03 Track 3

Unit 6

It’s a mystery

Chapter 2

Is “Spontaneous Human Combustion” Possible?

Page 101

Is “Spontaneous Human Combustion” Possible?

It happens something like this. Someone finds a badly burnt body in a poorly ventilated room. The body is sitting in a chair or lying on a bed or the floor.

The upper body of the victim is a heap of ashes, but one or more mostly undamaged hands or feet may be visible as well.

A layer of blackened grease covers the ceiling and walls above the victim’s head, but fire damage in the room is limited to a small area right around and above the body objects only a meter away remain untouched by the blaze police investigators find no obvious source or cause for the fire.

This scene describes a typical case of spontaneous human combustion (SHC), in which a human body is supposedly able to burst into flames and to burn to almost nothing entirely on its own.

In most SHC cases, there are no witnesses to see how the person caught fire. In rare cases, the observer, who is often a friend or family member, tries to put out the fire.

Occasionally, the victim survives. Again, there is no clear outside cause − the blaze appears to start from within the victim’s own body.

This phenomenon is actually nothing new. A 1763 book by Frenchman Jonas Dupont with the title De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis describes in detail a number of cases of SHC.

A century later, Charles Dickens used SHC to kill off one of the characters in his novel Bleak House. A number of more recent unexplained deaths have helped to keep the theory of SHC alive.

One of the latest cases was of Michael Flaherty, a 76-year-old man who was found burned to death in his home in Galway, Ireland, on 22 December 2010.

Police arrived to find mostly ashes, with his head near an empty fireplace. The room was undamaged by the fire. After a thorough investigation, the coroner recorded Mr. Flaherty’s death as a case of “spontaneous human combustion”.

People have tried to explain these mysterious deaths in various ways. Some have said that SHC can be set off by a build-up of electricity or gases within the body.

The most reasonable explanation seems to be the “wick” or “candle” theory. This says that, under certain circumstances, the human body can function as sort of an inside-out candle.

That is, the fabric in a person’s clothing acts like the wick and the fat in a person’s body like the wax in the candle. A spark from a nearby source could set off a small fire in the burning clothes would cause a person’s body fat to melt, adding fuel to the fire.

In a poorly ventilated room, the body can burn for hours and cause the kind of damage seen in many of the suppose it SHC cases.

In this scenario, the combustion is not “spontaneous” at all and is always caused by some external fire source.

In a recent experiment, the criminologist Dr. John de Haan put the wick theory to the test.

De Haan wrapped a dead pig (chosen because the body fat of a pig is similar to that of a human) in a blanket, poured gasoline over it, set it on fire and let it burn in a badly ventilated room.

After burning for several hours, the body of the pig was reduced to ashes, much like the bodies of many supposed it SHC victims.

De Haan’s experiment did not persuade everyone that the wick theory explains SHC. Some believe there are still too many unanswered questions and many of the cases.

What about the situations where no external source of fire was found or where victims have burst into flame in front of witnesses?

Until scientists come up with a theory that explains all of the circumstances, many will likely continue to believe in the possibility of spontaneous human combustion.