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That comtaminated pond thread got me thinking about  SC . I have always been fasinated by the stories I have read about this subject. I myself do not really have any theories about this but would be interested to hear yours..

Spontaneous Human Combustion.

Personally I'm skeptical. I read about a case of SC which turned out to be nothing more than a cigarrette. It'd been believed that this woman had spontaniously combusted in her home because she had burned to death in a chair in the middle of her living room without burning the rest of the house. As it turns out she fell asleep with a cigarrette lit which caught her chair on fire, by the time she woke up she was melted to the chair, and because she was heavy the fire kept burning fueled by her bodyfat. Eventually her body was pretty much burned to ash and the fire, no longer having fuel to burn from went out, leaving not much more than a black stain on the chair. It was just a strange freak accident. I wont claim SC is 100% impossible, or that I've examined all the information there is out there, I just havent heard or seen anything that makes me think it's more than an urban myth.

I'm with Blaster on this one. I saw a show on this a few years ago and that's essentially what was uncovered about SHC. Body fat fuels the fire and when it's done, the fire pretty much goes out. I believe CSI did something like this also using a pig (not like that really matters). I can't say that it won't or doesn't happen, but until I see it with my own eyes, I'll have to remain skeptical.
I do know that I've tried to light people on fire using my mind but that didn't seem to work either...

I think it's a concept developed by lazy fire marshalls (the guys who investigate the causes of fire).  

"Hmm...  no cans of lighter fluid or flame throwers lying around...  Oh, I'll just write "spontaneous combustion."  Nobody'll check."

I'm a bit of a skeptic as well when it comes to SHC but anything is possible.

I don't completely agree with most cases being written off as smoking related.  I was a fireman for a few years and during one of the training classes, we did a test to see if someone could actually be set ablaze by falling asleep with a lit cigarette.

The answer is yes and no.

Say you are a smoker, and you're sitting in bed smoking a cigarette when you fall asleep.  The cigarette falls beside you on the bed.  If the cigarette is laying on it's side, then there is little chance of catching fire.  There is just enough room between the cherry of the cigarette and the blanket/comforter/etc to pull in air to the cherry - which means that the area below the cherry is not actually hot.  

But, say then that in your sleep you roll over and the blanket/your pajamas fall on top of the cigarette, then you would have a fire.

Now I have no doubt that some SHC cases were caused by the latter situation.  But, I'm sure there have been some cases where the person was not a smoker and yet are still unsolved as to why they burst into flames.

Those people might have been poisoned/strangled and then set on fire.
What's interesting, that I saw from those shows which set a pig on fire (dead pig) is that the pig will mostly burn up but the surroundings do not catch on fire.

There are several problems with the cigarette/body-fat model:
1)  It takes massive amounts of heat to reduce a body to ash.  Ask anyone in the mortuary industry & they'll tell you it takes forced flames of thousands of degrees Centigrade to combust a body.
2)  Even if the person in question is very fat, there simply isn't enough fat on a human body to reduce it to ash
* * *
None of the skeptical models of SHC can explain how extremely high temperatures remain isolated in this very limited space, ie;  Why doesn't the whole building burn down, with that much heat?
It is next to impossible to set someone on fire with a cigarette.  Or anything short of a thermite grenade, for that matter.  Human beings are not highly flammable things.  As the Klingons say, "Bags of mostly water".  Water doesn't burn well.
Based on what I've read about SHC, it is a recognized phenomena that predates cigarettes & gasoline accelerants, etc., in the home.  Charles Dickens made reference to it in 2 of his works.  There are older references as well.
Check out www.forteantimes.com for links to theories and discussions on SHC.  It ain't a closed case.
peter johnson/denny crane

"Say you are a smoker, and you're sitting in bed smoking a cigarette when you fall asleep. The cigarette falls beside you on the bed. If the cigarette is laying on it's side, then there is little chance of catching fire. There is just enough room between the cherry of the cigarette and the blanket/comforter/etc to pull in air to the cherry - which means that the area below the cherry is not actually hot."

Ahh, but if the person was doused in gin would that not change the equation?

Wasn't there an episode of Kolshak about this?

"What's interesting, that I saw from those shows which set a pig on fire (dead pig) is that the pig will mostly burn up but the surroundings do not catch on fire."

Ahh, but if the pig were ALIVE would that not change the equation?

Skaboi wrote:

>
> Say you are a smoker, and you're sitting in bed smoking a
> cigarette when you fall asleep.  The cigarette falls beside you
> on the bed.  If the cigarette is laying on it's side, then
> there is little chance of catching fire.  There is just enough
> room between the cherry of the cigarette and the
> blanket/comforter/etc to pull in air to the cherry - which
> means that the area below the cherry is not actually hot.  
>
> But, say then that in your sleep you roll over and the
> blanket/your pajamas fall on top of the cigarette, then you
> would have a fire.
>

I used to do arson investigation, and I remember one class in particular we took specifically dealt with cigarettes starting fires.  The conditions have to be just right.  A dropped cigarette does not always start a fire, and often just burns out.

That said, I once photographed a fatality scene for the NC SBI where that was, in fact, how the fire started.  One dude died, while his brother suffered 3rd degree burns trying to get him out.  It was not a case of just the person burning up and nothing else, though.  The whole house was in rubble.

I don't recall SHC being one of our choices in "Cause" for the fires we investigated.  We did have an "Unknown" category, though, but we worked very, very hard to not use it.

Eirik wrote:

> "What's interesting, that I saw from those shows which set a
> pig on fire (dead pig) is that the pig will mostly burn up but
> the surroundings do not catch on fire."
>
> Ahh, but if the pig were ALIVE would that not change the
> equation?

Actually, yes it would.  A dead pig is (presumably) still, so it is not exposing other fuel load to the fire.  A live pig, ooh, might move around (okay, it probably would unless HEAVILY sedated or comatose), possibly igniting other fuels in the area.

Just a thought....

peter johnson wrote:

> There are several problems with the cigarette/body-fat model:
> 1)  It takes massive amounts of heat to reduce a body to ash.
> Ask anyone in the mortuary industry & they'll tell you it takes
> forced flames of thousands of degrees Centigrade to combust a
> body.

Actually, crematoria do not reduce an entire body to ash, either.  There are often large sections of bone left over.  They pass the remains through a chipper to pulverize those bones so it blends better with the ash.

> 2)  Even if the person in question is very fat, there simply
> isn't enough fat on a human body to reduce it to ash
> * * *
> None of the skeptical models of SHC can explain how extremely
> high temperatures remain isolated in this very limited space,
> ie;  Why doesn't the whole building burn down, with that much
> heat?

Well, just to play devil's advocate here, there are TWO key parameters in the heat transfer equations: the temperature and TIME.  If something burned very hot, but very fast, it would not necessarily expose the surrounding fuel to sufficient energy to ignite.  Hold a match flame (which is plenty HOT enough) next to a 2x4 and it won't ignite; the total energy transfer is too small to vaporize sufficient volatiles to their ignition temperature.

In firefighting/fire investigation, we do see very hot fires all the time that don't spread much at all.

> It is next to impossible to set someone on fire with a
> cigarette.  

This is true.

>Or anything short of a thermite grenade, for that
> matter.

This is not.

> Human beings are not highly flammable things.  

Well, yes and no.  I see your point (mostly water), but we ARE made of organic compounds that ARE flammable.  Plus, the clothes we wear ARE very flammable, which is probably more the issue.  People do, in fact burn.  The water is contained in the cellular protoplasm and is surrounded by that organic matter.  Besides, if something is burning hot enough in an open space, the water will not put out the fire anyway (it will boil and just 'float away').


> Based on what I've read about SHC, it is a recognized phenomena
> that predates cigarettes & gasoline accelerants, etc., in the
> home.  Charles Dickens made reference to it in 2 of his works.
> There are older references as well.

Man has been around flammable materials for many millenia.  Gun powder has been known for a couple thousand years; hydrocarbon fuels have been used for various things for a long time.  Just because it is not refined into gasoline does not mean it's not been around, and readily available, for a long time.  Coal is a good example.

Just throwing this stuff out there, I really don't have a SHC theory other than to say on the one hand, we don't understand everything that goes on around us, and on the other, whenever something SEEMS to be a mystery (because it is not understood at the time of observation), supernatural-esque explanations take hold.



Post Edited (04-28-05 21:59)

And at what point in the burning process does the pig become delicious?

Between medium and well done.

Or, as Charles Lamb posited, burn down an entire house in order to produce the perfect roast Suckling Pig --
I'm really glad ulthar is involved in the discussion here, because he's investigated real arson & real fires -- as he says, there is an "unknown" category on the forms, but they work very hard not to use it -- as should be so.
When ulthar points out that even very high temperature crematoria do not reduce bodies to ash, this is making my point:  In the cases wherein SHC is suggested, very frequently the entire body has been reduced to ash, with none of the accompanying bone chunks produced by regular cremation.  Or, stranger still, there will be all ash, along with an untouched leg or arm, or a skull shrunken to baseball size with nothing else but ash.
My point would be that what is looked upon as SHC by Fortean investigators & the like is some very very peculiar stuff, and, no, you don't get the same results by even immersing a body in a barrel of gin & then igniting it.
Rationalist explanations of SHC may neutralise discussion, but they do not account for all the known data.
The point is well taken about "the supernatural" being invoked, which is why Fortean philosophy gives a good model for approaching things like the appearance of The Virgin Mary, UFOs, Crop Circles, and SHC.  The model is first of all to recognize that there is some peculiar stuff going on in the world, then to accept every possible explanation as being possibly true.  Then by looking for the explanation that covers the most data on the given phenomena one can approach a model of truth.
Richard Dawkins -- an atheist scientist, the current scientific expert on Human Evolution, who mistrusts all and any supernatural claims -- posits a middle ground between the Paranormal/Supernatural and the strictly Scientific, which he terms the "Perinormal", meaning the phenomena orbits on the periphery of common knowledge & may at times take on the appearance of the Supernatural, because our current comprehension of the normal is insufficient to embrace said phenomena.  An example would be Meteors, which were observed by ignorant farmers to fall from the sky, but were rejected as coming from the sky by the most "scientific" minds of the time because it did not fall into the then current Scientific world model.
Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are extinct!  It is unscientific and ridiculous to believe otherwise!!  What?  Oops!!  Never mind . . .
I'm not emotionally invested in "proving" that SHC is ghostly, or caused by Elves, or anything else -- but what I do think is that the phenomena is genuinely odd & bizarre & deserving of high scrutiny by minds both scientific and prosaic.
peter johnson/denny crane

Has anyone ever checked to see if these people that burst into flames may possibly live near or drink water from that pond in Germany that's causing the problem for the toads? Hmmm...a conspiracy is afoot.

Well, I've read some of the accounts myself, and what I can say for them is generally, you shouldn't trust either the skeptics or the believers on this one. The skeptics provide too-tidy explanations that fall apart on closer inspection, while believers are far too inclined to try probing for scientific explanations of what is, real or not, inherently unscientific. If there were a natural explanation, it would be repeatable and testable, as all real science (a.k.a. natural philosophy) is. If what we have here is a supernatural effect, then it is inherently untestable and humans cannot repeat it since the supernatural is not something we control.

I haven't seen any of these cases personally, so I can't speak for SHC specifically. I can say, however, that having experienced one thoroughly impossible and inexplicable event, I do firmly believe magic is real. While I've never heard of any specific spell for causing people to burn up, I do know that some murderous spells are a part of certain occultists' beliefs, so I think it entirely possible that SHC might be some extension of magic in general. Again, though, magic is neither testable nor repeatable, so people should not go looking for scientific explanations of it.

I seem to recall that the particular story in which Charles Dickens disposed of one of his characters with SHC was Bleak House. I'll have to go find a copy of that for myself to be sure, but something to keep in mind: as with Stephen King's Firestarter, it's fiction, and should not be taken as a genuine explanation of how the supernatural works.

As Writer said, Dicken's story about SHC was Bleak House but he attrubited it to alcohol as many did at that time.

Millions of college students have proven that theory wrong.

Let's see, we find out what we think could actually be the cause of SC, so now how do we test our theory. I've never heard of any other animal spontaneously combusting so we'll need human volunteers.

Should we let them know what we are doing or just make up something? Hmmm, sounds like the makings of a B movie plot.

"When ulthar points out that even very high temperature crematoria do not reduce bodies to ash, this is making my point: In the cases wherein SHC is suggested, very frequently the entire body has been reduced to ash, with none of the accompanying bone chunks produced by regular cremation."

I imagine Ulthar would put cases like this in the "Faked own death by burning some clothes and disappeared category."

This is just speculation, as I have never actually done this experiment, but I imagine it MIGHT be possible to test the ash residue for 'human' remains.  Strictly speaking, ash is non-combustible material mostly comprised of inorganics (metal salts, for example).

But, I do know that we can test dirt/debris from around explosion scenes and find UNREACTED explosive; in no case is 100% of the explosive 'consumed.'  I've done chemical testing on enough fire debris samples to know that you find all kinds of stuff one might naively think would 'burn up' in the fire.

So, I would conjecture that in that kind of ash, it should be possible to test for organic residue, and POSSIBLE even pinpoint the residue to human.  I don't know that this has ever been tried in a SHC case, and of course our chemical testing technology has increased dramatically in the past twenty years.

It would be an interesting experiment.  I should do some reading to see if this sort of thing has been explored.

Point well-taken that Dickens was writing fiction --- However, all of his work was based upon things he knew of in his day, eg:  The ghosts in Christmas Carol.  It was a popular belief in 19th-Century England that the ghosts of the departed did watch over and care about the activities of the living.  The episode in Bleak House was based upon actual events reported in the newspapers of his day.
My point was that SHC isn't a "new" phenomena, but rather something that has been speculated about for quite some time.
Ulthar raises some interesting points, re. is the SHC residue confirmable as human.  Can some of the cases be instances of people faking their deaths & simply buggering off.  I don't know, but it's a damn good question.
And, yes, we really really DO need a B movie or 2 on this subject.  And frog falls.  And strange green children found emerging from caves . . . . etc. etc.
There is a lot of very odd stuff out there.
peter johnson/denny crane

Why is it that after a week or so of intermittant internet research, every single case I find involves someone who was a chain smoker in loose-fitting pajamas or robes and who was described by friends as "careless" with their cigarettes and reportedly fell asleep while smoking a lot?  90% of them also mysteriously burned up while in their barcaloungers while the remaining 10% seem to have died while lying on linoleum (which is flammable).

You know how many people claim to have witnessed SHC during the entire span of human history?  Zero.  

None of this will sway those who want to believe - just thought I'd share what I learned.

One of the strange things about SHC is that a lot of the cases involve elderly people.  There are few cases of younger people having burst randomly into flames.

Sometimes I get angry enough that I feel like I'm going to burst into flames...

It is apparently a fact that no one has ever spontaineously combusted in front of witnesses.



Post Edited (05-03-05 07:46)

Well of course not because then they'd learn the secret of the Alien heat ray there by unraveling the mystery of the exploding toads thereby exposing the Illuminati to the world!! Duh. : )

I use to play on a baseball team in the 70's that traveled to a town a couple times a year that claimed to be the first case of Human Spontaneous Combustion.  It is the town of  Cloudersport, Pa. It's the famous photo where you see a chair and part of a leg or something. Wouldn't that fire have to burn pretty hot to burn that body like that? How come the rest of the house didn't catch fire?

(The question may have been answered, but I didn't get a chance to read all the post. I just wanted to put my two cents in.)



Post Edited (05-03-05 07:21)

here's one possibly explanation for spontanious combustion:

Article (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7720569/)

Erik --
Did you look at the links from the Fortean Times pages?  SHC predates linoleum and cigarettes and loose fitting flannel pajamas.
If these things genuinely contributed to SHC, then I wonder how come my own father didn't burst into flames on numerous occasions.
There may indeed be a corollary, just as alcoholism may play a part as some suggest.  But all this begs the question of well then, how come the phenomena is so rare if it's so easily "explained away".  Really, by pointing out association one does not determine causality.
As far as the witnessing thing goes, there are, in fact, episodes in the available literature of people who witnessed people starting to smolder & threw them into lakes, etc., with no real idea as to what the causality of the smoldering was.  Maybe all these people are telling fibs.  
You are correct that, no, nobody has apparently stood by and watched someone devoured by flames & done nothing about it, for the sake of being a "witness" or out of curiosity as to what would happen next.
Nobody has ever seen an adult Giant Squid either, but rather infer their existence from available evidence.  There is still debate as to whether anyone has ever really seen "ball lightning", or earth-bound molecular plasma.
Certainly, having numerous eyewitnesses to SHC would be a cool thing, but wouldn't really contribute anything to "proving" or "disproving" SHC.  Numerous people have "witnessed" UFOs, ghosts, lake-monsters, etc., yet these witnesses have done nothing at all to resolve the debate as to the respective phenomena's reality.
I hasten to add that I'm not a "true believer".  I do, however, think that something weird is going on, at least as weird as meteors or frogs falling from a cloudless blue sky.
peter johnson/denny crane

I can't speak to ancient cases (and they'd have to be DAMN ancient to predate, as you say, smoking and flammable clothing by the way), but evey case I find in which the facts were collected and documented in a scientific manner seems to point to someone (usually a very old someone - another commonality I found) who smoked a lot and wore real flammable clothing being careless with a cigarette (often with matches nearby or in pockets), setting their clothes on fire, being overcome and burning up.  

The fact that an unburned leg or arm is sometimes nearby doesn't impress me - I have seen with my own eyes the same thing with people burned by napalm.  I can't explain the exact science of it, but I know it isn't unusual for a burning body to be totally consumed in some places but not in others.

Do I think there is a preponderance of evidence to support the idea that there at least might be UFOs, bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster?  Yes I do.  I'll need to see more proof before I believe it, but there seems to be something going on.  I do not feel this way about SHC.  I haven't found one witness account from an era and a culture that isn't otherwise rife with all kinds of myths and folklore.  For instance, myths about werewolves and vampires very possibly were fueled early on as explanations for horrible killings that today we understand and accept as being the work of deranged humans.  The fact that some townspeople attributed a child's grisley murder in 15th century France to a werewolf is not evidence of werewolves.

I also think it's real damning that there's never been a witness.  Other phenomenon you mention that have no witnesses either occur in environments where virtually no human has ever spent any length of time (giant squids) or are things most humans wouldn't know if they saw (earth-bound molecular plasma).  People are very often around other people in homes and they sure as heck would notice if someone burst into flames.

The only possible cases where evidence was actually gathered and documented strongly suggest carelessness with cigarettes as the real reason.  When a non smoker in flame-retardant clothing burns up while moving around somewhere during waking hours (with, dare I hope, a witness around), give me a call.

A very cogent reply, Erik, but it still doesn't explain how being old, smoking, & wearing loose clothing creates the mystery.
Most people like that manage to set either the whole house on fire or the whole bed, etc.  The body is recovered.  Granted, they are usually covered with charcoal & burned beyond recognition, but the bones are still intact, and the general shape is still recognizable as human.  Teeth are still in a recognizable skull, etc. etc.
This is simply not the case in the instances wherein SHC is proposed as a possibility.
Bones are reduced to ash.  Skulls shrink to the size of baseballs.  Pretty odd stuff.
Not to be crass, but the Germans modified the furnaces at the camps throughout WW2, and were still never satisfied with the performance of these crematoria.  How is it that their engineering is sometimes surpassed in an open-air situation?
I think it IS a mystery.
peter johnson/denny crane

I'll allow that a fire that burns someone up would have to be awfully hot to reduce their bones (at least the big bones), but again, I've seen that happen and not in a crematorium.  I'll also allow that a person burning up would very very likely burn the house down too, although I imagine it's possible that it wouldn't, especially in enclosed spaces where oxygen might not be in enough supply or the non human fuel around might be musty or damp.  So if those are the facts of a particular case, careless smoking does seem to be an imperfect but still not impossible explanation.  

But now the main problem I have with the web sites I've seen that support the existence of SHC (sadly, I didn't find one supporting or against that seemed very objective to me) - their depiction of the facts seem to be pretty slipshod, while those sites looking to disprove SHC seem to be pretty thorough.  For example, one site I found talked about a guy from down south who was supposedly a SHC survivor.  He told an author writing a book on the subject that he was asleep in his trailer when he suddenly awoke with painful burns all over his body.  Okay - fair enough.  More searches on the guy led to a documented fact the SHC people conveniently left out.  Around the date he claimed this happened to him, he had filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the hot water heater in his trailer.  He claimed that it stopped working and when he tried to fix it , it burst and scalded him in those same parts of his body he would later claim were touched by SHC.  The case was dismissed because the manufacturer demonstrated he didn't follow the instruction manuel while attempting the repair.  Only then did he contact the author of the book with a story about surviving SHC.  No mystery there, and I see a lot of that kind of unquestioning acceptance of first hand accounts all over the SHC sites.  I've seen far more concrete evidence of UFOs than I have for SHC.

their testimony would be considered anecdotal evidence just like the bagillions of people who have seen ufos, bigfoot, the numerous lake monsters around the world, the chupacabra, leprachauns, and numerous other phenomena.

Unless a scientist can get someone to do the flame-on bit in a lab it will always be unprovable and remain one of those mysteries to be debated on internet forums..

I'd take an eyewitness account with a grain of salt, no doubt about it, geezer...  But having a witness would at least graduate this phenomenon up to the believability level of UFOs and Scottish Pleiosaurs.  As for now, it isn't even that high.

Erik & odin & ulthar -- sounds like an Icelandic Heavy Metal band -- make very good points, which I don't detract from --
HOWEVER -- didn't you know there'd be a "however"? -- the objections raised still don't acutally "explain away" the forensic evidence.  Note that to "explain away" something is not the same thing as really explaining it.
The very reason that SHC exists as a category of general weirdness is that people observed really odd things about very strange deaths by fire.  The people that observed these very odd things were people in the Fire & Rescue & Police professions who, like ulthar, were very experienced individuals who had seen any number of deaths-by-fire, yet found these particular events significant enough to comment upon.
Also, these very odd deaths do, in fact, conform to a pattern of oddity.  Part of that oddity is indeed, as has been repeated here, being old, a smoker, lonely, ignored, wearing loose clothing, being an alcoholic or indulging in drink, etc. etc.
The point would still be that there are thousands of individuals -- more is the pity -- that conform to this "victim model" that are not bursting into flames.  How come, if this is to be put forth as the definitive criteria?
peter johnson/denny crane

"The point would still be that there are thousands of individuals -- more is the pity -- that conform to this "victim model" that are not bursting into flames. How come, if this is to be put forth as the definitive criteria?"

Could be there are only a few who've been so terribly unlucky...  but the pattern itself is suggestive of a common cause.  I am sure that rescue/fire workers see bizarre stuff all the time, and sometimes stuff they're at a loss to explain.  We all see stuff like that.  

I once a guy fall backwards off a second floor balcony and land flat on his back on concrete.  He got up and was fine (and no, he hadn't been drinking, though the guy who accidentally knocked him off had).  The next day he wasn't even sore.  That fall would have killed some people, paralyzed some people, and caused at the very least some severe pain and injury to almost anybody.  So why did this guy who was average size, in average shape, and not particularly tough, not get hurt?  Sometimes it just happens that way.  I expect it's like that with accidental self-immolation too.

But it is a fair point to say that I cannot disprove the existence of SHC, and I will readily change my position that does not exist should some more evidence (or at least a plausible scientific explanation of how it might happen) surfaces, so I guess we can leave it at that.