
a body and the immediate area around it to ash, to a type of electrical short
circuit in the body igniting the body's fat and incinerating it. These
theories do not explain why it is only the body and the bed it lay on, etc.,
that burns. A heat that powerful should consume the entire room, and even the
entire building. How is it then that body parts are left intact, curtains
aren't reduced to ashes, even though a nearby object such as a television may
have melted from the searing heat?
People aren't always alone
when they're consumed by the inner flame, either. Most of us have heard the
story of the young woman dancing with her boyfriend at a school dance,
bursting into flame and disintegrating before many horrified onlookers. On
Unsolved Mysteries a short time ago, I caught part of a story where a couple
was having coffee and breakfast in their home, when the wife suddenly saw
smoke pouring from the back of her sweater. With her husband's help, she
removed it and the shirt beneath to end up standing only in her bra in her
kitchen, with a reddened area on her shoulder blades the only evidence that
something had been burning. The shirt and sweater apparently were unharmed in
any way. The only conclusion one can draw is that the smoke was coming from
the woman's body.
Experiments have been done
with pig cadavers to duplicate a SHC occurrence, with little success. While
body fat is an excellent fuel for fire, the pig corpses tended to smolder more
than burn, and none of them came close to the higher temperatures needed to
reduce the body to ashes in a few moments. Cremation experts claim that in
order to reduce something as large as a human body to ash, it takes thousands
of degrees and several hours to do the job, and even then there are pieces of
bone, etc., left behind. The entire house would be cremated along with the
body if one tried this outside of the crematorium. Of course, it could be
that it could only be duplicated in a LIVING body...
Oxygen depletion in the room
and building would, of course, affect the spread of the flames and tend to
confine them to a small area. While the heat would be intense enough to melt
nearby objects, things like paper would be able to remain intact due to the
lack of oxygen to feed the flames. In other words, things would tend to
smolder unless oxygen was provided. The brownish greasy film would be caused
by the smoke from the burning body fat and clothing. And, in most of the
cases found, the victims had been alone for hours prior to discovery--they may
have simply burned down to ash slowly. In some cases, possible ignition
sources tend to be ignored in the drama of the unusual death. Aunt Millie may
have smoked like a chimney in life, but that is conveniently forgotten.
The above explanations do not
explain that poor woman in her kitchen with smoke pouring from her back,
though... there's probably not enough theories in the world to set her
mind at ease...
For more information on
this topic, as well as the types of SHC cases, go here:
http://www.sonic.net/~anomaly/articles/ga00003e.shtml
-Webmaster.