Spontaneous Human Combustion

   I was a kid the first time I ever hear of SHC and saying it scared me shitless is not even coming close! We heated with wood so I'd had my share of painful run-in's with flame mainly from getting too close. To think that one could simply catch fire is disturbing still today, but it seems it has happened many times. One of the first dates back to the year 1673 when a Frenchman by the name of Jonas Dupont published a book of his investigations by the name of "Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis." A near murder conviction by a victim's spouse was said to have inspired the writings.  In another instance from 1744,  Grace Pelt of England, was found in her home burnt as you would a log, yet with no apparent flame! If we fast -forward to 1957, Anna Martin of Philadelphia Pennsylvania died after being exposed to temperatures pushing two- thousand degrees! Her remains were a pair of shoes and part of her torso. Dr. J. Irving Bentley, also of Pennsylvania, burned with such an intense heat that it made a three-foot hole in his bedroom floor. How can something burn so hot and yet not take the dwelling with it?


    Charles Dickens even wrote about it is his 1852 novel, "Bleak House." Dickens was of the notion that it might be a side-effect of alcoholism, basing this on the real-life case of Countess Cornelia Cesenate. In the second edition of the same novel, Mr Dickens claimed to have done enough research to uncover more than thirty other cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion. The story of the death of the Countess is as strange as it is ugly. In the August 1932 Saturday Magazine, they reported she was sixty-two years old and no health issues were mentioned. She spent three hours with her maid in conversation, and, after saying her prayers, fell asleep. Her maid shut the door and it remained that way until morning. When the Countess called not at the normal hour, the maid went in concern to find the door as left the night before. When the calls went unanswered, she entered the room. The site had to be both a shock and a horror. At a distance of around four feet from the bed she beheld a large heap of ashes. The Countess legs were not burned, her head was half-burned and lying between them. The room was filled with soot,  but no sign of any flame. The oil lamp had no oil and two candles were left untouched as well. It is believed that the Countess feeling warm, left the bed to open a window, and burned before the journey was finished. Another case of the body and victims clothes being the only thing engulfed.


    Now we move forward to July of 1951 when SHC claimed the life of sixty-seven year old Mary Hardy Reeser, of St. Petersburg Florida. She was alone but her landlady was in another part of  the building. She took a sleeping pill and sat down in an "overstuffed" chair and lit a cigarette. Next has been the subject of great debate ever since.


    At eight the next morning, Patsy Carpenter took a telegraph to her room, and, while trying to gain entrance, found the knob too hot to handle. Two painters heard the cry for help and ran to the rescue and burst the door open. A burst of oven-like heat filled the faces of the three as they entered the room. All that was left of where poor Mary sat, was the fire destroyed chair, ashes, and a few teeth and some bone, left ankle, foot , shoe, and what appeared to be a shrunken human skull. Another case of only where the victim was being damaged. The room, just like the others was unscathed.


   When the word of this case spread abroad, it caught the attention of the FBI. Needless to say every human being wanted answers and wanted them now.  We had a war in our not too distance past, a crash that was said carried lifeforms not of this planet, and on top of that, the Cold War already had people paranoid too. Aliens, Russians, or you just burn to the ground was not choices of passing that people wanted to deal with, even until now. On July 7, 1951  an investigator by the name of Reichert, sent a package from the scene to J. Edgar Hoover,  and the FBI, even down to the shoe that did not burn.


   The FBI labs could not find any answers as to how a human being  could suffer such a demise as this, and could only offer conjecture and theory to a world that still wants answers to this day. They did know that by burn patters, the body had burnt from the inside out.  As we all know again there was a absence of flame and or scorching anywhere but around the victim. The do know that the human body contains enough fat and other substances to permit different amounts of damage. All they knew was that whatever the cause of the heat, it touched nothing that the victim was not in contact with at the time of death. Science had no choice but to say they had no clue.


   In the last three hundred years there been a reported two-hundred cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion world-wide and answers from the paranormal to the "Wrath of God" has been offered as answers. Fact is, science still don't know everything as much as they, and sometimes us, wished they did. I can't speak for you, but the next time I feel that first trickle of sweat, I think I'll have a seat and hopefully chill. Times of the unknown indeed.......