‘I couldn’t make him hear, and I softly opened the door and looked in. And the burning smell is there – and the soot is there, and the oil is there - and he is not here!’ – Tony ends this with a groan. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Whether such a quantity of hydrogen may accumulate in the bodies of drunkards as to combust is not easy to determine. Dr Robert MacNish, Anatomy of Drunkenness, Chapter XII, Spontaneous Combustion of Drunkards
cf.
Gases in the colon will support combustion, and serious accidents have been reported when diathermy has been used for fulgurating colonic polyps. Cutting diathermy is often used for enterotomy in surgery on the stomach and small bowel and has been considered safe. We found, however, that under certain circumstances gases in the stomach may be explosive. J J Earnshaw & T K Keane, British Medical Journal 6666, Gastric explosion: a cautionary tale
And when I opened the stomach with the electro-cautery device there was an explosion and the gaseous contents of his stomach ignited and splattered stomach contents all over the ceiling light and on those who were surrounding the operating table. It was all rather frightening at the time. There was a blue flame and a sort of thump. The flame lasted a second or two and stopped ... The patient did very well afterwards. Dr Jonathan Earnshaw, televised interview
I realised that the water must be the source of the fuel. Now hydrogen burning in oxygen burns with a fierce blue flame and will cut through steel. And steel melts at fifteen hundred degrees Centigrade. Now that sort of flame could indeed reduce a corpse to ashes without releasing enough oxygen to sustain burning elsewhere in the room. That would also explain the lack of water. I have no belief in spontaneous human combustion as a paranormal or supernatural event – it is an entirely natural event the mechanism of which we do not entirely understand. John Haymer, investigator
My tests have shown that the body supports a fire of no more than about sixty to seventy-five kilowatts. That’s half the size of the average waste-basket fire. The flames are quite hot, the temperature of the flames is seventeen, eighteen-hundred Fahrenheit but they’re very small, very localised and as a result they’re not producing a lot of radiant heat to ignite things any distance away. John DeHaan, fire scientist
Stow, Ohio: For Kay and Mike Fletcher it was a morning they’ll never forget. Out of nowhere a cloud of smoke suddenly erupted from Kay’s body. Unsolved Mysteries
Kendall [Mott] couldn’t believe what he was seeing. All that was left of his father was a scattering of ashes, a few splinters of bone and a fragment of skull. ibid.
A gas company meter-man named Don Gosnell made an unpleasant discovery at the home of Irving Bentley, a 92-year-old retired physician. ibid.
When I got to the bottom of the steps there was a pile of ashes on the floor, and there was an odour, something I’ve never encountered before, kind of a sickening sweet odour. And then I looked up and here there was a hole burnt through the floor right above me. And I stood there and looked at that hole and there were little red ambers all round the hole. Don Gosnell, interview Unsolved Mysteries
Sequoyah County, Oklahoma February 18th 2013: ‘There was nothing burnt around the body.’ The Unexplained Files, Discovery 2013, Sheriff
There was no external source. ibid.
This man burnt to ash while the house remained intact. ibid.
The first recorded case in 1641. ibid.
Incredibly, there are people who claim to have caught fire spontaneously and somehow lived through the experience. ibid.
June 1995 Frank Baker: ‘It was the damndest thing I’ve ever seen.’ ibid. Peter Willey
‘Doctor: this burned from the inside out.’ ibid. Frank
Imagine falling to sleep in your armchair one peaceful evening and then suddenly bursting into flames. Or being crushed to death by a falling poodle. How about leaping off the Eiffel Tower in a flying suit and plummeting eighteen stories to the ground? These are the deaths so surprising they are truly unbelievable. The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd s1e2: Bizarre Deaths, History 2024
Shockingly, there have been roughly 200 reported cases of Spontaneous Combustion in history. ibid.