In November 2015, information appeared in the German media about a strange and frightening incident. Witnesses describe a forty-year-old woman sitting quietly on a bench in a park. Suddenly, she began to smoke, and after only a few seconds the woman’s body was already in flames. The most terrible thing about this sight was the fact that the lady did not make a sound at the same time, as if flashing like a match was the most common thing for her.
A man who noticed what was happening shot down the fire with his jacket. With severe burns, the woman was taken to hospital. Police admit that versions of arson and suicide seem unlikely to them.
An unnamed lady is far from the only case of spontaneous combustion in the last century. There are people who survived after such cases. Among the best-known documented examples are 71-year-old Briton Wilfried Gauthorp and American salesman Jack Angel. In both cases, no one was able to determine the cause of spontaneous combustion. Burnt limbs had to be amputated.
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A similar phenomenon is called "spontaneous spontaneous combustion of a person" - Spontaneous Human Combustion or SHC for short. It occurs both with living people and with the dead. Throughout history, people have tried to explain such incidents either with the machinations of the devil, or with unknown internal mechanisms.
Terrible photographs of victims of self-immolation show charred remains, but the earth around is completely untouched.
Drunk knight
Although the legends of spontaneous combustion came to us from ancient times, the first documented case dates back only to 1641. Danish physician and mathematician Thomas Bartolin has compiled a catalog of strange medical phenomena. And in one of the chapters he described a knight named Polonius Vorsitius.
According to the doctor, the knight just sat and drank wine in the company of his parents in his house in Milan, when he suddenly began to spew out the “devilish flame” from his mouth, which burned him to ashes.
Head in the fireplace
Before a German woman in Ireland, a similar incident occurred with 76-year-old Michael Faherty. Mr. Faherty was found at home in Ballybane with severe burns. He was lying on his back, his head next to the fireplace.
Despite the obvious explanation, the coroners do not confirm the version that the fireplace caused a fire. The living room, including the fireplace, did not contain a single trace of fire - except for the floor directly under the body of the man and the ceiling above his head.
Forensic scientists suggest that the cause of death was precisely spontaneous combustion.
Woman growling like a dragon
This incident occurred three years before the events in Ireland, and the fireplace no longer took part in it. An elderly English lady, Jeanine Saffin, sat peacefully surrounded by her relatives, when suddenly a flame erupted directly from her stomach.
“She growled like a dragon,” recalls one of her relatives, Don Carrol, “and although the kitchen was untouched, her cardigan just melted. The investigation will never believe me, but I know what I saw. ”
Smoldering leg
Fast forward to a hundred years ago. In 1835, Professor James Hamilton, a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Nashville, America, woke up in the morning when he felt a burning pain in his left leg.
Throwing back the blanket and looking down, Hamilton saw a tongue of flame about ten centimeters high that burst from his leg. The professor tried to extinguish it by clapping his hand on his ankle several times, but the attempt failed.
Then the only right decision occurred to him: to block access to oxygen fire. He firmly gripped the burning site with his palms, and the flame disappeared.
Where is the truth?
Almost all scientists agree on one thing: man alone cannot catch fire. There are two main theories explaining cases of spontaneous combustion, but both imply a source of fire: the “human candle” hypothesis and ignition from static electricity.
From the point of view of chemistry, the human body really contains enough energy to catch fire, but 70% of it is water, and its evaporation requires a lot of energy.
In favor of the fact that spontaneous combustion, in principle, does not exist, suggests that some of the cases described throughout the history were later explained without any involvement of magic.
Now it will be unappetizing. The effect of the “human candle” is the phenomenon when the clothes of the victim are saturated with melted human fat and begins to act as a candle wick. In August 1989, the BBC, featuring Dr. John de Haan of the California Institute of Forensics, demonstrated the following experiment.
The pig carcass was wrapped in a wool blanket, placed in a tightly closed room with furniture, the pig was doused with a small amount of gasoline and set on fire. It took the carcass time to flare up. The fat was heated by a low yellowish flame at a very high temperature. It is noteworthy that the pig’s meat and bones were completely destroyed by fire, and the surrounding objects were practically not affected.
The second hypothesis - fires from static electricity - is based on the fact that under certain conditions, the human body can accumulate such an electrostatic charge that when it is discharged, clothing can catch fire.
Since ancient times, people have been accompanied by strange mystical phenomena. One of these phenomena is the “Devilish Fire” —a spontaneous ignition of a person from within. During excavations in Thebes, a papyrus was found with a description of "the transformation of the priest into a fire torch." About such an emergency there is evidence of ancient Greek authors and medieval monks. And first of the XVIII century, they began to be registered in police reports, and therefore they can be considered fairly reliable. In 1731, the whole of Italy was shocked by the work of Countess Carnelia Bundy of Cassina. The maid found in the morning in the bedroom of her mistress a heap of ash, in which lay the head, three fingers and both legs of the countess. This death did not receive an explanation, because no traces of the fire were found.
About 5 years later, an English newspaper published an article about the mysterious death of writer George Temple Johnson. At half past two in the night he was found dead in his room. The lower part of the body was completely burnt, although there was no sign of fire on the clothes. What happened then? Why didn't the clothes burn out? - Neither firefighters nor scientists could answer these questions.
Along with fatal cases were the lucky ones who managed to survive from this phenomenon.
A resident of Russia Valentina Fedorovna Aseeva escaped from the "Devilish Fire". One night, Valentina felt a severe pain in her heart and passed out. Her husband called an ambulance, but soon a woman was engulfed in flames. The husband began to extinguish the fire and he succeeded. But the consequences of spontaneous combustion were terrible: the left part of the body was covered with blisters, the hair on the head was scorched to the roots. However, the night cotton shirt and the sheet remained intact. Arriving doctors and firefighters could not explain what happened.
There were more cases, but it makes no sense to write about them because the outcome was the same. And now we turn to the assumptions of scientists in this regard.
In ancient times, these cases were called the "Devilish Fire." It was believed that the victim sold his soul to the Prince of Darkness (Satan), but then violated a secret agreement, for which he paid.
Researchers of paranormal phenomena have proposed such a hypothesis. SSL (spontaneous burning of people) as a poltergeist is a manifestation of cosmic energy controlled by someone's will. Like the “dormant force” that builds up at the base of the spine, a deadly fire “drowses” in the human body until a “short circuit” of its normal bio-energy and cosmic occurs. On this account, one can only object that the "dormant force" controlled by someone, in fact, is no different from the "diabolical fire" of the Prince of Darkness and therefore does not explain the physical nature of the "powerful thermal flash" leading to the burning of a living body.
In the nineteenth century, it was believed that only drunkards became victims of spontaneous combustion, whose bodies are so alcoholized that they flare up from an accidental spark, for example, flying out of a pipe. But such a hypothesis did not hold out for a long time. Many victims did not smoke or drink, and this hypothesis does not explain why clothing does not suffer.
The most perfect version so far is the assumption of the Russian academician V. Kaznacheev. He believes that unknown phenomena occur in the human body, in which the fundamentals of cellular energy contain thermonuclear reactions, and the cells themselves are real nuclear reactors, and if a malfunction occurs, a nuclear reaction will begin, which leads to spontaneous combustion. There is only one objection to this hypothesis: why doesn't clothes burn out?
While scientists have not figured out the mystery of the origin of SSL, we can only hope that these cases are very rare and the likelihood of becoming a victim is very small.
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Human spontaneous combustion is a rare phenomenon and, possibly, therefore, has not yet been studied. It’s not even that the basis of this phenomenon is some kind of process unknown to science. Quite the contrary - everything seems to be clear and has long been known ... The human body contains combustible materials, such as fat. It sounds, of course, not very pleasant, but human fat burns well. We are all well aware of the rite of cremation, which is probably as old as humanity itself. But this article is about spontaneous combustion. Why is it happening?
Forensic experts shrug
In world forensics, there are many cases where firefighters and policemen discovered the remains of people who were burned under obscure circumstances. For example, in the middle of the room lies a charred body, and furniture and interior items are almost untouched by the fire. Yes, and the body burned somehow strange. Where there was a torso - a heap of ash, and arms and legs, sometimes the head - are intact. Most often, a burned-out person was a victim of violence. He was first killed and then burned to stage an accident. But sometimes the crime was completely excluded, but the half-burned corpse was there, and the forensics threw up their hands in bewilderment. It has been suggested that ignition can be caused by the high temperature that occurs during internal chemical reactions that can occur at the atomic level. The combustion process itself in this case is supported by human fat, which slowly melts. However, many victims of spontaneous combustion were elderly people who abused alcohol and nicotine, and were distinguished by significant thinness ...
The Nicole Millet Case
It is interesting that information about spontaneous combustion of people reaches us from ancient times. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that a man who was inflamed for no reason and burned up sold his soul to the devil, for which he paid the bills. Starting from the 17th century, publications appeared on cases of spontaneous combustion in Italy and England. And in 1763, a book by Jean Dupont, The Natural Inflammation of the Human Body, was published. The Frenchman came up with the idea of \u200b\u200bwriting the book when he found out about the Nicole Millet case, the death of which was blamed on her husband. However, a forensic examination determined that the victim caught fire on her own, and as a result the unhappy husband was acquitted. Later this story made such a strong impression on Charles Dickens that he “burned” one of his characters in the novel “Cold House”, for which, however, he later had to fend off the critic George Henry Lewis, who accused the author of perverted fantasies. Similar cases of spontaneous combustion are described in the books of Emil Zola, Jules Verne and Herman Melville. Be that as it may, spontaneous combustion has not yet been recognized by science and can only produce numerous rumors and debates.
Explain the inexplicable
Let's try to understand all of this from a scientific point of view. About seventy percent of our body is made up of water. The only thing that burns well, as already mentioned, is fat, as well as gas - methane, which can be in the intestines. In all known cases, the victims burned almost completely, which is impossible in principle, since this requires a very high temperature, which can only be obtained under special conditions, for example, in a crematorium furnace or at a ritual fire, when the body is wrapped in cloth and covered with wood. But even there the corpse burns for hours, and the remaining bones in the crematorium are grinded in special chambers. In order for a chemical reaction to lead to a fire in the human body, a lot of energy is needed. And where does she come from? Scientists do not understand this. The most plausible of theories about the causes of the complete destruction of the body by fire is considered to be the "candle effect." If the body somehow caught fire, then for it to burn completely, the flame must be maintained. This role is played by human fat. Roughly speaking, the victim’s clothing is impregnated with fat during combustion and subsequently acts as a wick. In the late 1980s, a professor at the California Institute of Forensics John de Haan delivered an interesting experience. He wrapped a pig’s carcass with a wool blanket, doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. The carcass burned for five hours, and as a result, nothing remained of it. At the same time, the furniture in the room remained almost intact. In its composition, pig fat is very similar to human fat, therefore, the scientist suggested that in cases of spontaneous combustion of a person, the result was the same precisely due to the presence of clothing. True, several years later, National Geographic reporters tried to repeat the experiment, but unsuccessfully. They forgot to close the front door, a draft blew fire, causing serious damage to the room. There is a version that the complete burning of the body is facilitated by the floor material, which prevents the absorption of fat, as well as the sitting position of the victim, when the tongues of flame rose vertically up the body. There were attempts to explain the phenomenon described by the influence of a mythical cosmic particle - a pyrotone, which has the ability to pass through matter and release atomic energy, causing a fire of matter. The theory put forward by the professor of Brooklyn University Robin Beach is also considered plausible. He suggested that the cause of spontaneous combustion is the accumulated static electricity. This has happened more than once, for example, at gas stations. On human clothing, it also accumulates, which can lead to electric discharge. Thanks to this, in dry, cold weather, a person can flash like a candle.
Martyrology of spontaneous combustion
Over the past three hundred years, about two hundred cases of spontaneous combustion of a person have been described. Almost all of them ended in the death of the victim. Here is some of them. On April 9, 1744, the remains of the 60-year-old alcoholic Grace Pett from Ipswich in England were found by her daughter. According to the daughter’s testimony, there was nothing left of the mother - “she looked like a bunch of coals and ashes from a burned bundle of firewood”. The clothes scattered next to the remains were untouched by the fire. On July 1, 1951, Mary Rieser, a resident of St. Petersburg (Florida, USA), was found by a neighbor in her house that was burnt down, with the exception of a part of her skull and a completely whole left leg. From the chair in which the unfortunate one sat, there were only a few springs. Even if a woman caught fire from a badly extinguished cigarette, this does not explain that her body, according to the conclusion of a forensic examination, burned at a temperature of several thousand degrees. This tragedy inspired the American writer Michael Harrison to create the novel Fire from Heaven, published in 1976. The Mary Rieser case was the most frequently cited evidence of spontaneous combustion. On May 18, 1957, the charred corpse of Anna Martin, a 68-year-old American from Pennsylvania, was discovered. Only a part of the torso was left of it. Forensics have established that the body burned at a monstrous temperature of about 2000? C. However, things close to the remains, including slippers and even a couple of newspapers, were not affected by the fire. In December 1966, the remains of 92-year-old Dr. John Irving Bentley were found in his house in Kudersport (Pennsylvania, USA). An employee of the energy company, who came to take readings of an electric meter, found a heap of ash in the room, from which a part of the foot was sticking out. The rest of the doctor’s body burned completely. The house remained almost intact, only in the bathroom where Bentley died, a burned-out area about a meter in diameter gaped in the floor. This list goes on. But no matter what the reasons for trying to explain the phenomenon, all these cases have one thing in common - the victims did not have the slightest chance of salvation.
By the way
It is interesting that sometimes after complete combustion of the body in the ashes find small balls - sariras, or relics. Of course, in Europe or America it is not customary to delve into the remains of the dead without need. But in Asia this is a common thing. There, Sharirs of famous religious figures are cherished in memory of the deceased authority. There is even a sharira of Buddha himself, which is kept in Elista in the Buddhist temple "Golden Shakyamuni Buddha Monastery." Shariras are believed to be dead kidney or bladder stones or melted bones. Although they also found sariras, consisting of the remains of hair, fat and blood.
Human spontaneous combustion is a rare phenomenon and, possibly, therefore, has not yet been studied. It’s not even that the basis of this phenomenon is some kind of process unknown to science. Quite the contrary - everything seems to be clear and has long been known ...
The human body contains combustible materials, such as fat. It sounds, of course, not very pleasant, but human fat burns well. We are all well aware of the rite of cremation, which is probably as old as humanity itself. But this article is about spontaneous combustion. Why is it happening?
Forensic experts shrug
In world forensics, there are many cases where firefighters and policemen discovered the remains of people who were burned under obscure circumstances. For example, in the middle of the room lies a charred body, and furniture and interior items are almost untouched by the fire. Yes, and the body burned somehow strange. Where there was a torso - a heap of ash, and arms and legs, sometimes the head - are intact.
Most often, a burned-out person was a victim of violence. He was first killed and then burned to stage an accident. But sometimes the crime was completely excluded, but the half-burned corpse was there, and the forensics threw up their hands in bewilderment. It has been suggested that ignition can be caused by the high temperature that occurs during internal chemical reactions that can occur at the atomic level. The combustion process itself in this case is supported by human fat, which slowly melts. However, many victims of spontaneous combustion were elderly people who abused alcohol and nicotine, and were distinguished by significant thinness ...
The Nicole Millet Case
It is interesting that information about spontaneous combustion of people reaches us from ancient times. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that a man who was inflamed for no reason and burned up sold his soul to the devil, for which he paid the bills.
Starting from the 17th century, publications appeared on cases of spontaneous combustion in Italy and England. And in 1763, a book by Jean Dupont, The Natural Inflammation of the Human Body, was published. The Frenchman came up with the idea of \u200b\u200bwriting the book when he found out about the Nicole Millet case, the death of which was blamed on her husband. However, a forensic examination determined that the victim caught fire on her own, and as a result the unhappy husband was acquitted.
Later this story made such a strong impression on Charles Dickens that he “burned” one of his characters in the novel “Cold House”, for which, however, he later had to fend off the critic George Henry Lewis, who accused the author of perverted fantasies.
Similar cases of spontaneous combustion are described in the books of Emil Zola, Jules Verne and Herman Melville. Be that as it may, spontaneous combustion has not yet been recognized by science and can only produce numerous rumors and debates.
Explain the inexplicable
Let's try to understand all of this from a scientific point of view. About seventy percent of our body is made up of water. The only thing that burns well, as already mentioned, is fat, as well as gas - methane, which can be in the intestines.
In all known cases, the victims burned almost completely, which is impossible in principle, since this requires a very high temperature, which can only be obtained under special conditions, for example, in a crematorium furnace or at a ritual fire, when the body is wrapped in cloth and covered with wood. But even there the corpse burns for hours, and the remaining bones in the crematorium are grinded in special chambers.
In order for a chemical reaction to lead to a fire in the human body, a lot of energy is needed. And where does she come from? Scientists do not understand this.
The most plausible of theories about the causes of the complete destruction of the body by fire is considered to be the "candle effect." If the body somehow caught fire, then for it to burn completely, the flame must be maintained. This role is played by human fat. Roughly speaking, the victim’s clothing is impregnated with fat during combustion and subsequently acts as a wick.
In the late 1980s, a professor at the California Institute of Forensics John de Haan delivered an interesting experience. He wrapped a pig’s carcass with a wool blanket, doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. The carcass burned for five hours, and as a result, nothing remained of it. At the same time, the furniture in the room remained almost intact. In its composition, pig fat is very similar to human fat, therefore, the scientist suggested that in cases of spontaneous combustion of a person, the result was the same precisely due to the presence of clothing.
True, several years later, National Geographic reporters tried to repeat the experiment, but unsuccessfully. They forgot to close the front door, a draft blew fire, causing serious damage to the room.
There is a version that the complete burning of the body is facilitated by the floor material, which prevents the absorption of fat, as well as the sitting position of the victim, when the tongues of flame rose vertically up the body.
There were attempts to explain the phenomenon described by the influence of a mythical cosmic particle - a pyrotone, which has the ability to pass through matter and release atomic energy, causing a fire of matter.
The theory put forward by the professor of Brooklyn University Robin Beach is also considered plausible. He suggested that the cause of spontaneous combustion is the accumulated static electricity. This has happened more than once, for example, at gas stations. On human clothing, it also accumulates, which can lead to electric discharge. Thanks to this, in dry, cold weather, a person can flash like a candle.
Martyrology of spontaneous combustion
Over the past three hundred years, about two hundred cases of spontaneous combustion of a person have been described. Almost all of them ended in the death of the victim. Here is some of them.
On April 9, 1744, the remains of the 60-year-old alcoholic Grace Pett from Ipswich in England were found by her daughter. According to the daughter’s testimony, there was nothing left of the mother - “she looked like a bunch of coals and ashes from a burned bundle of firewood”. The clothes scattered next to the remains were untouched by the fire.
On July 1, 1951, Mary Rieser, a resident of St. Petersburg (Florida, USA), was found by a neighbor in her house that was burnt down, with the exception of a part of her skull and a completely whole left leg. From the chair in which the unfortunate one sat, there were only a few springs. Even if a woman caught fire from a badly extinguished cigarette, this does not explain that her body, according to the conclusion of a forensic examination, burned at a temperature of several thousand degrees.
This tragedy inspired the American writer Michael Harrison to create the novel Fire from Heaven, published in 1976. The Mary Rieser case was the most frequently cited evidence of spontaneous combustion.
On May 18, 1957, the charred corpse of Anna Martin, a 68-year-old American from Pennsylvania, was discovered. Only a part of the torso remained from her. Forensic scientists have found that the body burned at a monstrous temperature of about 2000 ºС. However, things close to the remains, including slippers and even a couple of newspapers, were not affected by the fire.
In December 1966, the remains of 92-year-old Dr. John Irving Bentley were found in his house in Kudersport (Pennsylvania, USA). An employee of the energy company, who came to take readings of an electric meter, found a heap of ash in the room from which a part of the foot was sticking out. The rest of the doctor’s body burned completely. The house remained almost intact, only in the bathroom where Bentley died, a burned-out area about a meter in diameter gaped in the floor.
This list goes on. But no matter what the reasons for trying to explain the phenomenon, all these cases have one thing in common - the victims did not have the slightest chance of salvation.
By the way
It is interesting that sometimes after complete combustion of the body in the ashes find small balls - sariras, or relics. Of course, in Europe or America it is not customary to delve into the remains of the dead without need. But in Asia this is a common thing. There, Sharirs of famous religious figures are cherished in memory of the deceased authority. There is even a sharira of Buddha himself, which is kept in Elista in the Buddhist temple "Golden Shakyamuni Buddha Monastery."
Shariras are believed to be dead kidney or bladder stones or melted bones. Although they also found sariras, consisting of the remains of hair, fat and blood.
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