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Lucid Lab Podcast: Spontaneous Human Combustion: Fire From Within
In this episode, Kendra delves into the mysterious phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion (SHC)—the bizarre and controversial claim that people can burst into flames without an external ignition source. We explore the history of reported cases, from the chilling accounts of individuals found mysteriously charred to the scientific explanations that attempt to explain this phenomenon. Tune in for a captivating discussion to ignite your curiosity and pose the question on if there really is a scientific explanation for this or if it is something paranormal causing humans to burst into flames.
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Sources: https://www.history.com/news/is-spontaneous-human-combustion-real https://www.livescience.com/42080-spontaneous-human-combustion.html https://www.britannica.com/story/is-spontaneous-human-combustion-real https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2019/01/spontaneous-human-combustion-and-the-enlightenment.html https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/unexplained-phenomena/shc.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/158853.stm
- Duration:
- 52m
- Broadcast on:
- 24 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Hey guys, it's Jessica. - And this is Kendra, and you're listening to - Lucid Lab. - This is Kendra's episode, and she has not yet left, but she's about to. - I know, I feel like we've said that on the last three or four intros. We all are like, get out of here already, girl. We've had to double up. As you can imagine, we're trying to plan ahead so that I can edit this because I have a lot of plane time coming up, 'cause it's a seven hour flight. I wanted to record this, so I had something to keep me occupied, and I don't go crazy on a plane. - It does not take seven hours to edit. It takes much longer. - Yeah, because I probably get through maybe 10 to 15 minutes of good content in an hour. - And I'm less, because I am a Capricorn. - Yeah, she can't help herself. So yes, it is very time consuming, and yet, here we are still doing it a year and a half later because a labor of love, we're not making any money yet. - It's true. - Someday we will. We do like doing this, and we like hanging out. - We do, and we don't want to do our regular jobs. It's just as simple as that, though. - Make us famous. - Come along with us, and keep listening. - Can you make us famous, but not make us famous, 'cause we don't want to be famous? - I want to be able to still go to Target. I want to walk on the beach. That's the good thing about being a podcaster, though, is that you can kind of hide easier than-- - Exactly. - So that's our dream. Thanks for listening to our TED Talk. This will be coming out mid-September, so hopefully, depending on where you live, getting a little bit cooler. - It's been a crazy summer. - Yeah, I'm ready for fall weather. - Me too. - I'm hoping by the time I get back from my trip in mid-September, it's changed completely, and I get to wear sweaters. I always wear sweaters, anyway. - Yeah, but I mean outside without melting. - Oh, no, I still melt. - And you're hiding from the sun, 'cause you're a vampire. I was wearing a sweatshirt the other day, because when you go into the stores, they're so fucking cold. - Exactly. - Especially the grocery store, and you're in there a while, if you're doing your weekly shopping, I'm like, I can't go in here in a tank top, or I'll freeze. - They blast the AC, and that's anywhere, that's restaurants, the movie theater. Everywhere you go, it's a drastic difference from inside to outside. It doesn't need to be that cool, guys. Calm down, save some energy. - Right? - All righty, what do you have for us today, Kendra? I know it's going to be exciting, and a lot of fire. - Speaking of it being really hot, we are talking today about spontaneous human combustion. - We're so stupidly excited about this episode for no reason. - I don't even know how I came across and decided, I should do this. I think I read one example story which I'll share, and I was like, I should do an episode on this. I've never thought about it, really. I mean, it's horrible. Okay, I already obsess because I'm an anxious person on things that can kill me all the time, and then this one, there's no warning, you just combust. - You can't even mentally prepare for something like that. There's no symptoms, I don't think. We'll talk some of it, but it's not like you're just hanging out and you're like, oh, I feel a little strange. Why is the top of my head smoking? - A person just bursts into flames from some kind of chemical reaction within the body, apparently without being ignited by anything external, and it happens quite quickly and they're gone. - I know you're going to give us examples where they all bad people. - No. - Oh. - Unfortunately-- - I mean, it would make sense if they were evil people, and like the devil is just claiming them. - Save that thought because there was discussion back in the olden days, it was just thought that you were some kind of unworthy person. - Okay. - And God had smited you. I mean, if you have nothing else to compare it to, it would make sense. - I'll still explain something like that. - Especially when some of these examples, people witness and you are at a time when science is not strong yet, of course they would attribute it to some kind of higher power, and everything back then was about God and judgment. You will be burned in hell for your sins. Like all of that, it makes sense. - In reality, it's just Jennifer's stomach acids were too strong with something. For several centuries, people have debated whether human beings can actually spontaneously combust. The first accounts of spontaneous human combustion, I will also refer to this sometimes by its acronym 'cause it's easier to say SHC, actually that's not easy to say, SHC, it's kind of a tongue twister. So you might get sick of me saying spontaneous combustion. It's all the S's again, Jessica. - I know. - I'm gonna tongue tie myself. - Anyways, this goes back all the way to the 11th century. And then the phenomenon really gained exposure in the 19th century after Charles Dickens, you know that guy. He used spontaneous combustion to kill off one of his characters. The novel is called Bleak House and that character exploded into fire. And so that really brought it into the consciousness of the more recent generation. And then even for us today, it's appeared in many movies and television shows, including The X Files, I remember that episode guy. I think it was a guy. Maybe I don't remember the episode. - I don't remember it, but I just had a theory about what. - Why this happens to them? What if they were meant to be a superhero? - Part of who they are or whatever was to emit flames and they never came to know this about themselves and it was never used so it finally ate them at the end. They didn't learn how to harness the power. It wasn't exactly men character that had flames. - Isn't that Jennifer Lawrence, or am I forgetting? - Now that I say that, there actually was the Fantastic Four comic books. And I think there was a Fantastic Four movie, but there was a character named Johnny Storm and he was called The Human Torch and that was his superpower. Maybe it's a genetic disposition. Maybe it's some kind of like genetic mutation and some people just burst into flames. Fires don't typically start on their own. When a forest fire happens, for example, firefighters go out there. They don't assume that the flame just ignited itself, rather they're usually looking for what caused the fire. It's a camper or a lightning strike, something like that. But we do know that there are also things that can self-ignite without exposure to flames under the right circumstances, including cold dust can explode or piles of compost can ignite on their own or a pile of oily rags just sitting in a hot storage container so like heat or if like the sun is magnifying through something that can start a fire. But it's a whole different matter when we go into claiming that people can suddenly burst into flames for really no apparent reason. There's no doubt that bodies can burn. We cremate remains all of the time and we know that taken to that level of heat, the human body can be reduced down to ashes in a matter of a couple of hours. But the mystery of human combustion lies in the supposedly strange circumstances under which the victim just burst into flames. There's no obvious source of ignition around the body, no open fires nearby that might have accidentally set them on fire. Furthermore, the victims are killed and not only partially burned, they completely disintegrate into ash. Demons. (laughs) Many claim that the burning often seems to begin in the chest or stomach area and there are many accounts that we will get into that leaves the remains of legs or hands intact after the spontaneous combustion. - You know, yeah, I've seen some of those photos where like their feet are still on the ground or their hands are gripping like a chair and that's all that's left. - Creepy. - It is very creepy. - This is creepy. - And I'm doubling down on demons (laughs) because if someone is in control of you or whatnot, they could probably do that to you. - Maybe. - The other odd thing that goes along with spontaneous human combustion is that many times the furniture that they may have been sitting on or the floors they were standing on and floating in the room, anything like that will remain mysteriously untouched. We know that the human body is composed mostly of water and the only flammable properties of a person are fat tissue and the methane gas that we produce. We know that because guys like to light their farts on fire, right? That's how it all started. That's how we found out. - So because of this, many scientists will dismiss and they say that spontaneous human combustion is not possible and they argue that something around the body, there must have been some kind of undetected source that ignited them such as a match, a cigarette spark, something like that. There are many scientists that do not believe spontaneous human combustion is a thing. - All right. - Good for them, I guess. I'm gonna give you some stories today that I think challenges that. Those who believe in spontaneous human combustion point to the fact that the human body has to reach a temperature of roughly 3,000 degrees in order to be reduced to ashes. So unless it was done by some kind of explosion, which would go along with combustion, it seems impossible that a human could get to 3,000 degrees and nothing else in the room would be touched. So I feel like that's a pretty good argument. And once again, crematoriums take over two to three hours to reduce the body to ashes. And some of these are done almost instantaneously. - And they're specifically in a unit meant for cremating someone to make the heat go to that height. - Really? - And a lot of these people are just sitting in a chair somewhere. - Many of the stories are them in bed, sitting in a chair. There's one in a dance hall. Over the past hundreds of years, there have been more than 200 reports of people burning to a crisp for no apparent reason. The Danish physician and anatomist, Thomas Bartholen, has been credited with pinning the first written account of spontaneous human combustion. In 1654, he wrote that during the reign of Queen Bonas Forza from Poland, she had a knight who was in her court and he drank two glasses of brandy. People witnessed him belching and fire coming out from his mouth and then he erupted into flames. This was a story that was passed down through the ages. There's no real proof, I guess, that it really happened. They didn't have iPhones. (laughs) He also described in his book, A Story of a Poor Woman in Paris who had been a heavy drinker. I guess you would call her an alcoholic. They said that she would drink more than she ate food for about three years. And one night, she was laying on her straw bed to sleep. And the next morning, they found her completely incinerated, reduced to mere ashes and all that was left were a few toes and fingers and a piece of the top of her skull. Interesting, but I feel like a lot of people fit into that category. - To alcoholics or drinking more than they eat. - And you'll see that become a theme back in the day. They will start attributing alcoholism to spontaneous human combustion. In 1725, there was a mysterious death in the northeastern French town of Reims and it attracted considerable attention, both in the medical world and the legal world, because the remains of 63-year-old Jean Lemaire were discovered in the early hours of the morning by her 66-year-old husband, Jean Millette, they were innkeepers. Authorities, when they showed up, automatically suspected that her husband killed her. He had been having an affair with the maid, tail is all this time. (laughs) And he was actually on trial for his wife's murder. He looked guilty to many. And the court was ready to convict him. He claimed his innocence all along. He said he came downstairs and found his wife in a pile of ash. The investigators were like, "That couldn't happen, you burned her." But a surgeon came forward. His name was Claude Le Cat. And he testified on behalf of Jean. He asserted that Madame Lemaire was likely the victim of spontaneous human combustion. He linked the phenomenon to two factors in particular. He spoke to her excessive alcohol consumption and sedentary lifestyle. He proposed to everyone in the court that women were on the whole more predisposed to spontaneous human combustion because they were less active than men. Oh. So he was also a sexist. (laughs) Yeah. He was at the time writing about his growing concern with how much alcohol society was consuming. So he kind of had a ulterior motive there as well. But he gave enough of a convincing argument that Jean actually did not go to jail for his wife's murder. Wow. Too bad it wasn't as convincing as it needed to be 'cause there would be less alcoholics today. Maybe. If they knew I might burst into flames, it might stop people from going down that route. I think about downtown Denver and many cities, unfortunately in America, where we have alcoholics and drug addicts that are living on the street. This isn't the answer. We know this. If that was the truth, we would have people blowing up everywhere. Exactly. I'm just imagining these beams coming down from space and it's like phew. That will actually be a theory, don't you worry. There will be UFOs because in every paranormal story that we tell on this podcast, UFOs have to show up. So while people were dying from spontaneous combustion, most of it was affecting the lower class and what society deemed as just alcoholics. But then one of the higher court died in a mysterious way. And that was the death of the Countess DeBondie of Susana, Italy sometime around April of 1731. And that would be the primary event that would lead to more interest in strange deaths occurring by fire. The scene of her death was inspected by many people, including Giuseppe Biaccini of Verona, Italy. And Biaccini would publish a book regarding his examinations of the room and the remains and his thoughts on what had happened. The Countess's remains were found on the floor of her room halfway between her bed and the window. And it consisted of a pile of ashes to completely undamaged lower leg sections. And then once again, a section of her skull lying on the ground between the two legs. Can you imagine like walking and then seeing? Like, yeah, I think about that. I'm like, you walk in and you just see two legs. - I know. - And then just ash. To be in Giuseppe, there was only one explanation for this. The Countess had been caught completely off guard by a sudden combustion within herself while walking from the bed to the window. It had likely started somewhere in her lower abdomen and burned so fiercely that her body was reduced to ashes as she was still standing. And that's when her remaining skull fell straight down between her legs. - That's imagining it happening instantaneously. That's what he's saying. He's like the only explanation for this. Her legs are still standing there. She had to have been zapped by something. - An alien force or a demon. - He speculated that the initial ignition was somehow caused by what he called the effuvia, which is just gases and wastes within the stomach, those ignited. He speculated perhaps they were assisted by vapors from a nearby bathtub. She had been using an alcohol base like bath salt. But she had taken that bath the night before. - Yeah. - So I don't know if it was still floating in the air. They did know that she had not been feeling well and she had retired to her room early. So I guess maybe you do know what's coming on. She was known to be completely sober at the time. So this kind of sent people into a tailspin because they had been thinking that it was caused by alcohol, like alcoholics, the Countess, she didn't fit that picture. She didn't drink excessively. She wasn't completely idle like the others had said, you know, if you're just sitting around drinking and doing nothing. She was a woman. So I guess she fit one of the three categories. - Which? - She also wasn't part of the lower classes. Remember what I said before? They thought this was a disease that was only affecting the lower common folk. - Okay. - Banchini put forward five criteria that he attributed to happening when it is a case of spontaneous human combustion. And these would last for nearly 200 years as kind of like how you would say that a death was truly by spontaneous combustion. So he said, number one, a flame from any candle lamp or cooking fire could not possibly consume a human body to the extent that is seen in the case, the reduction of the bones to complete ashes. Number two, under normal circumstances, other objects in the area of the body should have also caught fire, but the flames did not. They unnaturally confined themselves to just the human victim. Number three, the most commonality in these cases is that the torsos are completely destroyed, but the outer limbs are not. - Okay. - Number four, he felt like the reason for that is the fire would start within the torso area of the body and then it would run out of fuel before it got to the extremities and that's why they wouldn't burn up. And number five, he said the fires must occur and spread extremely fast. For the victims never seem to have resisted it. So like we just talked about, if somebody caught fire from a candle, they're going to run around the room. They're going to scream. We don't ever hear that in any of these stories. We go back to the example of the innkeeper and his wife. He was in the house with her. She never screamed or anything. He just came down and found her as a pile of ash. Same thing, you have a countess, you know that she has handmaidens and many servants in her house and nobody heard her scream or anything. She was just bound as a pile of ash. That's crazy. It's wild to think about. There were many that tried to attribute the countess's death to an unforeseen lightning strike. I saw that when I was doing the investigation into this through the house. She was walking towards the window so they're like maybe some lightning came in and zapped her but there's no evidence of that happening. Keep folk get struck by lightning. I know more commonly than spontaneous human combustion and people survive lightning strikes or if they die, it's usually more of stopping your heart or something electrical. Not disintegrating you to ashes, instantaneously. So this work that Bianchini did is really what propelled the idea of spontaneous human combustion. 14 years after he wrote this, it was translated to English and presented in London in a magazine and that's when it started spreading to other parts of the world. And a man named Paul Raleigh took it over and he wrote his own pamphlet with that he described to other cases that he knew of. According to Raleigh, there was a story that happened in Southampton, England in 1613 and that was of a man named John Hichel. He came home after working one day. The family went to bed and it was a small house so they all slept in the same rooms together but in separate beds. The mother-in-law that was living with them is the one that recalled the story and she said she woke up in the middle of the night to what she called lightning that came on fiercely out of nowhere. And she cried out looking for anybody else if they had seen it and got no response. And when she went over, she found her daughter completely burned to death. And then she found the husband John still burning and she dragged him out of the bed to try and save him. He was on fire with no visible flame and he was reduced to ashes and just a few bits of bone in the middle of the street. So two people. Yeah, this one's an interesting one. One of them caught on fire first, maybe the wife because she was already dead. This is not the only case where it was multiple people. There was a case from back in like the 1100s as well where they said several nights in an army caught on fire. So this seems like judgment because even if they were laying in bed with each other, we've talked about how like the surrounding things don't catch on fire, it's just the people. But this one did. So their bed didn't catch on fire. The floor didn't catch on fire. Was it just the people? It was just the people. That's what I'm saying. This seems like what did they do? Judgment. The other case that Raleigh presented in his pamphlet was of a woman named Grace Pet who lived in Ipswich, England. And in 1744, she was 60 years old. She was a known alcoholic. She was found on the floor by her daughter. She was completely consumed by a fire but there was no flames coming from her body. She had just disintegrated. Like, I guess like a firewood log would do. Nearby clothing was completely undamaged. What about the type of alcohol? From what I saw, like the guy who we talked about that was belching, had been drinking bourbon. If I remember right, there's another story that maybe comes up in a minute that was whiskey. Most of it that I see is whiskey. Okay. I don't drink a lot of whiskey. Me either. It makes me really weird. So after Raleigh published all of this in English, it really caught on again and became a newfound interest and many physicians and scholars of the time began to search in the England, Scotland, Ireland areas for more cases of this unusual cause of death. And this is really when they started recording them. And I did come across a website when I was researching that had every known case out there and you could look through each of them. They're all very, very similar with just reducing ashes and a few digits being left, they're bizarre. So with all of this, of course, the scientists have to start theorizing what happened. And the new theory that started to form to explain these bizarre deaths was that these people didn't have normal human bodies because a normal human body would be incapable of being burned to the extent of what these people had happened. And so they decided that the people had made themselves more flammable than normal. What would make you more flammable than normal? The culprit was alcoholism again. They said this would only happen to someone who drank an abnormally large amount of alcohol for an abnormally long amount of time. It was believed that their body's tissues would become more and more saturated with the flammable fluids, which in turn would make them susceptible to being burned and even their bones would become more capable of bursting into flames. Okay. They called this theory the preternatural combustibility and that became the new thing in the 1800s. They began spreading propaganda about the dangers of alcohol and convincing people that they should alter their habits. It's one way to get people to stop drinking. It didn't last. One of the men that came forward with this new theory, his last name is Lair. I didn't write down his full name, but he came up with what he said were the criteria because they all have to come up with their own thing. And he said, number one, all victims had immoderate uses of spiritist liquors. Number two, it only happens to women. Oh, okay. Which most of the stories I've told have been women. Interestingly enough, it does happen more to women. So maybe there's something with the women physiology. All of them were far advanced in age. And this is something that will come, as we start talking about modern cases too, most people who spontaneously combust are over the age of 60. Interesting. And then it's the same things we've heard before. Just the same things that are found are the bodies reduced to ashes, limbs, and digits left behind. There was no obvious source of outside flame. Something else that they noted is that there would be a very strong pungent smell in the room, wherever the combustion happened. And we'll hear in some more modern cases that sometimes there's even like a greasy film left on the walls. - Yeah. - Which is probably just leftover body. Before I jump into modern cases, I wanna tell one more story that happened on Christmas Eve in 1885. This one actually happened in America, in the small farming town of Seneca, Illinois, to a woman once again named Matilda Rooney. She was alone in her kitchen. She had been relaxing and drinking whiskey that evening with her husband. She seemed fine. She went to bed with her husband. And at some point in the middle of the night, maybe she did wake up with heartburn or something. She went down to perhaps get a cup of tea or water. And it was while in the kitchen that she combusted or something happened. And she was quickly incinerated her entire body, except for her feet. - Whoa. - This one also took out her husband, Patrick. He was upstairs sleeping. And he was found to have suffocated from the fumes, released from her body in the other room of the house. - Oh. - It left the investigators baffled when they showed up. There was no source of ignition that could be found anywhere in the house for the blaze. The flames had been intense enough to reduce Matilda to complete ashes, but nothing had touched anything else in the rest of the room. So they concluded that the fire must have started inside of her body and stayed confined to her body. But this is an interesting story because her husband suffocated somehow. I guess because fire does rob oxygen from the room? - Well, yeah, you can die of smoke inhalation. Back in the 1800s, I don't know how well-equipped they were to see exactly what he died from. - And this is a house in the 1800s of farmhouse. It's probably not that large, so. - No, he was probably right next door. - Exactly. So over the next hundreds of years, create a natural combustibility was a lot. It was called for the strange fire death. It was accepted and argued for as the theory of what was going on and it was all attributed to alcohol. - Interesting. - And that takes us into the 20th century and where we are today in the 1900s. There was a rise of interest in spiritualism. We've talked about that on many other episodes and they would publish a wide range of magazines that would present stories of like ghosts and hauntings. They were looking for more ideas and stories to sell. In many of these publications, stories started popping up about people spontaneously combusting. And it was presented in a different way because what had happened is after all of this, I guess, hype around it and then retrieving it to alcohol. By the 20th century, other things had been happening and it wasn't really widely discussed out there. And in fact, like if you were a doctor or a scholar that said you were going to look in the spontaneous combustion, it was almost something that was seen as ridiculous and you could be like shunned from the community because you were seen as kind of like a quack. Science is becoming more refined and they're like, "No, bodies don't just blow up, stop talking about it." These cases still were occurring, but doctors didn't want to talk about them, but there was all these investigators, firemen, policemen that were showing up and finding these bodies. And so what happened is these stories started going to these publications that were used to, you know, they were kind of like the national inquirer of the time. And so they started sending out these stories about people just blowing up and it was seen as like a conspiracy theory. And who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory? Because they would write in these stories, the medical community doesn't want you to know that you might just burst into flames and they're afraid they don't want the public to know because then all of us will be, you know, freaked out and blah, blah, blah. So it kind of like brought this whole like excitement around spontaneous human combustion. People felt like if they had a story that they were uncovering something and like really putting it to the powers that be that they knew what was really up. - Yeah. - And this led to more discussion and I'm surprised it didn't come up in the past, but it really started early 1920s to 1950s that perhaps the reason it was covered up is because there was a supernatural explanation. - Demons. (laughs) - And all of this came together in 1932 with the publication of a book by Charles Fort called Wild Talents. And it featured a variety of strange stories, mostly from these magazines and he found stories from all over the world, international newspapers. And I could go through, I have a few more examples here, but it's basically the same stories. They're found burned to death, usually in their bed or in a chair and nothing else around them. And there's really no other way to explain it. And the audience for these publications was relatively small at first, but it began to grow because of the paranormal thoughts behind it. And this is when you also saw the rise of UFOs. - Yeah. - So this like takes us into World War II. They were starting to question maybe they're tied together. But it stayed kind of in the fringes of like the people out there who thought a little differently, ex-filesish, whatever. And it wasn't really taken seriously until there was a case. And this is the most famous case and it's probably what drew me into doing this episode in the first place. And this happened in 1951. And this was a time when newspapers had really started going like more national, like you didn't just have the local news, you had your national news and TV, I think was in 1950s. Maybe anyways, it spread the story around and this is when it got into the mainstream consciousness that spontaneous combustion could actually happen. And that is the story of a 67 year old woman named Mary Reeser. She was from St. Petersburg, Florida. - Not a Mary. Marys are great. - It was the morning of July 2nd, 1951. The landlady who lived there, it was like one of those big houses that had like separate rooms. And the landlady had seen her the night before when her son was there visiting and then said good night to her. And the next morning someone knocked on the door and they had something from the postman for Mary Reeser. So the landlady was going to take it to Mary and give it to her and she went to knock on the door and no one answered in Mary's apartment. And then when she went to open the door, the handle was so hot, she was taken aback. - That's interesting. - It is. At that time she went and found a couple of men nearby and said I need some help. Nobody's answering in this apartment and the door is hot. And so they came and helped break into the apartment. They found one foot still wearing a slipper and what looked like a charred and shrunken complete skull. No other body parts were present. And these gruesome remains sat in a puddle of grease on the floor where Mary's easy chair recliner used to be. The rest of the apartment had very little evidence of fire. When the authorities showed up, the fire men, the detectives, the coroners and even an anthropologist who worked with the FBI began studying this case. They were all quoted as stating that they were baffled. Whatever happened to find reality. There was no scientific plausibility for her death. They were actually on record saying this, which is why it's spread quite quickly because you had very well known and trusted authorities saying the only thing that makes sense is spontaneous combustion. So this is when all of the theories started coming out because it became very well known that there was this woman who died and they were on record saying, we don't know what the fuck happened here. We think it was human combustion. And there was a man that stepped forward and his name was Michael Harrison. And this is the 70s. And he came out with a lot of ideas and they were all of the paranormal realm. One of his theories was he believed there was a connection between spontaneous human combustion and telepathy. He thought that people with unusually strong magnetic fields might have a connection. Strong, emotional states, demons. He kind of started a whole craze on other ideas and that's when we see people coming forward. And one of the theories was that perhaps there's electrical fields that exist within the human body and they just short circuit somehow. And that leads to spontaneous combustion. Or maybe it's caused by a poor diet when you eat bad food combined with maybe alcohol and they all combine in the right little mixture in your stomach and digestive system that fuels a fire. That's a possibility. They pointed to this saying that you saw more reports happening in areas where the diet was not as healthy. And they mentioned that if you look in Asia where their diet was more rice and fish, there were very few stories coming out of war, spontaneous human combustion. So that's why that theory started. The truth of the matter is they had no idea. And I don't think we still have any idea. No, it's aliens or demons. That is still my only answer. One of the other ones that came out is something called ley lines. So they said this one person, Larry Arnold, put out a book in 1995 saying that the mysterious fires of spontaneous human combustion were caused by what he called ley lines and they're across certain parts of the earth. So it's something with this ancient power that is flowing along these ley lines within the earth. And he mapped out where all the spontaneous human combustion cases had happened and said it was something from the earth bringing forth this energy that was causing people to burst into flames. But only one person sitting on a chair. Yeah. And then we get to UFOs because, like I said before, we can't have anything paranormal without UFOs. And I trust in their proficiency in aiming. And why are they choosing old ladies who are just sitting in their recliner? Because they're being kind. They're choosing someone at the end of their life and they need to learn something. And they're like, does this beam work? Choose someone old. Maybe. And then one of the craziest stories that went out in 1983 was that the Shroud of Turin. I don't know if you're familiar with that. It supposedly has the image of Jesus. There was a theory out there that it was probably created because Jesus Christ himself spontaneously combusted. I think that would be in the Bible. I think so. Other than Mary Reeser, one of the most famous cases that is quoted when you go out there looking for spontaneous combustion. And this one is another one they cannot explain. And it happened in 2010, which wasn't that long ago. And it involved a man for the first time. Not really, not really for the first time, but usually it's women. So 76 year old Michael Faraday of Galway, Ireland. He was found dead in his living room. His body was thoroughly burned with his head lying beside his open fireplace. The ceiling space immediately above his body showed burn marks and so did the floor beneath it. Yet nothing else in Michael's home was touched. Interesting. News of his tragic death probably wouldn't have spread beyond the local newspapers if the coroner had not pointed to spontaneous human combustion as the cause of death. I just raised my hand like a child like, hold on. And I did, I was just like, I'm not ready yet. I have a new theory. Okay. I mean, think about all the witchy shows, the people who died in spontaneous combustion incidents. It's one of a certain type of person or entity. And these witches around the world did find them and the only way to kill those types of beings is in this way. And they can't announce it to the world because technically they're a secret society. And that's what's happening. That's very possible. They find out who a person is and that's literally the only way to banish them from this life or whatever. And that's why it's always in the same way, but they can't explain it to the average day folk because they're not allowed to be known in real life. I take back demons and aliens. And now I'm just witches, which secret society. These are all secret demons. They look like you're nice, like next door neighbor lady, but she's actually like an evil demon. That's what I'm saying, spawn. They're ridding this human world of these infestations. You're welcome. We have solved spontaneous human combustion. Yes, we have. And if you are the people who are doing it, come talk to me, you can recruit me. I need more money. I want to be part of it. Just don't make me explode. I don't think I want to die this way, but if it's a real bad person, I'll help. Yeah, I'm sure it's just like abracadabra poof. (laughing) Friend your own fire. So as much as I want to believe that it's caused by witches and UFOs and demons and the smiting of gods, we have to look at the scientific side too. And there were some experiments done to try and understand why or how humans might spontaneously combust. A number of experiments were performed concerning the idea of alcohol, making a person more flammable. They did not find any connection. Flesh that had been soaked for a long time in alcohol burns no better than flesh that had just been doused or had no alcohol at all. They said, in fact, what would happen is that if you tried to burn flesh that was covered in alcohol, the fire would just burn the alcohol off first, and then the flame would just die out when it got to pasta alcohol, which makes sense. Exactly. Like with Esti. Caronza, right? She attempted to douse him in schnapps. It didn't work. Right, because it just burns off. Or I think about even when you're trying to do a fire, the same thing can happen with, I can't think of the stuff right now that you pour on a fire, like just the fire starter you have to keep it going. It doesn't go forever. Also, it never combusted. They didn't see it explode or anything that would explain how a body got to ashes in the amount of time that it did. So they kind of ruled that out. Then they moved on to the thought that it was caused by methane, which was the other flammable substance in our body that can build up from a lot of gas in the intestines and stomach area. And the thought was that it would build up in the intestines and then be ignited by other proteins in the body that would act as catalysts to speed up this weird chemical reaction leading to combustion. But they once again did not find any connection there. And it also was brought up that if that is truly a cause of spontaneous combustion, why don't we see it happening in cows because cows actually produce quite a bit of methane. We also, when I get to the skeptical part of it, we don't see animals spontaneously combusting. - No. - It's really just in humans. So, witches and demons. (laughs) One of the other theories was that the fire begins because of static electricity building up inside of the body from an external geomagnetic force that kind of goes along with the ley lines I was talking about earlier. But again, to just one person. - Well, they said that it could have been ascribed to something that they called a pryoton, which is a subatomic particle. And they were saying that it could interact with cells and the static electricity within the body to create like this little mini explosion. But scientists have tried to recreate this or see how it could even happen. And as of August, 2018, they hadn't found a way to recreate or prove that that would even be a viable theory. So, I think that kind of rules it out. But the most possible explanation, and this is one that started back in the 1800s. They called it the candle effect back then. And now it is called the wick effect. And this one kind of makes sense. And there have been some good experiments done on this. So the thought behind this is that the human body can act much like an inside-out candle. So a candle is composed of a wick on the inside, surrounded by a wax made of flammable fatty acids on the outside. The wax ignites the wick and keeps it burning. That's how a candle works. In the human body, the body fat acts as the flammable substance and then the victim's clothing or hair would act as the wick. So the thought is that as the fat melts from the heat, it soaks into the clothing and acts as a wax-like substance that keeps the wick burning slowly and allows it to build up to the temperatures that would reduce a body to ashes. But not instantaneously true. But scientists say the wick effect would explain why victims' bodies would be destroyed, but the surrounding areas would not, just like a candle. - But some of these have been in chairs. - I know. - That are not destroyed. - Well, Mary Research Chair was destroyed. - Okay. - But others are not. Others weren't laying on their bed and they weren't destroyed. And if you had a candle laying on a bed and trying to think, it probably would catch on fire. - I mean, instantaneously, it's all cloth and feathers. But if it is the candle effect, once the fat of the body is gone, then there's not something for it to keep spreading, maybe. - No, but all of that would burn instantaneously with the body. - Yes, you're right. So they did an experiment and this was actually televised on the BBC in 1998 and they did it with a pig. - Oh. - It was a, a pig corpse. So the pig had already passed away. - No, they killed the pig for that. Let's make that clear. - It's better than them like taking a pig and lighting it on fire while it's alive. - Yeah. - That would be even more inhumane. So they wrapped a pig in a blanket. They soaked the blanket in petrol and then lit it on fire. - Okay. - Over a four hour period, the fat from the pig's body was clearly wicking up on the charred remains of the blanket. And as the burn proceeded, the bones of the pig began to become exposed as the fat melted away. After the four and a half hours, the body of the pig was reduced to just two pieces of the thorax part of the pig. And they noted that throughout the process and experiment, while the pig was burning like a candle, the temperature in the room stayed low enough that people were able to enter and leave as they please and even film right there next to the pig's body while it was burning. So they felt like that gave proof that this would be a realistic scenario on why someone could die and become basically ashes over a long enough period that it would look like they spontaneously combusted. But in fact, perhaps there was something in the room that caught them on fire like they're clothing or their hair and then they became a big candle. This actually came up in the Mary research story that I mentioned earlier in Florida. The corner and the firemen all said that they believed that she had died because she had fallen asleep with a cigarette in her hand. And the cigarette had caught something on fire and then she just burned because she was a larger woman and she had quite a bit of fat in her body. They did also point back to most stories of spontaneous combustion, did involve people who were on the heavier side. So they had more body fat to burn. So it does make some sense if you want to go into the scientific side of it. - Yeah, get it. - But some people point to this experiment with the pig and say that it doesn't really prove anything and that they don't believe that's actually how a human body would burn. They said that the way that they prepared the pig's carcass was different than how it would happen in the wild with a human body. They pointed to the fact that they used a flammable substance like petrol to start the fire in the first place. So that doesn't really prove anything. Because in most of the spontaneous combustion deaths, there was no proof of anything flammable to have started the wick effect to begin with. So you have Mary research, even if she had a cigarette that she fell asleep with, she didn't have like an ignition source on her body for it to like go up in flames quickly like it did with the pig carcass, which makes sense. They also brought up that on the televised experiment with the pig that the pig burned through the floor that it was sitting on, which was also different than what's happening in most of the spontaneous combustion cases. They're not burning through the floor. They might burn through like one thing that they were on, but most of the room would be untouched and that was not the case in the experiment. And then they also brought up that it took four and a half hours with the petrol added for the pig carcass to completely become ashes. And in several of the instances with human combustion, the victims became ashes instantaneously or within one to two hours at most. So while it is a good in theory, they're like, this just doesn't explain everything that's happening in the spontaneous combustion cases. This is all I could find. This is a tricky thing to research. There's not a lot out there. And many people either side with paranormal reasoning. So aliens, electromagnetic lay lines, pyrokinesis, telepathy, somebody's like looking at you and they hate you and they want you to explode into flames. I think if that was the case, there would be more parents going up in flames because teenagers would like (laughs) wish that on their parents. It is interesting that it happens more commonly among women and that it's in the older subset of our society. So 60 years plus, it's like a culmination of something building up within the body. If it is something that's like physiological, they didn't meet their life's goals. They have been eliminated. Maybe it's part of the matrix. I think so. So one thing I wanna go back to with Mary Reeser, I mentioned that her whole skull was found. But what was really interesting about the skull that they found is that it had shrunk. So think about like the little head shrinker guys. It had been reduced to the size of a teacup. Like beetle juice? Exactly what I think of. What's interesting about this is that heads don't shrink when they're exposed to heat. Usually they expand and in extreme temperatures, they should explode. So the amount of temperature that was able to reduce her body to ashes doesn't match with what happened to her skull. So this is a big mystery. And I think that's why Mary Reeser is probably the most famous case of this. People who believe in the supernatural side of spontaneous human combustion use the fact of her shrunken skull as proof that this is coming from things outside of scientific explanation. Interestingly enough, the skull that is in question is no longer available to be studied and no scientific examinations have been done on it. They claim that it was sent to the FBI at some point to be examined, but at this point it has been buried along with the one foot that they found. So a lot of people who believe in the supernatural cover-up conspiracy, whatever you want to say about combustion, believe that's more evidence that it's a government cover-up of some kind. So that's another theory that we haven't discussed. Is there's like some government weapon that they're testing on older individuals within the world? - But why? - But why, Kendra, that doesn't make sense to me. - I'm struggling to come up with a reason behind this and I'm not the only one because we don't have any experts that have been able to definitively say yes or no to the existence of spontaneous human combustion. Most scientists will come out as skeptics and I saw a lot of skeptical things out there. They're just saying this couldn't happen. I'm sure there's a rational explanation. They're probably all smokers who died falling asleep with a lit cigarette or they mentioned that perhaps they were in a room where there was some unknown source. Like I even saw one, they were like stretching so far that they said like a little ember from a nearby fireplace just like blew into the window and caught this person on fire. Like I think if you look at all of this, there's no real explanation for it and they can't recreate it in the lab. So to me that points to there's something paranormal going on here. - Absolutely. - And we don't understand everything about our bodies either. We don't understand what most of our brain does. So these people come in at us and saying, no, this doesn't exist. This is pseudoscience and people are just making this up. There's seven billion people in the world and it doesn't happen that often. There's only 200 cases on record that we know of. It has never been seen filmed or videotaped or on a surveillance camera. So we've never seen it happen. It's all just been like witnesses second-hand accounts. So maybe one day somebody will catch it now that we have phones everywhere and surveillance cameras everywhere. We'll see if in the next 20 years or something we catch it on film. But until then there are a lot of people out there saying that it doesn't exist. There was one other medical condition brought up that could explain it. I think this is a far stretch, but I'll just put it out there for you guys who are skeptical. There's a medical condition called Stevens-Johnson syndrome that in extreme cases may be mistaken for a case of what they call an aborted spontaneous combustion. It's a skin disease which can be triggered by a toxic reaction to medications and it can cause the appearance of severe burns and blisters all over the body and can sometimes lead to death. But they don't turn into ash with just feet and arms hanging out. So I don't know, that's a stretch. Big stretch. So what I can say after researching this is that I don't know what the fuck's going on, but we know that there are people literally turning to ash and leaving behind just random body pieces and their poor poor family members are walking in to find that. People burn in house fires, people burn in cars. They don't become piles of ash in that instance when they get really, really hot with water known fire sources. So something's going on. And maybe we're all walking around with the possibility that we could explode. Kendra, I don't feel bad. If you explode right now about to explode. I know this is a little bit different than other episodes we've done, but it was something that I was intrigued by and wanted to share what I could find out there about spontaneous combustion. So just know, like I said, 10 ways to die or whatever. Add this one. Now we got 11 ways to die, not a way I'd want to go, or maybe it is. It happened really quick if you just blow up. It happens instantaneously. Sure, I'm good. You don't know. You're just like poof, you're dead, and then you're reincarnated into something different. So the only way I want to go is instantaneously. Anyways, thanks for listening. We are on all the social media. You can find us on TikTok, Facebook. YouTube, and Instagram, all @lucidlabpodcast1word. Send in your lab reports to lucidlabpodcast@gmail.com. We might pick yours, so get to writing. Send that email, send that snail mail, whatever. Thank you for listening. I hope none of you spontaneously combust. We won't know if you do. And in the meantime, stay lucid, watch your grandma. Don't let her drink too much whiskey. I'll watch Jessica tonight, she might combust. Stay lucid, we love you. Bye. Goodbye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]