spontaneous human combustion

spontaneous human combustion On the morning of 2 July 1951, Mary Reeser, of St Petersburg, Florida, was found dead. Her landlady had attempted to deliver a telegram but the doorknob was too hot to touch. When rescuers entered the smoke-filled apartment, they found a pile of ashes and fragments of bone, along with one blackened foot encased in a satin slipper — the remains of Mrs Reeser. Dubbed by the newspapers ‘the cinder woman mystery’, this was one of several dozen grisly cases, recorded over the past three centuries, of spontaneous human combustion (SHC).

What happened in this case and others like it? In some mysterious way, solitary human beings have burned up almost entirely, without setting fire to their surroundings, and with no apparent outside cause. Even James Randi, the famous hoax-breaking sceptic, has described SHC as a ‘not-too-well-explained phenomenon’.

The great period in this form of auto-incineration, SHC's Elizabethan period, so to speak, was in the mid nineteenth century. No man did more to draw attention to the phenomenon and its dramatic possibilities than Charles Dickens. In the December 1852 instalment of Bleak House he did away with the repugnant junk-dealer Krook in spectacular fashion, by turning him into soot, smoke, and what the novelist describes as ‘a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceiling’. Although other novelists had lit the way — Herman Melville in Redburn (1842), Captain Marryat in Jacob Faithful (1834), and Nikolai Gogol in Dead Souls (1849) had recently turned their villains into human tapers — Dickens' was the most detailed and repulsive account. It was also the most believable, which Dickens ensured by citing in his book corroborating testimony from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, works of jurisprudence, and the medical literature. Bodies — especially vile bodies — burned.

In an immediate and caustic reaction, the journalist, positivist philosopher, and physiologist G. H. Lewes denounced Dickens' credulity in the pages of The Leader, labelling Krook's demise a ‘vulgar error’ whose endorsement by novelists could only perpetuate ignorance and superstition. To support his attack, Lewes cited the damning evidence of the brilliant German chemist, Justus von Liebig, who had recently completed a series of experiments showing that beyond any shadow of a doubt SHC was an impossibility. Liebig had tried to set alight bones and flesh, dried and wetted, all without being able to reduce them to ashes. Bodies did not burn.

Liebig ought to have settled the matter, but did not, and for two reasons. In the first place, he was a chemist, using new-fangled (and foreign) experimental procedures to explore what was judged at the time to be a matter of and for medicine. Doctors who had come on the scene soon after a death by SHC had no reason to doubt the evidence of their eyes. At a time when experimental chemistry and medicine were making great efforts to establish themselves as credible and reliable, there was a veritable tussle over the rights to pronounce on causes of death, and over who had disciplinary ownership over corpses (the matter was settled by the formation of forensic science in the late 1800s).

Apart from disciplinary tussles over the credibility of on-the-scene and laboratory evidence, the conflict between sceptics and believers was, and remains, one between those who concern themselves with causes and those who deal with effects. With most of the human body a mystery, lying seemingly beyond medicine, many doctors were happy enough 150 years ago to treat effects, and to accept as real many phenomena (including most diseases, in fact) for which they had no explanation. Scientists, however, were reluctant to credit any effects for which causes could not be discovered, and steadfast in discrediting any whose conceivable causes violated known laws.

As the scientific and medical controversy continued, many commentators found that SHC, if not scientifically credible, was morally proper. Almost without exception, those who went up in a puff of smoke were the lazy, the corpulent, the solitary, the aged, and the drunk. What better way to eliminate a degraded character, like the unfortunate but deserving victim in Emile Zola's Doctor Pascal (1893)? In any event, it was a death too good for scandal sheets to give up. Are we to sense trouble on the horizon when, early in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866), Raskolnikov enjoys a lurid newspaper account of SHC?

While believers have documented the characteristics of SHC victims, sceptics have used precisely these characteristics to explain away the phenomenon. In a recent re-evaluation of over twenty-five deaths attributed to SHC, Joe Nickell and John Fischer have found that simple explanations account for each case. In some cases, an alcoholic's carelessly-dropped cigarette sets the victim ablaze. In others, an oil-heater or a spark from the coal fire have done the job. Meanwhile, those reluctant to discount the reality of SHC have supposed that a perfectly natural ‘candle effect’ may be responsible: the result of human fat dripping out of the body, permeating the clothing, and then burning like a giant human candle wick.

Thousands each year revisit the death of Krook, and are horrified by Dickens' ability to portray ‘the romantic side of familiar things’. Thousands devour lurid reports, often illustrated, of recent deaths by SHC and, like that famous connoisseur and collector of impossible facts, Charles Fort, ask ‘why not?’ For a large segment of the population — those alienated, or at least not persuaded, by scientific authority — SHC is a fact, whether explained by recourse to people's ‘electrodynamic potential’ or the Earth's ‘geomagnetic fluctuations’, or not explained at all. Reporting the freakish fate of Mrs Reeser, a Florida newspaper ran the story under the wry headline, ‘How Woman Was Incinerated Stumps All But Amateurs’. While physicians and scientists denounce the credulity of the general public, thousands of amateurs have ready answers to this particular mystery of death.

Michael Shortland

Bibliography

Harrison, M. (1976). Fire from heaven: a study of spontaneous combustion in human beings. Sidgwick and Jackson, London.