Fact or Fiction: Spontaneous Human Combustion

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Widow Mary Reeser was a plump woman of 67 who lived quietly in a modest but pleasant apartment in St Peatersburg, Florada. On the morning of 2 July 1951, a telegram arrived for here. The landlady, who lived in the same building tried to deliver it but could get no reply from Mrs Reeser, She tried the doorknob. It was so hot to the touch that she cried out in pain.

Two painters were working nearby, so the landlady called them over and asked them to break in. They put there shoulders to the door and, with a splintering of woodwork, it swung open. The landlady and workers reeled back under a blast of furnace-hot air. But when shortly after they crept inside the apartment there was no sign if the conflagration they had expected. All they could see was a feeble flame flickering on the partition wall which separated them from the apartments small kitchen. They easily put it out, and peered around the partition into the kitchen

The landlady expected to see Mrs Reeser, perhaps sleeping in her armchair. However all that was left of the armchair was a couple springs and all she saw of Mrs Reeser was a few unrecognizable charred bones, a skull shrunken to half size by intense heat, and a single satin carpet slipper containing a left foot burnt off at the ankle...

Plastic utensils in the kitchen had been melted and a mirror had been shattered by the heat. But the only other sign that there had been a fire was a small area of scorched floor. A newspaper laying near by was quite untouched. At an inquest held into Mrs Reeser's death, experts professed themselves utterly baffled. The blaze that had consumed her body had been more intense than 2,500 Fahrenheit needed to dispose a corpse in the city's crematorium. Yet the fire had not spread more than a few inches from the old woman's body. No cause could be found for the blaze, and a police suggested she might have fallen asleep while smoking by setting fire to her clothing.

The experts admitted defeat. Their only other course would have been to admit the possibility of one of the strangest and most argued-about scientific phenomena of all time - spontaneous combustion, the sudden bursting into flames of a human body, during which the clothing is sometimes not even scorched.

The unfathomable case of Mrs Reeser is only one of the more recent cases of spontaneous combustion. Such 'human torch' blazes have been discussed for centuries. ( Charles Dickens referred to one in Bleak House.) But because 20th-century scientists are highly skeptical about the phenomenon, cases of it are seldom well documented and are rarely studies. Even so, apart from the death of Mrs Reeser, there are some other well substantiated cases.

In 1880, an eminent physician, Dr B. H. Hartwell, was among several witnesses to the death of a woman at Ayer, Massachusetts. Flames suddenly burst from the woman's torso and legs, and she sank to the ground and died in a horrifying blaze.

In England, in 1919, a well-known author of the day, J. Temple Thurston, died at his Kent home, his body horribly burned from the waist down. The inquest verdict was that he had died from heart failure. But no one could explain how he came to be burned over more than half his body while there were no signs of fire in the room and the rest of his body was untouched.

In 1992, Mrs Euphemia Johnson, a 68-year-old widow, was burned to a pile of blackened bones at her home in Sydenham, London. The fire that consumed her body must have been as intense as that of a furnace - yet her clothes were untouched.

Two similar, horrifying cases of spontaneous human combustion occurred in England in the 1930's. The first involved a 19-year secretary, Maybelle Andrews, who was dancing with here boyfriend at a club in London's Soho. Flames suddenly shot from here chest and back, consuming her within minutes and resisting all attempts by other dancers to put them out. At the inquest no solution was offered the the mystery of her death. Her numbed boyfriend William Clifford, said 'The flames seemed to come from within her body.' The inquest verdict: death by misadventure, caused by a fire of unknown origin.

The second case was reported in 1938. Phyllis Newcombe, 22, was leaving a dance hall at Chelmsford, Essex, when blue flames suddenly engulfed her body. She was reduced to a pile of ashes within minutes. The coroner who investigated her death said: 'In all my experience I have never come across anything as remarkable at this'

Another case in England that same year was investigated by biologist Ivan Sanderson, who founded the Society for the Unexplained, in New Jersey. This was the case of Mary J Carpenter, who was with her family aboard a boat on the Norfolk Broads on a hot summer's day. Suddenly, as her husband and children watched in horror, she burst into flames and was reduced to ashes.

Two if the best authenticated cases of spontaneous human combustion in recent years have occurred in the United States. The first involved Billy Peterson, who was sitting in his parked car in Detroit when flames apparently burst from his body. When rescuers pulled out his charred corpse they found that the heat inside the car had been so intense that part of the dashboard had melted. Yet Billy Peterson's cloths had not even been singed.

The second and equally remarkable phenomenon occurred on 5 December 1966. Early that morning Don Gosnell started his working day reading gas meters in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. One of the first house he called at was at the home of Dr John Bentley, a 92-year-old retired family physician. Knowing that the old man could move around only with the help of a walking frame, Gosnell was not particularly surprised when no one answered the front door. He eventually let himself in and walked downstairs to the basement to read the meter. There he found a neat little heap of ashes on the floor. Gosnell wondered how it has got there but did not think to look up at the ceiling, were a charred hole gave clear view into the above bedroom. The ashes had fallen like powder through the hole. Gosnell read the meter and walked back upstairs, calling out for Dr Bently. Traces of smoke hung in the air and as Gosnell walked down the hallway to investigate he sniffed 'a strange , sweetish smell'. He opened the bedroom door and fell back in horror. The doctors soot blackened walking frame lay on the floor, overhanging a gaping hole, its edges scorched by fire. Also on the floor lay all the remains of Dr Bently- a right foot, still in it's carpet slipper and burnt off at the calf. At the inquest which followed, the coroner recorded a verdict of 'death by asphyxiation and 90% burning of the body'. All the comment he would make later was: It was the oddest thing you ever saw.'

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