Spontaneous Combustion

Spontaneous combustion occurs when an object self-ignites. The cause may be chemical, as when lithium oxidizes explosively in water, or biological, as when a haystack catches fire due to heat generated from bacterial fermentation. There is no scientific evidence that the human body can selfignite. However, spontaneous human combustion (SHC) as an alleged cause of death has a long and controversial history. If true, the mechanism of ignition is mysterious and challenges what we know about the human body.

Cases accredited to SHC tend to have features in common. Most victims are female. Many are overweight, alcoholic, and have a mobility dysfunction or disabling illness. Usually there are no witnesses to the combustion and no calls for help are heard. The torso is badly burned, while [Page 891]extremities, such as the lower legs, are left intact. The immediate environment suffers little damage although a foul-smelling yellow oil may surround the body. Often there is a significant time lapse between the victim being last seen alive and the finding of their charred remains.

Apart from possible accounts in the Bible, the first description of SHC in Western culture has been attributed to Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680), founder of the journal Acta Medica et Philosophica Hafniensia, who described the case of a Parisian woman incinerated in her sleep while the straw mat on which she lay sustained little damage. In 1763, Jonas Dupont collected such stories in De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, raising the public profile of the phenomenon.

Public interest in SHC has been utilized by writers as a dramatic literary device. Possibly the earliest example can be found in Charles Brockton Brown's (1771–1810) novel Wieland published in 1798. The most famous is the death of Mr. Krook in Charles Dickens's (1812–1870)Bleak House, first published 1852–1853 and forming part of the debate about SHC that raged in 19th-century England. SHC has been the subject of sustained interest in more recent times since the death of Mary Reeser in Florida, in 1951, at the age of 67, popularly accredited to SHC.

Seventeenth and 18th-century explanations for SHC favored alcoholism as the cause, believing (erroneously) that “alcohol-saturated” flesh was readily combustible. The more speculative contemporary explanations include kundalini fire, geomagnetism, ball lightning, and force fields from high-tension wires. Quasi-biochemical accounts such as “pyroton” particles initiating a nuclear chain reaction within the human body, ignition of cellular hydrogen and oxygen, and mechanisms associated with phosphorous metabolism have been dismissed by scientists as, at best, misinformed. Two explanations based on known scientific principles have met with less general skepticism and account for at least some of the phenomena associated with SHC: the static flash fire hypothesis and the candle or wick effect.

The human body can generate static electricity, and Professor Robin Beach, formerly of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, suggested that some people can generate up to 30,000 volts at a time, which may singe or burn clothing on discharge. Moreover, there is some evidence that static discharge from people may ignite fires in some highly flammable environmental conditions. However, Beach's research demonstrated that the human body can hold an extremely high charge of static electricity without harm, so it is unlikely to cause a person to self-ignite in the way implied by SHC.

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