Spontaneous human combustion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is a name used to describe cases of the burning of a living human body without an external source of ignition. There is speculation and controversy regarding SHC – some regard it as a unique and currently unexplained phenomenon, while others feel that cases described as SHC can be understood using current generally-accepted scientific principles. There are about 200 cited cases[1] worldwide over a period of around 300 years; however, most of the alleged cases are characterised by the lack of a thorough investigation, or rely heavily on hearsay and oral testimony. 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.”

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[edit] Causes

There are many hypothesised explanations which account for the various cases of spontaneous human combustion. These generally fall into one of three groups: paranormal explanations (e.g. a ghost or alien caused it), natural explanations that credit some unknown and otherwise unobserved phenomenon (e.g. the production of abnormally concentrated gas or 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.[1]

[edit] 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, and that the likelihood that truly spontaneous human combustion actually takes place within the body is quite low.[2]

[edit] Unverified natural phenomena

  • 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 sometimes described as lonely people who fall into a trance immediately before their incineration. Heymer[3] 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 criticised on the basis that Heymer “seems to be under the illusion that hydrogen and oxygen exist as gases in the mitochondrial cell [sic] and are thus vulnerable to ignition, which is, in fact, not the case.”[4] (Mitochondria are organelles found within cells.)
  • Another theory suggests high-energy particles or gamma rays[1] 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 while 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%.[5] (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).
  • The controversial phenomenon of ball lightning has been proposed as one of the causes of spontaneous combustion.

[edit] 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.[3]
  • The “wick effect” hypothesis suggests that a small external flame source, such as a burning cigarette, chars the clothing of the victim at a location, splitting the skin and releasing subcutaneous fat, which is in turn absorbed into the burned clothing, acting as a wick. This combustion can continue for as long as the fuel is available. This hypothesis has been successfully tested with animal tissue (pork) and is consistent with evidence recovered from cases of human combustion.[6]
  • 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.[7]
  • High temperatures, normally over 570 Fahrenheit can combust the skin.

[edit] Possible cases

[edit] Deaths

Some commonly cited cases include:[1]

[edit] Survivors of static flash fires/events

Two examples of people surviving static flash events are given in a book on SHC.[8] 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:[9]
“ 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 [the flashes] 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.[10]
“ 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.[10]
Clark:
“ I was not wearing any nylon clothing [at the time of the flashes]. 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 [at the time of the incident]. I used to have a lot when I was younger. I used to get shocks from touching fridges, things like that. ”

[edit] In fiction

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This “In popular culture” section may contain too many minor or trivial references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject’s impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and remove trivia references. (September 2009)

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![11]” 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 had 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.”

In the Red Dwarf television episode Confidence and Paranoia (1988), Dave Lister contracts a mutated form of pneumonia causing his dream of the spontaneous combustion of the Mayor of Warsaw in 1546 to actually occur.

In first pages of the novel, “Spontaneous,” by Diana Wagman, Auntie Ned self combusts, alone in the kitchen.

In the South Park television episode “Spontaneous combustion”, (1999) various members of the town, beginning with Kenny, start to spontaneously combust which causes the townspeople to attend church more, and compels Mayor McDaniels to order Randy Marsh to discern the cause for the explosions – which turns out to be intestinal gas retention.

Two of the many drummers for the band Spinal Tap died of SHC: Peter “James” Bond (whose death is described by Nigel Tufnel as follows: “He just was like a flash of green light… And that was it. Nothing was left.”) and Mick Shrimpton.

In the episode called “Ashes to ashes” from the television show Dead like me, the character of Mickey spontaneously combusts after an arm wrestling contest.

In a Fringe episode “The Road Not Taken”, a woman gets on the bus to go to the hospital, her breath steams up windows and a newspaper on the seat in front of her starts to smoke, she runs off the bus and bursts into flame, then explodes.

[edit] 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 [12]
“ 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)[citation needed]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d “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. ^ a b 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. http://web.cgu.edu/faculty/gabler/toxicity%20Addiction%20offprint.pdf. 
  6. ^ Palmiere C, Staub C, La Harpe R, Mangin P (2009). “Ignition of a human body by a modest external source: a case report”. Forensic Sci Int. doi:10.1016/j.forsciint.2009.03.027. PMID 19410396. 
  7. ^ Joe Nickell (Nov-December 1996). “Not-so-spontaneous human combustion“. Skeptical Inquirer. http://www.csicop.org/si/9611/shc.html. 
  8. ^ Heymer, John E (1996): The Entrancing Flame, London, Little, Brown, ISBN 0-316-87694-1
  9. ^ Heymer, op cit, pp. 202-3.
  10. ^ a b Heymer, op cit, pp. 204.
  11. ^ 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
  12. ^ “Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious Universe” (television show), Episode 8: The Burning Question, first broadcast 1994 (UK)

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