Mysterious Universe - 36.06 - MU Podcast - The Human Torch - Spontaneous Human Combustion

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Welcome back to MU! Today we bring a collection of some of the strangest spontaneous human combustion cases on record, from victims reduced almost entirely to ash in otherwise untouched rooms to survivors who claimed flames seemed to erupt from nowhere. Along the way, the cases pull in fire science, the wick effect, strange electrical phenomena, and more as we wade through this great selection of craziness from Jenny Randles & Peter Hough. Welcome to your Plus+ Extension and to the final installment of our Visitors from Within Saga, part 06 - Changing the Abduction Experience. This has been quite a ride and we thank you all for joining us for this epic adventure through the mind of a hive mind as we are given some insider tips about changing the abduction experience, as and while it is happening. Germain steps up to our trance channel, Lysaa, to deliver us the tools needed for empowerment in what seem like helpless situations and offers us greater innerstanding about ourselves more than anything else… which is possibly the purpose of this wild realm we find ourselves growing in. Spontaneous Human Combustion Are you in danger of spontaneously combusting? The risk factors according to a 1799 physician Visitors From Within, 2e: Extraterrestrial Encounters and Species Evolution LinksPlus+ ExtensionThe extension of the show is EXCLUSIVE to Plus+ Members. To join. click HERE.Links Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Mysterious Universe, Season 36, Episode 6. And today we're going to be talking about the little phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion that has no rhyme or reason and no answer, really, to this day, as far as I know. This is a book from 1993 by the great Jenny Randalls along with Peter Howe. I'm going to say how. It's H-O-U-G-H. How? How? Hoff? Oh. I'm saying how.

All right. Maybe it'll be like Jeff or Giff and Jeff, whatever. Yeah. Giff, Giff. But I am Joe Hodgson, joining me, of course, is Brandon Thomas. How's your week, dude? It's going great. Hot.

Summertime. August in Texas, like August in Northern California, I suppose. It's just hot, dude. It's just hot. We were talking before the show about how draining it is. And if you've never been in, you know, these kind of temperatures, you're in for a surprise. The first time my wife came over from the East Coast. I was like, oh, it's like 115.

And she's like, how, how are you not dying? Your thermometers go up that high? It was the classic, it's a dry heat. It really is. It's a difference. When it's 95 here in 50% humidity, that's unbearable. But 110 at zero is great. It's no big deal.

Yeah. And you get a little breeze on top of that, you're outside. No big deal. Yeah, everything you need to get done during the day gets done either before 9 a.m. or after 7 p.m. Nothing in between those two windows. You're grateful for the beautiful thing that is central air. And you just are grateful that you have a shower to take three showers a day in the summer.

And it's great. Oh, yeah. It's, yeah, unless you have a pool, you just don't go outside. And that's why in my previous job, when I was a package delivery guy, it was awful. And it was actually worse because I'd get out and it's 110 degrees. Every two minutes, get back into my van and there's nice AC. So it was this constant fluctuation. There's got to be a scientific word for it.

But it was a fluctuation of being 65 degrees and then 110 every two minutes. And I'd get home and my body didn't know what to do. It's like, do we sweat now or what's going on? Yeah, it's called the Wim Huff method. And it's not good for you, I don't think. It's being that back and forth in the extremes. But you survived. You're a lot stronger and better.

We have an adorable neighbor who moved here from another state that's watering his lawn, which we all just think is hilarious as you just let it go, man. It'll come back here in about two months. Just let it go, Bubba. No, yeah. It's definitely probably not good for you. But now I'm a giant wiener because I go outside. I'm used to being in the AC all day now.

I go outside for five minutes to, you know, check on chickens or whatever. And it's like, oh. It's hot. Well, I'm grateful we revisited the MU weather report. It's been a minute. And I'm grateful that we did it. So for my weekly report, it's been the weather and it's warm, sir. Good.

It's hot. It's going to be hot. That's about it. It's going to be hot. Well, and up here we have another at least month or two before it even gets down to fall like temperatures. Yeah, or something better, or something better.

Now, you know, what is hot is when people are sitting there mining their own business and all of a sudden, poof, up in flames. And sometimes it's all that's left are their legs, sometimes maybe an arm, like a piece of an arm. It's very interesting, man. This spontaneous human combustion. I'm grateful you're doing this, dude. This is so cool.

There's a lot of threads that connect all these stories. and Jenny and Peter did a great job of running them together and kind of drawing the parallels. So it's something that doesn't get talked about that much as far as I know. I haven't heard a whole lot of shows talk about this, mostly because it's written off from any scientific literature. It was a fire. Even though once we get into the details, you'll see it's not just a fire. There's something else going on. Yes.

But before we get into that, though, what do you have coming up on Plus? Man, we are going to wrap up this beautiful visitors from within saga that, we have with part six. This is going to be the coup de grall. This is the reason we have been doing this pretty much. Cudicro. Oh, coup d'a is the political thing, huh? Yes. Okay. The coup de gras. As I'm hearing cartoons. So, yeah, we're going to go into part six on this, which is what this amazing saga has been leading to, which is your empowerment on how to alter change or even stop the abduction phenomena altogether. If you are interacting with the, the freaky woo-woo in anyway, sign up in the links below. We have a massive thread going for your alteration and perception, which is really what this is going to require. Also, a constitution is needed for this.

And that's just your ability to stand up and say, this is what I want, this is what I don't want. No more being pushed and pulled or checking, I agree, on agreements. You didn't read the whole clause of. And that's what we're going to find out is it's really these folks who are having these experiences you and I talk about, Joe. They're choosing them. And they're choosing the way in which they.

have them. Now, if they have to be had at all, then you get to also choose that, how they come at at you. If you want to fly the ship, if you want to throw one of them on the table, look at their skin under the microscope, we talk about that. We do get a new character that brings all of this home, Germain, is going to speak through one of the holes of our trench channel, Lisa, and give us all this awesome information about how to stop change or just completely rewrite the abduction experience altogether. And I'm really looking forward to it. So you guys, sign up in the links below. Get caught up on this huge saga and joined us for the cap off of this time. Yes, for sure.

And oh, I did want to, real quick before we get started, a listener, Sam had emailed in and talked about how we shit the bed with the Bashar things. I talked mad shit on it. And he actually kind of gave a lot more context because I wasn't aware of everything Bashar said. I watched 20 minutes of it like 10 years ago and was like, this guy is off putting. I don't know. But apparently he does not just love and light and he does a lot of other things, but it's still, I'm not saying that he's not channeling something either. I'm just saying

I don't really trust it, but I could be wrong. Yeah, that's the good thing about this. We get to interpret from our perspective. We get to know if we even made it 10 minutes into the thing or not because there is a package delivery type option. There are ways you can be told something that's just not going to resonate with you. And then someone else, and we've talked about this, man, your wife will hear something that you've told her a thousand times from a stranger and go, huh, oh my God, I've never thought of that before. And you're like, ah, but this is what makes also a great teacher, they say, is when a teacher can apply one piece of information in 10 different ways to 10 different students' ability to learn it. And what a lot of that has to do with

also is resonance. If you are being presented with information through a mouthpiece, it's just like, I don't care for the way that this is being presented yet. That is a very valuable for the mouthpiece for that to present to, then cool, just not my way of receiving or our way of receiving the information. Definitely going to talk some shit, because that's what we do, and we have some fun with it. Sam, dude, you're awesome. Thank you for writing in. We appreciate you, man. Yeah, it was a lot more. I haven't even read the whole thing, pure honesty here, dude, but it was very long, but I'm definitely going to sit down and read it because, or maybe do some more research and watching some of the Bashar stuff.

But it was just a, it was a gut feeling, you know, when I first saw the Bashar guy, Daryl. I was like, it's something off, but I don't know. It's just me, maybe. He has wooed Sam, and that's fine, Sam. We adore that you adore him. Darrell is like he's the way that he presents information is sometimes a turnoff, yes, no matter what the information is. Yeah, it just seemed, I don't know, overdone, overacted or something. I don't know. Just leaned into a bit too hard there. Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, we'll look into more of that, so thanks Sam for sending that in. But yeah, we're going to get into the aptly titled, Spontaneous Human Combustion, again by Jenny Randall and Peter Howe from 1993. And up until, you know, 93, I mean, these are all the stories they had. So I'd be interested if there's a newer book. I actually didn't even look. I saw Jenny Randalls, and I'm like, that's a classic MU name. So let's go there.

I love Jenny. Yeah, I've gotten heaps of books from her, man. Yeah, we'll definitely hear more of her from even more than this. That's is awesome. Oh, hell yeah. So this phenomenon, we'll call it, is, I mean, most of these stories have, they're strange enough that you don't really need to exaggerate them or anything. It's just just the facts are crazy.

And this is definitely one of them, the spontaneous human combustion thing. And it used to be actually a lot more, I wouldn't say normal, but accepted that it's just something that happens until we get into closer to the 1900s when, you know, science kind of takes over. And they're like, no, it's just it was a fire. But there's a lot more than that from. my perspective here. Yeah. People die in fires all the time. You know, you fall asleep smoking, your clothes catch a fire.

The weird thing is that a lot of times alcohol is involved, but alcohol doesn't do that. It doesn't offer a fuel source when you're drinking it unless maybe you're drinking 151 and then throw a match down your throat. That could happen, I guess, but I don't know. Were there any matches found next to these people? That's the thing is usually no. Yeah. No, you know, immediately discernible ignition source. So it's weird.

But yeah, so they start off with the, apparently a pretty famous story of Countess Cornelia Bandy. And this is 1731. She's a 62-year-old. That's another thing to note here is that they are often older. Huh. So I don't know what that would have to do with it, but maybe we'll find out. So it was just a normal night in March of 1731, the Countess, and this is a normal night. Oh, and this is in Sissena, Italy.

So she apparently had eaten dinner and spent several hours talking with her whole household. And eventually she goes to her room, pretty normal. Her maids with her. And apparently her maid stayed with her until she was settled in for the night. And according to the maid, at the point she left, everything seemed normal. She comes back in the next morning for her, you know, Advil and water or whatever they gave the countess back then. And pretty immediately, she's like, oh, something is fucky here because the countess wasn't in bed. Apparently, she normally was in the morning.

And about four feet from her bed, there's just a heap of ashes. And that was what was left of the countess here. No feet. And it was so extreme. What's that? No feet, hands, any appendages other than just ash? No. So that's why it's even weirder is just basically the torso had disappeared.

There's portions of her leg and parts of her head and fingers, but most of her head, like the center mass had just been reduced to this greasy ash. Damn. And that's another thing that keeps coming up too, this weird graciness of it. Yes. This viscous, gooey, ashy, what used to be your grandma. Fucking weird. But yeah, her bed hadn't been, you know, burned or anything. There's apparently still candles still lit nearby.

And I guess there was a lamp on the floor. floor two and that was covered with ash, but it didn't help provide any explanation for what had happened. But through the whole room was this oily, greasy soot residue type of thing. Yes, the whole everything is coated in this stuff. Yeah, it's really gross. And I'll get to why I think that might be. And apparently this residue was yellowish and foul smelling. As you can imagine, a burned flesh, especially of a human, is a very particular smell that's hard to get out of your sinuses. And apparently this contamination of this residue wasn't even just just in the bedroom. There was this oily soot that made its way into joining rooms too. And the windows also,

the glass had become coated with this strange, greasy material. Yeah. So you've got this, a woman whose body has just undergone this catastrophic destruction while lying only feet from a bed that is fine. And so this is like one of the first things that they noticed is that apparently Bandy was fond of brandy, Bandy Brandy. And Bandy is fond of brandy. Yeah. And I guess for a long time, people back then at least had had this idea that somebody

who drank heavily could just become saturated with alcohol and become combustible. Damn. Sounds like some 1700s logic, right? Well, they probably had some really good shit back then. Yeah. I mean brandy. It tastes like really strong wine to me. But yeah,

the problem is that humans don't generally turn into a Molotov cocktail because they drink brandy. It's metabolized. It doesn't accumulate in your flesh until you're flammable. At least, you know, maybe as far as our knowledge now. Right. Depends on how much you drink, I guess. I know, it goes.

How committed you are. But yeah, in the 18th and 19th centuries, this was kind of the explanation for spontaneous combustion. So it's not that they denied spontaneous combustion. They're like, oh, it's this moral judgment on people who drink heavily. You can just light on fire. It's like you whack off too much. You'll go blind.

That's what it sounds like. Yes, yes. And apparently Charles Dickens, I've never read this one, but there's a book he wrote called Bleak House, where this alcoholic, he burns to death through the spontaneous combustion. And that's probably where a lot of this idea came from originally. but the Countess's case is kind of hard to just, you know, put away just because of the physical description of the scene. So even if you assume that there is some kind of external ignition source somewhere in the bedroom, you're still going, okay, how could a human body burn that extensively without the fire spreading through the room? Right.

And that's the exact, one of the exact patterns that follows a lot of these stories. in just a few years after the countess's weird untimely death Britain came out with another one This lady's name was Grace Pet And she lived in Ipswich, England And Jenny and Peter here Said that she was the wife of a fishmonger Which I imagine means a fisherman

You know? I think you just grab them with your hands, yeah A monger. Mongers. She's about 60 years old again getting up there and this is April of 1744. And again, the situation just sounds normal. Grace's daughter went downstairs a morning and saw this horrifying thing. Her mother had burned to death.

But the fire again hadn't really spread anywhere. And they say that Grace's body was, again, reduced essentially to ash, but with portions of the limbs remaining. So her daughter enters the room and some of her, we'll call it remains, were still smoldering gross, first of all. Whoa. But there's objects nearby that should have been pretty vulnerable to fire. There's some clothes hanging, some like kids' clothes hanging close to the body. They hadn't burned.

There's some kind of like paper or something nearby just intact. That's why it's so strange is that it would be a paper or clothes should be a lot easier to ignite than a body. but somehow the body, well, at least the torso part, has this enormous thermal destruction while a piece of paper close by is untouched. So crazy. And again, the weird smell this time again. And what do you think they described it as? A unpleasant, greasy odor.

Almost exactly to the countesses. It reminds me of you've worked in kitchens, man. You know, whenever you cook and the vent hood is broken or something like that, all that grease and that oil gets, I mean, it's on everything. And you know what I'm, because you've then gone through in deep clean kitchens that you took over that somebody wouldn't take care of. And it's that nasty shit. So that's what it's making me think of is fat and oil burning. Yeah.

And being released, like, like vaporized into the air. Yeah. And they actually mentioned that where it's this vaporization of flesh and fat and stuff. Yes. But we'll get into the bones, too, because the bones is a, that's a different animal. Okay. But there's another story going around with this Grace Pet during her lifetime, actually, that she had this reputation. The people in the area thought she was a witch talking 1744, right?

18th century England, these accusations of witchcraft were still kind of around. And so people would still blame witches for illness or dead livestock. And there's a farmer who totally thought that Grace Pet had bewitched his animals, because his sheep were becoming sick. Oh. So obviously a witch. Why would it be anything else? Yeah, it's the witch down the road that did it, man.

Yeah. So he did this old piece of folk magic that people might be familiar with. It's called sympathetic magic, yeah. It's the idea behind a voodoo doll. So his idea is, okay, witch plays some kind of spell or something of my livestock. And so you can counter that through the affected animal. So he took one of his diseased sheep and burned it. And obviously the belief was that this would somehow turn the witch's own power back against her, kind of a mirror spell.

Okay. And apparently he performed this weird ritual on the same night that Grace mysteriously immolated. No way. Obviously, that doesn't prove anything, but it's just an odd detail. It does not prove anything. I'll say that. I've found this awesome article. So I'm going to go ahead and be linking this as well.

I don't want to get ahead of you on this. Are you going to go to what's more likely to, because there's a bunch of correlated data with this. Like, who's more like men or women are more likely in the age range and all that? Do you get into all that? I believe so later. So I think this is going to be a two-parter, so we might get into that near the end because they do come to some conclusions. There are some interesting conclusions to this, buddy. And there's an additional link that I'll be linking to this that really the title of the article is,

are you in danger of spontaneously combusting? The risk factors according to 1799 physicians. So we'll link that along with this. That's cool. Oh, and they were the best. They were the ones that gave you some cocaine for your blood ghosts. They were great. So this next case was from a French priest named Jonas DuPont in 1776.

And he got a collection of these cases under the title, The Incendious Corpus Humani Spontaneous. Spontaneous human combustion in English. Yeah. But one of the most famous stories he wrote about in there was a lady named Nicole Millett. And this case was a little different because somebody was actually accused of murdering her. So Nicole lived in France with her husband. And one evening, you guessed it.

She was discovered burned to death. And again, her body had been mostly destroyed, but the immediate surroundings hadn't burned, at least in the way you'd expect. And all of a sudden, her husband's going, uh-uh, shit. Guess who's the prime suspect in a case like this? and, you know, from a police perspective, that's totally reasonable. Your wife's found dead in these bizarre circumstances, and investigators can't find out how she burned. Yeah. Husband's going to become a suspect for one reason or another.

Unless he's a spontaneous human combustion expert. Like the irony there would be brilliant, right? He does all this research. His wife's like trying to call him to family dinners. He's like, no, I've almost cracked this case. I can do it. And then he's, you know, years down the line, then she then combust. And he's having now to defend himself.

Got some mad scientists going on there. But in this case with the Cole, there's a doctor named a Claude Nicholas LeCat. And he started getting involved. He's looking into this. And he's like, okay, the physical evidence here does not support murder. And this doctor was apparently an important figure in the early history of this phenomenon because he believed he'd come across enough unusual burning cases to take it seriously and as its kind of own category of weird deaths.

And in this Millett case, Nicole's case, the, uh, his testimony basically convinced the court and her husband was acquitted. And so basically the, the verdict or the, the death verdict, whatever was essentially just an act of God.

They were like, it was God. Like, I mean, because that's, you know, back then, if you don't know what's going on,

it's God or the devil. So, yeah. I mean, because imagine being accused of something like that. You come home, your wife's just burned to death. And your defense is like, no gentleman, my wife spontaneously caught fire. And the court goes, yeah, fair enough. You're good.

No, well, gone to do it. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Must have been a bitch. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So a lot of these cases from this priest's book that he wrote, the same thing kept happening over and over again, which is why he compiled them.

One, victims are frequently older. many, if not most, had consumed alcohol, at least, you know, within an amount of time before burning. Yeah. It was almost always indoors, and the body would be massively destroyed, but the fire is localized a lot of times to the torso itself. Yes. So obviously doctors are debating this over the, even by the 19th century. And riders were using it because great fodder, and now here we are using it because it is. Oh, God, it's so interesting, dude.

I know. And so a lot of physicians back then just accepted it. They're like, yeah, it's just something that happens. It's a way you can die. It's on the list, dude. Yeah. But there's a lot of other doctors that were like, this is nonsense. And so they didn't argue about the fact that people were just found strangely burned because they had. It was more about the ignition, you know, did it originate inside the body? Right. And that's the thing about this whole phenomenon is that the term, sponsor. Human Combustion, it kind of implies that something in the person starts the fire. Right. And I'm not even, like, we don't know everything. Like, we still don't know everything. So maybe there is some weird thing that happens in your body. If we are electrical beings, maybe you get a short somewhere. And it lights your subcutaneous fat on fire.

And we'll get into that too. It's called the human wick. Ooh, that's a badass name for a band. Your summer travels deserve an upgrade with select Chevrolet, Buick, G. DMC and Cadillac vehicles connected by OnStar, you can stream, game, and more on the go. Whether you're headed to a music festival or a cottage getaway, you can access hundreds of apps on Google Play right from your center display. Explore OnStar Tech Today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops.

Interesting note on here. Some of the list as well. You went over quite a few of these. Victims were alcoholics most of the time. led inactive lives. So the fact that they were sedentary played a role in this, usually overweight, usually over 60, women were much more prone to spontaneously combust than men. And what happens to women over 60? They get old. Do you know this? Yeah, menopause. So this is when you get like the hard, hot flashes and all that kind of stuff. So literal hot flashes, dude. I wonder if that's why they're called

that. Also, what's interesting to know here is at the scene, there's often an external flame, such as a candle or a fireplace. So this implies then that it's not necessarily 100% from inside the person, but that there is then a delineation called the human wick, which is dope. Yeah, the wick effect, the Johnwick effect. So a lot of the people who were saying, no, it obviously isn't just from inside the human. They're like, usually, like you said, there's candle or a cigarette or a fireplace ember, or maybe the clothing catches first.

but that doesn't take away from the fact the weird shit that happens afterwards why does the body continue burning why doesn't the room and how can bone be destroyed from this like we talked about yeah it says combustion's extremely rapid and the flames are extremely difficult

to put out yes we'll get into that too even if you can catch this it's very hard to put the body fucking shit out it's like napolem you just got fingers twitching over there and you're trying to damn dude this is crazy

so this is where the the wick effect comes in they describe it as like the body functioning as an inside out candle so you know a candle has wax surrounding the wick flame melts the wax the wick draws it upward and the wax becomes the fuel that sustains the flame so with the the the wick effect for a human it goes backwards so the general idea is that the the clothing is the wick and the body fat becomes the fuel like burning whale blubber right so if somebody dies or knocks themselves out somehow and their clothing catches on fire even a little bit, the heat can rupture the skin and melt the subcutaneous fat. And that liquefied fat soaks into the clothing. And so now the clothing isn't just burning anymore. It's feeding on human fat. Right. Which is really gross. Sorry, I should have given a warning. It's gnarly. Yeah. But apparently if that happens, then you get to potentially at least get a really slow concentrated smoldering fire. And this isn't necessarily, you know, this roaring inferno that people picture when they hear somebody has been almost completely incinerated. It's slow and localized and apparently potentially capable of continuing for hours.

Wait, but how fast does someone die from something like this? Has anyone ever heard someone screaming from being spontaneous, in mid-spontaneous combustion? Yes. No. Yeah, but that's the weird thing is maybe it's because, like they said, they knocked themselves out. Maybe they had a heart attack and then caught five. But we'll get into a case in a little bit here where the guy was, they concluded that he was still alive while he was burning. Oh my God, dude.

You think, I'll just say this. I came into this ignorant thinking you would just go up quick, your arms and legs lay there. Your soul is hovering over this now pile of ash that's smoldering, of course. And then you just go, oh, that was fun. You're like, what the shit is that? And you're out. Yeah, and you're gone. No, this is something that you get to enjoy for a little while sometimes.

At least all the nerves are gone. Oh, fuck. Jenny and Peter here, they actually go into this quite a bit, this WIC effect, because it probably does account for at least some of these cases. But that's the thing, is that it doesn't apply to all of them. So they point out a couple problems, especially with the bones. Reducing human bone to ash is not easy. Like I said, modern crematoriums operate at extremely high temperatures. And even then, sometimes there's bone fragments.

that survive this cremation process. Everything else is, you know, a fine dust. But the bones, particularly hard, not impossible, but very hard to get up to temp enough to turn them into a pile of ash, which is the thing. So when you have a lot of these cases where the torso's gone, it's quite a bit of bone in there and thick bone, the spine, your ribs, your breastplate or whatever it's called.

Yes. I mean, it's not like little tiny thin bones that might be easier to incinerate with this wick effect. Right. It's thick-ass, strong bones that are just ash now, but nothing else around it is burn. It's like you got hit with a blowtorch or something for hours. It's really weird. I looked it up here while you're talking about it. I don't want to get ahead again, but the human bone can absorb alcohol to a small degree,

and if exposed externally or via bodily fluids, and dry or grease-laden bone can burn if set of fire because bone contains organic material like collagen and fats. So could this wick effect happen from the bones setting on fire and cooking it from the inside? The bones being the wick? I don't know. Like if you drink that much that your bones absorb alcohol and turn into wicks, that's crazy. Like when you get cremate, they'll see somebody dies in some way and they were hammered at the time, say a car crash or something. And they go to cremate them.

Is the alcohol still in there to a degree that it would cause this to happen? I don't know. And this is years, man. It says that this is mostly sedentary alcoholics is the one that this is. is most likely, sedentary alcoholic women over 60 is really what you're most likely. So if you find yourself in that degree, I'd get up and move around a little bit. I also wonder, you know, because my mind goes right to tissue salts. I'm like, man, had you have had some phosphorus of some kind?

It would have moved that around the heat. So I'm, I don't, it's just fair. So you know what's funny about the phosphorus thing is, yes, I used to be a fucking nerd. I mean, I still am, but. Sure. And I used to do magic tricks and like card tricks and all this stuff. And one of the props I have, I still have some, it's really interesting shit. It's, I think it's red phosphorus.

And what you do is you burn a little bit of it onto a metal, like a coin or something. And what comes out of that when you burn this red phosphorus paper is this greasy tar-like substance. Really? And what you do is you scrape some of it onto your finger. And it's just for an effect. You rub your fingers together like this and smoke comes out of it. from this greasy friction that you use out of the red phosphorus. It's probably highly toxic.

I don't recommend you do it, but it is a prop that magicians use. That's awesome. And that was one of the first things I thought about when they talked about this greasy thing. And it does have kind of a sulfury type of smell. It's not real strong, but it is greasy and got a weird smell to it. So I don't know. The correlations do sort of add up on this. Now, also just for everybody out there, if you find yourself in that category,

We're not one to leave you hanging here, like the news. Find out tomorrow at 9. Fuck that. Let's go here. So commonly used options for tissue salts for helping with hot flashes. In that range, there are natrium macureum, naturium mercadium for fluid and temperature regulation. You need some callifos right there, cali phosphorica for nervous tension, and magnesium phosphorica

magfoss for flushing and physical restlessness. That's your anti-spasmodic there, your Leo salt. There you go, gang. There's your tools for... But if they were lacking in that, would it make it more probable or less? I would think more probable because if you're not moving this stuff around,

and especially women anyway, this is protocol. Like, if Mary's like, oh, I've got cramps, I go grab the magfoss and the caliphose for her. And then in five minutes, she feels better. So I would... Because this stuff moves things around.

Yeah, for sure. So there you go, gang. Something to think about. But what's weird is those people lived in a time where tissue salts were more available. No, not at all. Anyway, something to think about. Well, maybe.

I mean, if you think the tissue salts were more available because the food wasn't so fake and gay, then possibly. Like, they were actually getting the nutrients. Yeah, maybe the read. Yeah, could be. Just interesting. All this is just very, it just makes you ask really interesting questions, dude. We're just connecting dots that aren't there. That's all we do.

I love it. They're there. So the BBC had this program called QED, and they were trying to death. demonstrate that, you know, portions of a skeleton can happen or can be reduced to ash through low temperature smoldering fire like the wick effect. So they brought in a doctor, Dougal Drysdale from Edinburgh University. And they did this experiment and they used, they put animal fat wrapped in cloth. And sure enough, once they got the thing going, the cloth acted as a wick and the fat supplied the fuel. So that inside out candle idea did work.

So then they're like, all right, well, now I'll take. try the bone thing. So they put an animal bone inside of a small computer-controlled furnace and heat that bitch up to 500 degrees Celsius, which is... Shit. What is that Fahrenheit? No, man. My homeschool, man. And mine doesn't know that.

What was it again? 500 degrees Celsius. It's probably like 47,000 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know. 932. Come on. Oh, that's it. Yeah.

All right. So what they're expecting is that this prolonged heating. at that temperature would just reduce the bone to something at least close to powder. Six hours later, they pull it out, and there's still a recognizable bone sitting there. And it had become brittle enough that it could be broken apart with a little tool, I guess, but it didn't just go into ash. So Drysdale here was like, okay, maybe 12 hours would have done it. And that's the biggest frustration in this whole debate is that experiments demonstrate that bodies can burn through the wick effect.

That's real, apparently, right? I've never tried it. Don't plan on it. But recreating every single thing of these cases is a totally different thing. And that brings us to an Alfred Ashton. Ironically named. Yeah. That is another weird thing you see popping up in weird stories like this.

Their names. It's like... Mrs. Flamesdale. What? And there's another correlation of the weird names and a couple stories from now. Burnhart. So unlike the count. or Grace Pet. This isn't a

century's old story. This happened in 1988 and Ashton was a, again, you guess, an elderly man. He's living alone in this house in Southampton, England. Seems to be a lot of English folks burning up. Didn't move around a lot. Probably didn't, you know,

probably drank a bunch of football. Okay, so January 8th of 88, he had a neighbor come visit him around 6 o'clock in the evening. Nothing unusual. Again, that's the other thing, the mundaneness of when this happens. They had tea.

Maybe he poured a little bit of brandy in there. I don't know. They had tea and the neighbor left. And about three or four hours later, about 10 o'clock that night, the other residents around started smelling something burning. So what do you do? You call firefighters, right?

And yeah, one of the men who entered the house was Roger Penny, who was a fire officer, like a marshal or investigating fire. He's not fighting fires. He's figuring out how they started. Right. Like backraft.

Yeah, he had been to plenty of fatal fires, but this one bothered him quite a bit because, again, as soon as he gets in there, the first thing you noticed was this extreme heat and smoke in the floor was slippery. You could say greasy, maybe. Yes. That's why you have to wear no slip. That's why no slip shoes are required in restaurants is for this, right here. Shoes for cruise. That's right. Shout out.

Shout out. You know how much shrimp I had to pick out of those things? Oh, God. So gross. So yeah, the floor is slippery. The windows had this blackening by the smoke, but they weren't broken. And as the smoke started clearing out, he's like, oh, my God, there's a hole burned through the floor. And, of course, lying across that hole were the remains of Alfred Ashton.

Again, barely anything left. And later, Penny, the fire investigator was like, the destruction of this body was pretty much complete. Damn. Again, the torso gone, ash. Yeah. And what remained were his legs and feet. And then he started looking around. There's an electric fire near the hole in the ground here.

But according to his initial remembering of this, it wasn't switched on. So it had an on-off switch and it was off. That's his memory of it. Okay. But close to the body was a chair and hanging over the back of that was in anorak. Do you know what that is? I don't know what anorak is. What is that?

Anurac? Anirac. I had to look it up. It's like an Inuit coat. Oh. So kind of a heftier coat. Okay. Hefty coat.

And the bottom of this thing showed some heat damage, but it didn't burn. On another chair was a pile of newspapers. They were browned by the smoke, but not burned. There's a TV, and the plastic, like, casing and the knobbies and everything were kind of like warped from the heat. Oh. But, again, not burned. So he's like, okay, this room was extremely freaking hot, but it did not turn into what you'd assume would be a house fire somehow.

But then he noticed the surviving portion, I guess, of this ash dude's body. His trousers were still intact, so were his socks, his shoes. And the weirdest thing was he said, where the burning or destruction of this body had stopped, it stopped abruptly. So normally when he sees burn bodies, there's this gradual transition where it looks like it caught on fire and then went out. This gradient, you know. Right. But apparently, the fire had totally eaten through body, flesh, bone, everything, clothing, and then reached a point on the legs where it was just like, I'm out now.

And he called it, he literally called it a clean cut. And that really bothered him as a fire investigator. Yes. And he's like, this, I've never seen anything. like this. And so the investigation into this eventually turned into an open verdict like a lot of these do. They just said, we don't know. We don't know what the hell happened. So obviously the skeptics and maybe doctors or whatever, they're like, oh, it was the electric heater. You know, dude fainted. He had a medical history involving feigning attacks. So maybe he'd collapsed against the

heaters, clothing ignited. The Wick effect took over. Okay, sure. Except there was still this argument over whether the heater had actually been on. And a different fire investigator had said that the heater itself didn't have a switch and that the electrical supply had been interrupted when the burning damage the wiring beneath the floor. But Penny's like, no, I remember I checked the wall socket and the switch was off. He's like, okay, so somebody could have switched it on after the incident. Sure, that's possible. Sure.

And even Penny said, yeah, sure, that is possible. But nobody could, you know, establish that the heater. definitely been operating when he caught fire. So it was this open-ended, it could have been, it was a Schrodinger's heater. Yeah. And even some of the investigators who were in favor of this heater explanation were like, there's still other things that we can't really explain, even if it was the heater. And one of these other fire investigators was like, so there was a surviving hand

close to the destroyed portion of the body. So the torso had been incinerated, but this nearby hand survived. And Penny keeps coming back to these cutoff points. Because in the experiments that they did with the WIC effect, the combustion tends to peer out gradually, this gradient type of thing. So maybe it's because the fat supply and your human candle starts going out or maybe it keeps smoldering for a while, but you get a transition of some sort. And in Ashton's case, Penny was like, everything stopped together.

The clothing, bone, flesh, all of that just stopped. It's like somebody drew a line across the body and said, fire ends here. That's the weird. And he's a fire investigator. He's seen all of this before. He knows what they're supposed to look like. Yes. When it's weird, too, that this flammable oil is sent all over the place.

And the immediate things that are covered in this stuff is not ignited as well because it seems to then rule out that it would be even flammable. Have they ever taken a scraping of this yellow stuff and tried to set it on fire to see if it was flammable? Not that I remember seeing. There are a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of, you know, science they did about all this, but it's kind of confined to like lab conditions. And even if it was flammable, did they test for what it was? Right. Well, I would think, I would think you'd want that to see if there was some consistency between it. I mean, well, and a lot of these happened, you know, years ago before they even had the tools or even the thought to do that, I guess. Right. So Penny wasn't very happy that the BBC program presented this whole case as explainable through conventional fire science. He's not happy about it.

He's like, this BBC program left out things. And he didn't think the mystery had been, you know, taking care of as cleanly as television makes it appear. per usual. So, I mean, maybe the heater ignited and maybe it was the WIC effect, but there's still a difference between, you know, this possible mechanism and totally reconstructing what actually happened in this room. And with Ashton, nobody could do that. And it's just one of those ones that they're like, I don't know.

Damn. But this next story kind of goes in a different direction because most of these spontaneous these combustion cases are discovered afterwards, right? Somebody walks into a room, they smell smoke or that weird smell, and they find these weird remains of ash. Yeah. And usually whatever happens, nobody sees it, and that's why it's such a mystery. So obviously, this leaves a lot of room for speculation, but there's a story in August of 1978,

again, North Manchester. So what is going on over there, England? Yeah. But the location was a street called Elder Burn Drive. No way. Elder Burn. Come on. Old people are the ones that are doing,

are spontaneously combusting, and you live on a place called Elder Burn. It's a conspiracy. It's just old people trying to go out in weird ways so their name gets remembered. That's what I'm settling on. I don't blame him at all. Go out in flames, literally.

But come on now. The realm, his last, the dude that burned, his name was Ashton. These people live on Elder Burn. Come on, man. A little bit. On the nose, isn't it? A little on the nose.

So, yeah, a bunch of residents in this, like, maybe apartment complex type of area, just heard screaming all of a sudden. And there's a lot of witnesses to this case, too. This is what makes it great. So at first people thought it was just children being shitheads, like, as they do. But then it kept going. And they're like, wait, this isn't, this isn't normal. What is that screaming? I mean, they're like, it sounds inhuman.

So people started coming out of their apartments to see what the hell is happening. one was a dude named Victor Cunnington and he said the screaming sounded agonizing so right after the screaming he sees a dude come running out of the apartment building

on fucking fire no way like engulfed head to toe and fire and this dude starts running towards the corridor just screaming his head off and he gets to the door of a woman named Betty Whiteside

kind of another weird name She lived opposite his flat and he just starts hammering on it. Help me, help me, help me. And I guess this was confirmed later because investigators found these black scorch marks on this wooden door where he had struck it repeatedly. And so obviously the people start running towards him. A dude named Patrick Fury, as in furiously burning, man. He was a nurse's officer who kind of knew how to respond to a burn emergency. So he grabs a rug and tried wrapping it around this dude to smother the flames.

but it didn't work. Fire just kept going. Damn. Another resident actually pants the dude. He took his pants off and ripped him right off. Oh, insult to injury. Yeah, and he burned his own hands doing that. Oh, shit.

They're on fire, dude. Like what? Yeah. So they're trying to put this dude out. He's on fire trying to put this dude out while he's just screaming his head off in the corridor. And then while everybody's dealing with that, a second person comes running out of the apartment. And it's a woman who is also on fire.

No. What? So now you have these two humans just burning up in the hallway. Elders burning. And they're trying to help her too, obviously, but eventually EMS arrives and the flames do get extinguished. But the dude died before he could even get any medical treatment. And this is Edward Mason, a 50-year-old railway worker who lived in the flat. And Mason was married, but his wife had apparently gone back to Jamaica or something sometime earlier.

but the woman actually was a little bit younger and lived close by, and they said that she visited Mason frequently. So he's banging this chick and God sets him both on fire while I set it down. Shit, dude. Cormic. God, damn. She was still alive, just barely, though. So she was rushed to the burn unit at the hospital in critical condition.

And the police were like, we got to talk to her immediately because she's probably the only person alive who knew what the hell happened in the hospital. that apartment. Yeah, no shit. So while she's being rushed to the hospital, firefighters go inside this apartment, and that's when they were like, der FERC is this, because the apartment wasn't burned again,

but they had just watched two people come out of there, head to toe in flames. But they said that the flat or the apartment in America was basically untouched. There was no burned furniture or anything, no raging blaze. Again, no obvious cause of this,

of a major fire. They did say the hallway had pieces of charred clothing scattered across it where they'd fallen from the victims, as you'd expect. But inside the actual apartment, they're like, we don't know. They did find a little bottle of flammable liquid, which they believed to be lighter fluid. So, of course, that immediately raises the possibility of total conventional explanation, right? Maybe they'd gotten a fight. Somebody threw lighter fluid. The other person set the fire, and then they both caught on fire.

It happens. And apparently neighbors right before the screaming started, they did hear raised voices. There was also small smears of blood on the wall. And this woman who had been on fire also had a minor head wound in addition to all of the burning. So the investigators are like, okay, so there's a violent fight. One of them, you know, pushed her head into the wall. Somebody else grabbed the lighter fluid. Boom.

Totally reasonable, right? It is. She may freak out when she got set on fire, combust it and hit her head on the wall when she stood up or something. That's the thing is they can't ever figure out a chronology that makes sense for what they saw. So obviously the detectives couldn't ever fully nail down that that's what had happened. There was actually no clear evidence at least that the lighter fluid had been poured over either of them. And obviously no fire damage showing where it had ignited. and nobody had seen what happened

before dude came running out into the hallway. The police put detectives right by the woman's bedside and just waited for her to come to. They're like, if she woke up, this can all be solved in 30 seconds. But she never did. The following day, she croaked.

Damn. So now the only two witnesses to whatever happened inside the apartment were gone. And obviously they investigated the possibility of murder, they thought made me murder suicide, some kind of bizarre, mutual thing, you know, suicide pact or something, you know. So, yeah. But none of it, they went through all these theories and none of it really fit.

And they also, well, the evidence suggested, I guess, that nobody else had been inside the apartment. And then less than three weeks later, they concluded the investigation and open verdict. They're like, we don't know. We have no idea. And this is 1978. We're not talking about 1700s anymore. This is semi-modern policing. And they were, I don't fucking know.

I don't know what happened. There were sideburns on the scene, for sure. Side burns. Yeah. What a weird case. The problem with these open verdicts that they come across a lot in these stories is that it always creates more problems than it solves. Because two people just spontaneously combusting it basically the same time is kind of an enormous stretch. so it does lead you more towards

they set each other on fire or something. But then why would they go, like if that was their goal, why would they go around screaming and knocking on people's doors? Maybe they were like, mistake was made.

Yeah, it's a good idea before you light the flames. And then about 30, I'd say about three seconds into that, it starts to not be a good idea anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And so you may just...

But how long does it take to burn through all the nerves and then you don't feel anything? I don't know, but this one's weird too because it said head to toe, which is unintrinsic for this phenomenon. If we're categorizing

it as the spontaneous human combustion because it's 99.9% of the time. Human torso is what burns and it leaves behind. There's this case here, man, I looked up. Uh, 1951. So this lady, this Mary Rieger, are you going to do this? I don't want to ruin it. Uh, I don't, there's so many names and dates in here. I don't know. Maybe. In Florida, St. Petersburg, Florida, she was found almost entirely cremated in her apartment chair leaving behind only a shrunken head and one undamaged satin shoe. This was investigated by the FPB. eyes. So it's interesting how head to toe they were on fire and that the dude pantsed him. I mean, all of these kind of things because usually it's not the case in this.

It's like the guy said with the other one, the fire, fireter who had never seen it just cut immediately. There's still a lot of clothing and things left. You know, and extremities usually always because it starts from within. It's like an implosion event, you know? And that what Victor Schalberger talks about that implosion is the way that nature gets its energy, not from explosion. So like waterfalls and things like that. It's almost like the body implodes on itself and that amount of friction or something combusts.

The only other thing I was thinking on this is sort of localized ball lightning. If ball lightning just pops up inside you or something and then grows. That'll be in part two. Oh, damn it. Okay. Well, do they have miniature nuclear war going inside you

from the scale factor? From the mundane to the magnificent, maybe one of your liver cells goes to war with your stomach and then it sends off nuclear weapons, they figure this out, Atlanta's themselves. Chain reaction. But your body is the host, yeah.

It does seem like some, I mean, even if you don't go crazy like we do to the Swedenborg shit or the mundane and magnificent, like even if it's not something crazy like your cells firing nukes at each other, it does seem to be some kind of chain reaction

that then... That. And it's always, in the torso is interesting because that's where what, all of your working organs happen, right? Like, it gets down to your legs and those are just NPC cells because it's just your leg.

Oh, that's a little incendiary, pun intended. But yes, your feet cells would argue that. But I agree with you that it does seem to be this internal system from a system's perspective. It's a central core meltdown. And all are affected at once. That is this chain reaction that then just poofs you out. And then it's like this big bang of your body almost

where all these little greasy pieces of you are now coating an environment and everything in it. It's so bizarre, dude. I mean, yeah, the greases, I'd be interested to know if these people were morbidly overweight, too. Well, they are sedentary, so maybe. It's in the article. Victims were usually over 60. Second one down is victims were overweight, full stop.

That's a period at the end of that. Victims were overweight. A big ass human candle. That's right. Damn, and now it makes me think of Fight Club, because didn't they make soap out of fat? Oh. You know what I'm talking about? while. I think I remember that.

Okay. I don't know if it's from that movie, maybe. Okay. So, yeah, with this case, though, the investigators pretty much leaned into the fact that these neighbors heard this argument right before. Yeah. The lighter fluid being in there is suspicious. The blood on the wall is suspicious. So they leaned more towards that, like, there's a mundane sequence of events in there somewhere.

We just don't know what it is. So case closed. That's annoying. But the whole thing with the dude, Edward, running through the corridor, head to tone flames, and then beating his hands on Betty Whiteside's door. And then the second person coming out with apparently the same, out of the same unburned apartment, but also engulfed. So that's the kind of case that explains why this SHCs, we'll call it, spontaneous human combustion. That's why it keeps coming up, at least, you know, through history.

history because anybody who's seen something like that is like, oh, there's a normal explanation, but that's not an, that's not an explanation really. It's a reasonable assumption at best, but you still have to figure out what actually happened. I think I know what happened in this case. I'm going to go ahead and say it. I think that the lover's quarreled type thing, she wanted him to leave the wife. He wouldn't do it, blah, blah, blah. He, the physical altercation, she gets bashed into the wall, maybe after she sets him on fire perhaps. And then some of the old, here's what I'm going to say. He pushes her.

Maybe she pushes him, squirts lighter fluid all over him, and then sets him ablaze. He shoves the shit out of her, hits her head on the wall, and when he does so, the lighter fluid she still had in her hands gets all over her,

of course, flame by proxy. Now she's igniting. He's running around the room already lit up, running out of the house, and then she follows him because now the fire has spread

so much on her. That's what I'm going to say happen. Perfectly reasonable. Perfectly reasonable. Well, and yeah, in that case, didn't have a lot of the hallmark of other cases too.

Like I said, just the torso or being reduced to ash, that didn't happen. So I would lean more towards this was some kind of weird lover's quarrel. But worth noting anyway. Hot, lovers corral action. And yes, it's nice to be included, though, because now we can kind of look at it and go,

you know what? Which one of these is not like the other kind of things? And this one feels a little bit different. Yeah. Well, yeah. And that's the point of, you know, including all these stories is so that we can, you know, wheat from the chaffet.

Word. That brings us to January of 1980. Police were called out to a house in a small Welsh mining community again, England. Damn, what the hell? Okay. And I had to look this up to make sure it wasn't a typo, but it was a mining community called Ebbwe-Vail, EBBW, super Welsh. It's Latin for catch-on-fire for no fucking reason. And you're old.

Yeah. the ebbbw Welsh people How the fuck do you say that? It's probably like Eib or something. Yeah, like Oeth. O apostrophe, T.H.

Apostrophe. Like, help us out, guys. But one of the guys who showed up to this was John Hamer and he had spent 25 years working as the like the CSI type guy, whatever Welsh version of that is.

And obviously he'd seen plenty of disgusting things. But this one just stopped him. He's like, what? he was told by another investigator, another cop or something that, and when you go in there, it's rather unusual death by fire,

which turned out to be quite the understatement. So again, he's going in there, he's seen plenty of these. It didn't look like the scene of this major blaze. It was warm inside, and there's a little smoke in the air, but there wasn't this devastation of things,

you know, that you'd assume would be there when somebody, destroys most of their body by fire. Oh, yeah. So they bring him over to the victim. Except, you know, as he described it, it wasn't exactly a body anymore. There was just a pile of ash and bone, so they didn't get most of the bone this time.

Oh, okay. The fireplace. Again, this is a 73-year-old widower. And they just, they give him a pseudonym, Burt Jones to protect the family, I guess. Burnt Jones. Come on. That's probably why they did that. So he was apparently sitting in his armchair near the fire.

This again, it's almost like a high strangeness thing where there's just enough of a plausible explanation to kind of write it off and be like, this isn't anything weird. Yeah. So only his lower legs and feet remain. Still wearing socks in parts of his pants. Okay. The leg bones above that had been calcined or calcined.

You know what that is? No, what is calcined or calcine. That's what we talked about earlier, basically this very. vaporization. Oh, where it'll, yep. That's not the scientific,

that's what I got from the, from Wikipedia or whatever. Gotcha. Calcine, calcined. And his skull was blackened and was lying away from the main pile of remains. Wait, just the skull.

Was there any skin on it or hair or anything? It just says it was blackened. So it was a bit scorched. But most of the rest of him was just gone. Okay. The weird thing is that his armchair had these burn marks on it, It was only, like, it is in, it was in the Burt Jones shape. Like the chair had burned, but only in the shape of this dude.

Holy shit. And there was a little, like a small chair or love seat or something, less than a meter away, which is about three feet. Three feet. Yeah. And there was like loose sheets or covers or something on it, not even touched. Another weird part is that the carpet underneath this pile of remains was only burned. where the remains had actually been laying. It just a couple centimeters away, barely singed.

And under this carpet were these plastic floor tiles, and those survived too. Not melted or anything. Weird. Even directly underneath this remains, the plastic tiles underneath were just untouched. And again, there's a TV. It still worked, but the little plastic knobbies were warped a bit, but didn't catch fire or anything. Lamp shades were melted, though. and there's thick soot again

coating the upper portions of the room like when you burn a candle too long on your mantle you know how you get that black shit up there sounds like that creosote yeah but again the the heat was I don't know selective kind of so Bert here

poor rest in peace Bert he had been expected to like a Sunday luncheon with his two daughters and when he never got there they're like I should go check on dad he's getting old probably caught on fire again. Yeah, he caught on Sunday. He always does this.

So the house was locked and nobody answered so they forced their way inside and apparently the living room had been sealed up pretty well against the drafty Welsh countryside. And when they opened the door, just smoke just starts pouring out. And then they saw the pile.

And so that's when the forensic team was called and immediately they're trying to make it easy. You know, they're like, oh, open fireplace, conventional fire, obviously answer, right? Maybe he had some kind of medical event, you know, fall into the grate, struck his head, caught fire, died, easy. But then there's other weird little details

that there were these burned fibrous materials on the front of the fire grate. And originally the forensics team was like, oh, some, you know, hair. And that explains he knocked himself out, caught him fire. case closed. This happens all the time. But then they tested these fibers later and they were of bovine origin. What? A cow?

Cow hair. Okay. Did he have cows? Could be explained. It doesn't say, but that could be explained away, right? Uh-huh. But apparently it was weird enough for them to include. Okay.

So whatever these hairs were, they didn't prove that he had, you know, gone head first into the fireplace. And there's one other problem. The, uh, the ashes in the grate weren't disturbed. I know what happened in this one. Cow broke in Laser Vision. He knocked over a lantern, like in Chicago, or was that in London? Laser Vision, Chicago started the, that's what happened. He did this over in Welsh and it started the Chicago fire, same year.

And all of a sudden, all these old buildings burned up too. Right. It's the butterfly flapping its wings. Yeah. The cow kicking this old man into a fire and spontaneously combust. It happens all the time. Easy. So you didn't imagine, like, if a full-grown man collapsed into an open coal fire,

you'd probably expect some evidence that his body had hit it. And there really wasn't. The fire, the ashes were untouched in it. But I guess it could have been roaring and maybe. Yeah, jumped out, I guess. There's always ways to explain it away. That's the funny part about this. Man.

But the chair complicated things even more because the burn pattern kind of suggested that he had been in contact with the chair while his body was burning. Right. So that kind of throws. out the he fell out of his chair, knocked his head out, caught on fire and then burned because he was burning while he was in the chair. Or he didn't catch on fire and then sit down, take a break in the middle of it. Right. That's kind of what they say. Like, oh, well, so if he fell into the fireplace first, did he get back up, sit down and then just burn up?

And maybe like, that's my time. This is how I go. Maybe he's like, hey, fuck it. I guess this is how I'm going. And again, possibly, uh, possible technically, but, uh, not exactly, you know, straightforward answers. Reasonable. Yeah. And then they noticed the light bulbs. There was this orangeish sticky residue coating the light bulbs. Guess what they did? They tested this one.

Okay. And it was identified as human tissue that had been vaporized or calcined, calcined, whatever, by the heat and onto the bulb. Damn. That's again, not really a problem, but they're like, that is an extreme heat, though, to do that to a body. Yes. So what? Another cop that came in, Sergeant Russell here. he was one of the first guys to actually come into this scene and he he described the victim as having burned like a candle uh wick effect yeah god so he remembered seeing the lower legs totally intact while basically everything above that was ash uh he also remembered that several officers and relatives just stood around looking at the scene because everyone was like what the fuck are we looking at the and of course somebody was like oh is it spontaneous combustion and the uh forensics officers that arrived

basically shut that shit down immediately. They're like, this isn't real, so it's another explanation. This is the thing about science in general. It's like, that's definitely not true, so it's something else. Right. It's like, why don't you look at all of it, though? I mean. And then you spin your wheels trying to have all this stuff fit in explanation, which you ruled out

immediately. Yeah. Which could be just the thing. Maybe you could put forensic evidence on discovering why it did that rather than just denying that that's denying the evidence. Yeah. So, and Russell wasn't convinced by this, obviously, even though I don't know if he believed in spontaneous human combustion or not, but he just wasn't convinced by this. So the other thing that bothered him was the body was burned so badly, but the room wasn't.

And apparently Jenny and Peter, the authors here, interviewed the guy, and he told, he told them that the senior officers eventually treated it as a straightforward accidental death, but he personally knew. never believed it had been fully explained. He's like, nobody convinced me this was just a normal accident. I've seen a lot of these things. It's not normal. I guess the pathologist found carbon monoxide in his system, Mr. Bert here, meaning that he was still breathing after the fire begun. They're like, why would he?

Oh, because he was breathing in his own burning. So I'm saying maybe he did catch on fire and just take a seat and wait for it to take its toll. Man. But yeah, they were convinced that. he was still alive while he was burning. I guess another neighbor had testified at the investigation that he'd seen Bert sitting beside the fireplace the previous evening. And the coroner apparently concluded that he had probably caught fire while seated, fallen forward, struck the grate, and died on the floor.

That seems like more plausible. So in ember, he starts getting on fire and who gets up to try to put it out, knocks his head on the grate, burns. and that's where the cow hair came from, right? There's too many weird things. Too weird. A cow apported into his living room, he got so shocked, the uproar, whatever,

teleported the cow in there and then teleported it back out caused this ignition of the human body. That's another one we can throw on the palm. It's not impossible. That's why it's so annoying because none of these explanations are impossible. It's just like, I guess,

again, accidental death verdict. and maybe that's exactly what happened. So that's how they close that one out. They're like accidental death, case closed by. This is so weird. And in such the freaky woo-woo category, because this applies to anybody. This means any of us, well,

you're more likely if you're over 60, overweight, sedentary and an alcoholic, and living in Wales. But other than that, any of this could happen to anybody. And so usually folks want an answer if it's been identified as something mysterious. But if you can't put an answer to this, then you get fear.

Because then you got potential presidents being asked the question, Well, what are you going to do about the spontaneous human combustion? I plan to, and they're like, well, I voted for you so you'd eliminate spontaneous human combustion because it could happen to any of us at any time. We know the facts. This is what we voted for. That's right.

You're letting your constituents down. Yeah, I'll drop it off there before the next story starts up. But we got a lot left and it goes, they do go into some theorizing about ball lightning and UFO connection possibly. So stay tuned for that on. next Tuesday show. Yeah. What if they're trying to put you back in your body? But there's some weird phase differential or something,

the shift from 40 to 3D back into your body or something like this, and it just glitches out and then just ignites the whole damn thing. And then because that's an aura fire or something, you know, it just burns really, really bright. I don't know. Really bizarre. So many possibilities and none of them make a lot of sense. Unless you're into looking at the freaky shit we do,

then it makes a little more sense, I'd hope. Yeah. And maybe, you know, One of his, like his gallbladder created CERN and then it created the, they found the Higgs boson and then it just created this huge black hole which just took everything out. Yeah, that could happen. I'm not putting it off the table. I'm not putting anything off the table these days. It's so interesting. His gallbladder made CERN. Yep.

I'm looking forward to the additional stories with this, man. Yeah, because the ball lightning component is what I was thinking of that it just sort of originates in you and it just goes whoop and just swells out and drops your hands on the ground, a shrunken head and it's over and it's very quick. Yeah. That would be a, and maybe there's many different types of spontaneous human combustion. Maybe the conditions are varied in that just like a Bigfoot, there's actually a Yeti and a big foot and a couple of different ways you can look at this thing. Right. Like a variety of alien species or something like that. There's many ways you could spontaneously combust.

Damn, some more preferable than others, it sounds. And that's the point of all these stories is to go through possibilities and try to, they're trying to point to it as spontaneous human combustion is one thing. But I don't think it is. Like you said, I think there's different things that could contribute to it. So weird, dude. I love it, man. Great pull. Great pull.

Yeah, I had a blast going through this one. That's when I knew, oh, this is what I'm doing for the show, not the last one I was working on. This is perfect, man. Brilliant. In the summertime, too, because it's all nice and hot here with our M.U. Weather Report, I feel like we could spontaneously combust at any time, man. So it's a brilliantly seasonally themed show. I lived, though.

I survived. Nice. Well done. Lucky for you, right? Mm-hmm. Well, before we get out of here, remind us again what you have coming up in Plus. We're going to wrap up this beautiful saga of the visitors from within with Lisa Royal and Keith Priest. And we're going to hear from Germain today about how to stop, change, alter the abduction experience. And your whole interaction with these things, even if it's psychic, if you guys are, if anybody out there has dreams of these things, technically that's one of the different types.

There's three different types of them, and one of them is completely non-physical and psychic. So they're finding you in these altered states. And if that's the case, there are a couple of measures you can take and we're going to go over that. So it doesn't have to be this slave to it. You can imagine in one of these, how I like it this was, is like if you're going out to trink a bear for its betterment or something like that, you've agreed that this needs to happen, the bear doesn't necessarily bridge that gap. But let's say that the bear chooses to bridge that gap and actually turns around and says, you know what, I welcome this. Take me, guys. Show me what you got here.

Would it change the experience for us? would we be less scared, treat it differently, treat it less hostily, perhaps? It's kind of this idea that the abduction phenomena, the way that we've heard it, every single individual that gets touched in that way, has chosen to be touched exactly that way. And if they'd prefer something different, we've got the tools for you on how to do that. Sign up in the links below. We're going to wrap this saga up. Hell yeah. Looking forward to the ending of it. And I might actually have to get a copy of that book now to see what else they have in it, because you're barely scratching the surface of this book,

aren't you. I'm leaving a bunch out, and this is a narrative I'm telling through the chapters that are here. So we picked and pulled from it to give this version of it away. But, man, there's so much more in it that we're not going to cover two more books of Lisa Royals that have already gotten in. One of them is the first one she did with Keith Priest, which is already fantastic. That one features a lot of Sasha that chick-shea channels. And then you've got future sex, which is already very interesting. I'm already getting balls deep into that one, and it's very interesting. So we have a lot more to hear about when it comes to this kind of stuff and just been enjoying the saga, honestly. It's been very cool, but we're going to wrap it up. Love it. Got great comments so far on it, so we're looking forward to hearing your end cap on that.

And we have to link the version 2 of it because the first print of it got too valuable. There was one for $8 when we started the saga, and now it's $220 if you guys want to go check it. it out on Amazon. So the popularity of this saga will not go unnoticed, but there is a version two out that I do like. Excellent. For a reasonable offering. Yeah. Well, if you're interested in all this, sign up in the links below to get Plus

and get a higher bitrate feed and no commercials, obviously, and just a fun time and it ties a lot of things together that you're missing out if you're not on Plus. But if you are a free listener, thank you anyway, and we will catch you next week. Welcome to your Plus extension, and thank you all for joining us here on Plus.