Further reading for Spontaneous Human Combustion
Mysteries of Mind Space and Time
The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort
Spontaneous Human Combustion is the phenomenon of living people suddenly, and without an obvious source of ignition, suddenly bursting into flames. This phenomenon, though rare, seems to be real, although it definitely has its skeptics, being that it exists in that Last Podcast-appropriate area of The Unexplained.
If the phenomenon of suddenly bursting into flames wasn’t already weird enough, the cases, some with photographic evidence, paint an even weirder picture. The death scenes often bear similar characteristics. The body is entirely consumed and reduced to ash. There is a large black pool of burned fat around the remains. Nearby furniture, even furniture occupied by the victim at the time of the burning remains mostly undamaged. The body is entirely reduced to ash, meaning that no skeleton is left behind. The fire burns hot enough to destroy the skeleton. This process requires the flames to burn in the thousands of degrees range. The final and most upsetting feature of SHC is that in nearly all documented cases, the fire left behind the hands and the feet of the victim. And just as the furniture and surroundings are mostly untouched by the fire, so are these whole remains. The victims are often found in positions which suggest that they didn’t even move as the flames consumed them, suggesting that they had either died prior to the eruption or, most frighteningly, that the fire happened so quickly, that they didn’t have a chance to react.
Victimology has cornered a few qualities of common SHC victims: Alcoholism is extremely common. Most of the victims are elderly women. There are also a lot of dodgy attempts to explain away the phenomenon. Skeptics do be like that sometimes. Most cases are lazily explained away as arson or accidental cases of self-immolation thanks to cigarettes but some explanations, such as The Wicking Effect, are fairly plausible given that they’ve been tested and proven as a possibility.
Episode: 440
Episode Link
