With all the different aspects of each case, it is difficult to fully explain each without ending up with a long, very dull, boring report, so here are some of the more intriguing aspects:
This list could go on and on. But it doesn't have to. The point is that even this short listing can demonstrate how mysterious a phenomenon spontaneous human combustion is. In fact, the only way to better show how mysterious it is would be to give a description of an actual case.
As a matter of fact, giving such a description of a case of SHC isn't such a bad idea. This one is particularly interesting, because it is one of the few cases where every possible scientific investigation tool was used, but the cause of death was still labelled "inconclusive". The events went as follows:
July 1, 1951Needless to say, SHC is pretty mysterious, especially after looking at an actual case of it.
Mrs. Mary Reeser, a 67 year old widow living in St. Petersburg, Florida, went to her son's home (also in St. Petersburg) to visit.In the evening she stayed at the house with her grandchildren while everyone else went to the beach. When the family returned, Mrs. Reeser had already left the house to go back to her own apartment. Her daughter-in-law went to Mrs. Reeser's apartment to see if everything was O.K. Apparently it was, because, according to her later testimony, she said that everything seemed O.K.
The last person to see Mrs. Reeser alive was her neighbor and landlord, Mrs. Pansy Carpenter. She saw Mrs. Reeser around 9 P.M., apparently to say good night to her.
At approximately 8 A.M. the next morning, Mrs. Carpenter signed a telegram for Mrs. Reeser and went over to her apartment to give it to her. To her surprise, the doorknob was hot. Being a woman of reasonable intelligence, Mrs. Carpenter determined that this was not good. She yelled for help, and two people painting across the street. One of the two opened the door, and saw a little smoke and a small flame on a wooden partition. He went into the apartment, but he could not find Mrs. Reeser.
The Fire Dept. arrived later and put out the small flame with an extinguisher. The wooden partition was removed and behind it was found something so strange that it deserves a paragraph of its own.
Sitting in the middle of a charred area with a 2 ft. radius were several blackened chair springs, a pile of ashes, a shrunken head, a charred liver stuck to a piece of spine, and a foot still wearing a slipper. Mrs. Reeser was dead. Her estimated body weight of 175 lbs. was reduced to less than 10 lbs. Little else in the room other than her chair was touched by fire. The upper wall was covered in an oily soot, and the plastic wall outlets there had melted. But that was about it.
The case was investigated by many arson experts, including Dr. Wilton Krogman, who was experienced in the effects of fire on cadavers. ("Hey, Wil, what are you gonna do when you grow up?" "I'm gonna burn dead people.") Along with the FBI, police and fire officials, they were stumped. As a top arson specialist from the National Board of Underwriters said, "I can only say the victim died from fire..."
Finally, they all gave up; they could do no more to explain the death.
However mysterious something is, though, someone is always going to try to come up with a rational explanation. There are many theories that try to explain SHC, such as: fats and oils in the body can burn under certain circumstances, static electricity could set the body on fire, and alcoholic beverages can make a person's breath flammable. (These are the more "tame" theories. Some of the more exotic ones attribute SHC to geomagnetic flux, internal atomic explosions, high frequency sound, and the like.) Of course, "in 1851 a German chemist pointed out that overweight imbibers of brandy generally do not burn when they are close to a fire." Well, duh. We can only speculate as to his research methods...
Of course, the preceding conversation probably never took place. The point is that no one theory for SHC has ever been proven and probably won't be for a long time.
Spontaneous human combustion has puzzled a lot of people for a long time. The at-risk group for this is any breathing person. However hard it is looked at, there is no apparent reason for SHC. No explanation (or combination of explanations, for that matter) has ever been proven. For the answer to this vexing question, which remains a mystery, it seems that the world will have to wait for just a little (or maybe a lot) longer.