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Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is the burning of the human body without an external source of ignition. There is speculation and controversy regarding SHC. There are about 200 cited cases worldwide over a period of around 300 years; however, most of the alleged cases are characterized by the lack of a thorough investigation, or are based on hearsay. In many of the more recent cases, where photographic evidence is available, it is alleged that there was an external source of heat present (often cigarettes), and nothing occurred 'spontaneously.'

Causes

There are many hypothesized explanations which account for the various cases of spontaneous human combustion. These generally fall into one of two groups: natural explanations that credit some unknown and otherwise unobserved phenomenon (e.g. raised levels of blood alcohol cause spontaneous ignition), and natural explanations that involve an external source of ignition (e.g. the victim dropped a cigarette).

Objections to natural explanations usually revolve around the degree of burning of the body with respect to its surroundings. Indeed, one of the common markers of a case of SHC is that the body - or part of it - has suffered an extraordinarily large degree of burning, with surroundings or lower limbs comparatively undamaged.

Suggested explanations

Many hypotheses have attempted to explain how SHC might occur, but those which rely on current scientific understanding say that with instances mistaken for spontaneous combustion, there actually was an external source of ignition. The likelihood that truly spontaneous human combustion actually takes place within the body is quite low.

Unverified phenomena

These explanations are not 'supernatural' in the sense of requiring a directed ghostly influence, but they do cite causes that disagree with well-established natural laws.

• Since every human body contains varying strengths of electrical field and the human body also contains flammable gases (mainly methane in the intestines), an electrical discharge could ignite these gases.

• SHC victims are lonely people who fall into a trance immediately before their incineration. Heymer suggests that a psychosomatic process in such emotionally-distressed people can trigger off a chain reaction by freeing hydrogen and oxygen within the body and setting off a chain reaction of mitochondrial explosions. This theory has been criticized on the basis that Heymer "seems to be under the illusion that hydrogen and oxygen exist as gases in the mitochondrial cell and are thus vulnerable to ignition, which is, in fact, not the case." (Mitochondria are organelles - small tissue groups within cells.)

• Another theory suggests high-energy particles or gamma rays coupled with susceptibilities in the potential victim (e.g. increased alcohol in the blood) triggers the initial reaction. This process may use no external oxygen to spread throughout the body, since it may not be an oxidation-reduction reaction. However, no reaction mechanism has been proposed, nor has a source for the high-energy particles.

• The victim is an alcoholic and has been smoking whilst drinking or shortly after drinking a strong spirit. There are claims that this raises the blood alcohol level to a point where it ignites, however, this 'explanation' is implausible, since ethanol typically burns only if the concentration is greater than about 23%, whereas a fatally toxic level is about 1%. (To reach a blood alcohol level of 20% would mean drinking many bottles of pure vodka, for example.)

• A suggested possibility is that both clothing and the person are caused to burn by a discharge of static electricity. A person walking across a carpet can build up sufficient charge and voltage to create a spark. It is unlikely that this could start a clothing fire, as although the voltage can be high (several thousand Volts), the stored energy is very low (typically less than a Joule).

Natural explanations

• Cigarettes are often implicated as the source of ignition. Usually, the victim is alone at the time of death, and it is thought that natural causes such as heart attacks may lead to the victim dying, subsequently dropping the cigarette. However, some of the victims did not smoke.

• The "wick effect" hypothesis suggests that the clothing of the victim soaks up melted human fat and acts like the wick of a candle. This attempts to provide a method by which a person could burn without causing similar damage to their surroundings (it does not address the source of ignition).

• Scalding can cause burn-like injuries, including death, without setting fire to clothing. Although not applicable in cases where the body is charred and burnt, this has been suggested as a cause in at least one claimed SHC-like event.

Possible cases

Deaths

Some commonly cited cases include:

• Robert Francis Bailey
• John Irving Bentley
• George I. Mott
• Mary Reeser
• Jeannie Saffin
• Henry Thomas

Survivors of static flash fires/events

Two examples of people surviving static flash events are given in a book on SHC. In addition, Jack Angel claims to have survived an SHC-like event.

• In September 1985, a young woman named Debbie Clark was walking home when she noticed an occasional flash of blue light:

It was me. I was lighting up the driveway every couple of steps.
As we got into the garden I thought it was funny at that point. I was walking around in circles saying: 'look at this, mum, look!' She started screaming and my brother came to the door and started screaming and shouting 'Have you never heard of spontaneous human combustion?'

Debbie's mother, Dianne Clark:

I screamed at her to get her shoes off and it kept going so I hassled her through and got her into the bath. I thought that the bath is wired to earth. It was a blue light you know what they call electric blue. She thought it was fun, she was laughing.

• In winter 1980, Cheshire, England resident Susan Motteshead was standing in her kitchen, wearing flame-resistant pajamas, when she was suddenly engulfed in a short-lived fire that seemed to have ignited the fluff on her clothing but burned out before it could set anything properly alight.

I was in the kitchen and my daughter just screamed out that my back was on fire. As I looked down it sort of whooshed all over me. It was like yellow and blue flames all over me. I was not burned at all. Not even my hair was burned.

The daughter, Joanne Motteshead, confirms this account and adds that the fire brigade arrived and tried (unsuccessfully) to set fire to Susan's pajamas.

• The two subjects (Debbie Clark and Susan Motteshead), speaking independently and with no knowledge of each other, give similar histories.

Clark:

I was not wearing any nylon clothing . I used to suffer a lot with static electricity so I tended not to wear anything nylon. I used to crackle with static when taking off my clothes and if I touched any metal thing it used to hurt me. I used to have a lot of trouble with electrical things. They would break down or blow up.

Motteshead:

I had just washed and dried my hair . I used to have a lot when I was younger. I used to get shocks from touching fridges, things like that.

In fiction

Examples of spontaneous human combustion are common in fictional works from the 19th century onwards. It is used both as a central plot device and as an incidental occurrence.

The second and third chapters of Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 novel Wieland focuses on the emigration of Wieland, a German, to colonial America. Wieland practices a solitary form of Protestantism. As part of his religious practices he spends solitary hours in a temple constructed on his property. One night his family hears "a loud report, like the explosion of a mine." Rushing to the temple, they find Wieland lying with his clothing burned off and delirious. He dies soon after. While the term "spontaneous human combustion" was not yet created, Brown includes a footnote at the end of chapter 2 that suggest the phenomenon and its existence in 18th century medical studies. The footnote reads:

"A case, in its symptoms exactly parallel to this, is published in one of the Journals of Florence. See, likewise, similar cases reported by Messrs. Merille and Muraire, in the "Journal de Medicine," for February and May, 1783. The researches of Maffei and Fontana have thrown light upon this subject."

Examples of spontaneous combustion occur in three works by the nineteenth-century Russian author Nikolai Gogol. In the story "St. John's Eve" from Gogol's "Village Evenings Near Dikanka" (1831–32) the guilty character Petro the orphan spontaneously combusts when confronted with a vision of a child he had killed. In the story "Vii," a huntsman in a Cossack village combusts after an encounter with a witch: "And once, when they came to the stable, instead of him there was just a heap of ashes and an empty bucket lying there: he burned up, burned up of his own self." In the novel Dead Souls, the landowner Korobochka laments that her serf-blacksmith burned up: "Something inside him started burning somehow, he'd had too much to drink. A blue flame just came out of him, and he smoldered and smoldered all over, and turned black as charcoal, and he was such a really skillful blacksmith!" The latter incident is used in the book as a metaphorical device.

In the novel Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens, the character Krook is killed by spontaneous combustion, "engendered in the corrupted humors of the vicious body itself." Jules Verne describes in his novel Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen (1878) that when a fictional African "King of Kazounde" tasted a punch set aflame, "An act of spontaneous combustion had just taken place. The king had taken fire like a petroleum bonbon. This fire developed little heat, but it devoured nonetheless." Verne has no doubt about SHC being the result of alcoholism : "In bodies so thoroughly alcoholized, combustion only produces a light and bluish flame, that water cannot extinguish. Even stifled outside, it would still continue to burn inwardly. When liquor has penetrated all the tissues, there exists no means of arresting the combustion."

Quotations

There's one mystery I'm asked about more than any other: spontaneous human combustion. Some cases seem to defy explanation, and leave me with a creepy and very unscientific feeling. If there's anything more to SHC, I simply don't want to know.

— Arthur C. Clarke (1994)

The opinion that a man can burn of himself is not founded on a knowledge of the circumstances of the death, but on the reverse of knowledge - on complete ignorance of all the causes or conditions which preceded the accident and caused it.

— Justus von Liebig (1855)

What would happen if you melted? You know, you never really hear this talked about much, but spontaneous combustion? It exists!... burn from within...sometimes they'll be in a wooden chair and the chair won't burn, but there'll be nothing left of the person. Except sometimes his teeth. Or the heart. No one speaks about this, but its for real.

— Keanu Reeves

See also

• Exploding animal
• Anomalous phenomena
• Combustion
• Spontaneous combustion
• Pyrokinesis
• Wick effect
• Oxyhydrogen

References

1. ^ "Ablaze!: The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion" Arnold, 2006
2. http://skepdic.com/shc.html Skeptic's Dictionary on spontaneous human combustion, Retrieved Oct 20, 2007 "The physical possibilities of spontaneous human combustion are."
3. ^ Fiery tales that spontaneously destruct - reports on spontaneous human combustion - includes an investigative chronology based on a published photograph | Skeptical Inquirer | Find Articles at BNET.com
4. Simmons, Ian (1996). in All Fired up With Spontaneity. In Fortean Times, p. 57, issue number 90 (September 1996).
5. Robert S. Gable (2004). "Comparison of acute lethal toxicity of commonly abused psychoactive substances" (reprint). Addiction. 99 (6): 686–696. doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2004.00744.x.
6. Joe Nickell (Nov-December 1996). "Not-so-spontaneous human combustion". Skeptical Inquirer. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
7. Heymer, John E (1996): The Entrancing Flame, London, Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-87694-1
8. Heymer, op cit, pp. 202-3.
9. ^ Heymer, op cit, pp. 204.
10. Lee B Croft. "People in Threes Going Up In Smoke and Other Triplicities in Russian Literature and Culture" The Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 59, No. 2 (2005), pp. l 29–49

External links

• CSICOP article on spontaneous human combustion
• "Spontaneous Human Combustion" – from the Skeptic's Dictionary
• A BBC article describing the experiment
• Article on causes of spontaneous human combustion including history.
• Spontaneous Human Combustion an Anomalies Study.
• Spontaneous Human Combustion or SHC from SpookyFiles.
• Matthew Alice's Straight from the Hip column on spontaneous human combustion
• Article on causes of spontaneous human combustion including history
• Pardon Me, While I Burst Into Flames
• Aug. 9, 1951: Associated Press report on the death of Mary Hardy Reeser
• Spontaneous human combustion and the wick effect
• "Ablaze!: The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion" by Larry E. Arnold, June 2006
• "HowStuffWorks 'How Spontaneous Human Combustion Works'"

• Paranormal
• Exploding animals
• Causes of death
• Anomalous phenomena