“In July of 1951, authorities found the body of 67-year-old Mary Reeser in her St. Petersburg apartment. Or more accurately, the pile of mostly ash that once was Mary Reeser’s body (part of her lower leg and some of her spine remained). Apparently, her body had been almost entirely cremated, which is mind-boggling when you consider that cremation requires three hours of burning in a 3,000-degree fire. Even more bizarre—only Reeser’s body had burned: The rest of her apartment was intact, even a pile of newspapers beside her body.”
The reader has two choices in taking in the story above, the
Reeser case, which is probably the most well-known tale of spontaneous human
combustion. One option is to believe that Mary Reeser suddenly exploded in a
ball of flames for no reason. The other option is to believe that Mary Reeser
accidentally set herself on fire with a cigarette.
First a little more on the Reeser case.
Just before 9 P.M., on July 1, 1951, Mary Hardy Reeser, a widow,
had walked her son, Dr. Richard Reeser Jr., to the door. He had dropped by a
for a visit. After he left, Mary dressed in her nightgown and took two sleeping
pills. She opened two windows in the apartment and sat in her overstuffed easy
chair and lit her last cigarette of the night.
Several hours later, a neighbor smelled fire and phoned the
police. Firefighters arrived quickly and found virtually nothing left of Mrs.
Reeser, most of her was reduced to a pile of black ashes. Her backbone was more
or less untouched and her left foot still had on a black silk slipper. Her
skull, reports say, had “shrunken to the size of a cup.”
St. Petersburg Police Chief J.R. Reichart requested help from
the FBI in solving the case. The bureau’s technicians spent three weeks
examining Reeser’s case. It was only able to determine that there was no
evidence that suggested lightning had struck Reeser or the building. All of the
fuses in the apartment were still intact. And investigators hadn’t been able to
detect substances that could have started the blaze. The FBI also ruled out
spontaneous combustion but did suggest that the overweight Mrs. Reeser (She
stood five feet and weighed about 170 pounds) fat could have fed a fire that
smoldered throughout the evening, allowing hot air and smoke to rise to the top
of the room.
Although there are several hundred unconfirmed reports of people
spontaneously combusting, there has never been a proven case of spontaneous
human combustion. There are, however, countless millions of cases of people
accidentally setting themselves on fire.
Benjamin Radford, science writer and deputy editor of the
science magazine, Skeptical Inquirer, casts doubt on the
plausibility of spontaneous human combustion, "If SHC is a real phenomenon
(and not the result of an elderly or infirm person being too close to a flame
source), why doesn't it happen more often? There are 5 billion people in the
world and yet we don't see reports of people bursting into flame while walking
down the street, attending football games, or sipping a coffee at a local
Starbucks."
The phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, if it exists at
all, can be attributed to the wick effect, whereby an external source of fire
ignites nearby flammable materials and human fat or other sources.
In order for anything to combust, three things are required:
Very high heat
A source of fuel (Mrs. Reeser’s nightgown was made of rayon
acetate and could have caught fire from a cigarette ash.)
An oxidizing agent (Generally the oxygen in the air.)
One of the problems with the concept of spontaneous human
combustion is that the human body is largely composed of water, making it very
difficult to burn. However, the fat in a human body will burn and when it does
burn it could…..I stress the word could…..act as fuel once the fire from fat
starts. As the fat melts the body burns from the inside out, leaving the
surroundings intact. The victim's hair or clothing might act like a candle wick
— known as the wick effect. A BBC TV show "Q.E.D" performed a similar
experiment in 1998 with a pig body wrapped in a blanket and showed that the
body burned for several hours without igniting its surroundings.
A 1928 study of supposed of spontaneous human combustion found
some commonalities among recorded cases included the following characteristics:
The victims are chronic alcoholics. (Mrs. Reeser had ingested
sleeping pills)
They are usually elderly females (Mrs. Reeser was 67 years old)
The body has not burned spontaneously, but some lighted
substance has come into contact with it; (She was a smoker)
The hands and feet usually fall off (As was the case in the
Reeser fire)
The fire has caused very little damage to combustible things in
contact with the body;
The combustion of the body has left a residue of greasy and
fetid ashes and a strong offensive odor.
A second study completed in the 1950s found that the burned
bodies were in close proximity to plausible sources for the ignition: candles,
lamps, fireplaces, and the sources were often omitted from published accounts
of these incidents. The investigations also found that there was a correlation
between alleged SHC deaths and the victim's intoxication which could have
caused them to be unable to respond properly to an accident. The reason the
legs and feet didn’t burn is that they usually weren’t covered in clothing. The
study also found that in cases where the destruction was extensive, additional
fuel sources were involved, (chair stuffing, floor coverings, etc.) Nearby
objects often remained undamaged because fire tends to burn upward.
A 2002 study by Angi M. Christensen of the University of
Tennessee cremated both healthy and osteoporotic samples of human bone (Meaning
porous bone where a disease might reduce the density and quality of a bone.
This sort of thing is common in the elderly.) and compared the resulting color
changes and fragmentation. The study found that osteoporotic bone samples
"consistently displayed more discoloration and a greater degree of
fragmentation than healthy ones." The same study found that when human
tissue is burned, the resulting flame produces a small amount of heat,
indicating that fire is unlikely to spread from burning tissue.
Almost every case of supposed spontaneous human combustion that
has been examined involves persons with low mobility due to advanced age or
obesity, along with poor health.
In the Reeser case, Mrs. Reeser took sleeping pills and was also
a smoker. Cigarettes are most often the cause of the source of fire in one in
every four fire deaths in the United States. A common theory was that she was
smoking a cigarette after taking sleeping pills, and then fell asleep while still
holding the burning cigarette, which could have ignited her gown, ultimately
leading to her death.
“Mary was a great smoker,” Ernestine Reeser, Mary Reeser’s
daughter-in-law, told the St. Petersburg Times in 1991. “The cigarette dropped
to her lap. Her fat was the fuel that kept her burning. The floor was cement,
and the chair was by itself. There was nothing around her to burn.”
There are still unanswered questions. For one thing, instead of
shrinking, Reeser’s skull should have exploded, but it didn’t. Also, a near
cremation of the body would have required several thousand degrees over the
course of several hours.
It only fair to mention that there is one theory is that a
condition called ketosis, the human body produces small amounts of the
flammable substance acetone (a component of nail polish remover) A person who
is ill may produce enough acetone that a tiny spark, say from static
electricity — could cause the person to catch fire and burn. Yet another
theory, this one a little further out, is that methane built up in the
intestines might somehow ignite.