RedHanded - ShortHand: Spontaneous Human Combustion

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

People who seem to have suddenly burst into flames – leaving just a pile of ash, a foot or skull, and a puddle of strange grease – have left biologists and police stumped for hundreds of years. And as recently as 2010, a medical examiner in the UK was forced to write ‘spontaneous combustion’ on a real death certificate.But there are some very strong scientific theories, and they are… unpleasant. Join us to find out why we think people go WHOOMP – and the very disturbing ‘human wick effect’.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

the image of that lonely foot burned into our teenage brains. I hope I am not alone. Do you remember it? No. Yes. Yes, I remember. Oh, okay, thank God. Because my intro doesn't work.

If you're not familiar with this image, I took a real leap of faith being like, yes, you will a, yeah, she would be there. I'm sure this was in a textbook. I am sure it was in a GCSE science textbook. I can't remember what it was in. So it could have been in a GCSE textbook. It could have been on rotten.com.

I don't know, but I remember this image. Gross. If it was in my GCSE textbook, God knows why. We may never know how that particular image made it onto the national curriculum, but I, for one, have never forgotten it, absolutely stamped onto my brain. I'm going to describe it for you. It's a lonely leg that looks like sort of half a calf, and that's on the floor.

And then there's what I now understand to be the frame of an arm, armchair that's just metal and on the floor. And there's a bit of a dark splodgy patch next to the leg and under the frame of the chair. And also a toilet and a bath in the background. Yeah. Who's got an armchair in the bath? Well, people who sat on fire for no reason. I'm still haunted by the possibility that I might go on fire at any moment. But I never bothered to learn who the leg over was, and today I'm going to change that for all of us. That famous lonely leg belonged to 67-year-old Mary Risa, who met a very unpleasant end indeed. On the 2nd of July, 1991, Mary's landlady noticed that the dawn-ob to Mary's Floridian home was unusually hot. I'm not sure exactly how

she discovered that, presumably through some sort of home-alone reenactment situation. As a landlady, like... Going around checking. That's pretty nosy. Taking your thermometer and sticking it into people's doorknobs, what are you doing? Maybe she just touched it and was like, oh, too much, too hot. But unlike McCauley Culkin, the landlady opted not to face whatever was on the other side of the door alone, and she called the police smart.

Good work, landlady. Now once the police arrived, they discovered Mary Rees's remains reduced to a pile of ash, all except, of course, for her lonely leg. So they took a picture of what they found. The chair that Mary had presumably been sitting on was also destroyed, safe again for the metal frame that you can see in this infamous picture. I believe she must just have an armchair in the bathroom. Maybe it's like a commode.

Was she an old lady? wasn't she? She was 67, but she wasn't particularly mobile, so it's not unreasonable to assume that she may have just put an armchair in the bathroom for ease. Sure. Everything else in the house, though, apart from the armchair,

was totally intact. Only Mary had been engulfed by the blaze. How is that possible? How can a fire not have spread throughout her whole house? And on top of that, no one could figure out what had caused the fire in the first. place, it really seemed as if Mary had been the source of the fire herself. So, friends, is it scientifically possible for a human body living or very recently deceased

to set a light with no external source of ignition? Are we all tranquil as a forest with a fire within? This is the sizzling shorthand. When you Google spontaneous human combustion, you will be told to see also exploding animal, pyrokinesis and fan death. Thank you very much, Wikipedia. I most certainly will be seeing also.

Do you know about fan death? Oh, is that when a ceiling fan falls on you? No. It is a belief in South Korea, and I believe in other parts of Asia, that if you sleep with the fan on, it will suck all of the oxygen out of the room and you will suffocate in your sleep.

No, I've never heard of that before. Fan death is taken very seriously in South Korea, let me tell you that. But it's a place that gets hot. What are they doing, just not having fans? Is this spread by air conditioning companies? What's going on? I think it is spread by big aircon, yeah, because it's obviously not true. But it's, yeah, people won't sleep with fans on.

Oh my God, I can't sleep without a fan on. It's my favorite thing. This is atrocious. So anyway, faced with the back, The ruffling puzzle of Mary Reese's passing, the FBI denied that the cause of Mary's death was spontaneous human combustion, or SHC, if you're nasty. But it wouldn't be the very first time they were full of shit now, would it? No, don't believe a thing the FBI say. No.

Spontaneous human combustion does seem impossible, but what if it isn't? Unlike our potential ancient GCSC textbooks that maybe Hannah and I are both having some sort of Mandela-induced. the hallucination about, we are going to tell you once and for all, if it is true, if you really could just go up in flames. Spontaneous human combustion isn't a term one can just fling around willy-nilly. It's very specific. And it's used in reference to a body, a human body, that has had significant portions of its middle section reduced to ashes, with less damage to the head and or extremities and minimal damage to the environment. in which the body was discovered,

which is exactly what had happened to Mary Risa. Those all have to be present. All of those parameters have to be present for a death to even be considered. Sure. As a potential spontaneous human combust. Understood, understood. So yes, Mary is far from the only suspected human combustor to have lived, though. Let's have a trickle through some others for you.

In 1970, 89-year-old Margaret Hogan was found to have burned almost totally away, only leaving behind her little legs. And like a lot of the suspected spontaneous human combustion victims we're going to tell you about, Margaret lived on her own, so we will never for sure know what actually happened. We can only tell you the state her house was in after she burned to death in it. Some plastic flowers had melted on a table, and so had the same. TV that was 12 feet from Margaret's armchair, the one that she had burned in, but the rest of her house on Prussia Street in Dublin was left totally undisturbed. According to a friend who had been over the day before, a small coal fire was burning at Margaret's house the previous day, but no connection between this fire and Margaret's death could be found. An inquest didn't help either.

So Margaret's cause of death was recorded as death by burning, but the source cause of the fire was listed as unknown, giving old marge an official mystery death. I don't know how you don't connect a fire and person burned in-house. Maybe there's no like trail from the fire to Margaret's body. Maybe she was really far away from it. Sure, but it seems like that's quite a big, quite a big clue. Yes.

On Christmas Eve 1885, the same fate befell another woman, Matilda Rooney, and her husband Patrick actually suffocated from the flame fumes in another room. No one suspected foul play. A farmhand who knew the couple well and had spent a few hours drinking whiskey with them that night, didn't see anything out of the ordinary. The blaze stayed confined to Matilda's whiskey-soaked corpse, never spreading throughout the house. And we've got even more examples.

from the annals of combustion. In 1980, 73-year-old Henry Thomas's child legnubs and skull were discovered in his South Whalayan council house. Henry's feet and little legs were still clothed, but the rest of him was totally incinerated, as was the chair he'd been sitting on when he burst into flames. And exactly like Matilda Rooney's house,

the rest of Henry's home was completely untouched by the blaze. The fireplace was still lit and no flames had migrated, nor were there any accelerants at the scene. As far as I could find, there is only one case that has been officially certified as death by spontaneous combustion. And it's surprisingly recent. The death belongs to a poor Barser called Michael Flachity, who in 2010 was elderly and he lived alone and he left almost nothing of himself behind. Dr. Kieran McLaughlin made this statement during the inquiry into Michael's death. This fire was thoroughly investigated and I'm left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation.

Wow. A doctor. Medical examiner said that. Wow. Mm-hmm. And so the coroner wrote spontaneous human combustion on Michael's death certificate. In 2010, wowsers. Wowsers burnt trousers. The only damage. left behind by old Michael's death were soot marks on the ceiling and the floor, vertically bookending the exact spot he burned alive. No way. Yes, way. 2010 way.

Oh my God. So other than this confirmed one, cases like Mary Risa, her red hot doorknob, and all of the rest that we listed are suspected SHC cases because no source of external ignition can be identified at the scene. Hence, the spontaneous bit.

Most of the time, the cause of the fire was listed as unknown, and in all cases after the combustion, a foul-odoured, oily residue was left where the person's body bits once were. Paul Rowley, a fellow of the Royal Society, was the first bloke to come up with this concept, that a person could just burst into flames with no outside help. In 1746, he wrote an article called Philosophical Transactions, all about the mysterious death of Countess Cornelia Zangaroo Bandi,

to whom all of the above death descriptors very much applied. The Italian noblewoman just didn't get up one day. And when her maid went to check on her, she found a room full of soot, a couple of legs, a head, a pile of ashes and a layer of stinky oil. As it turned out, Vandy loved a brandy and was even known to rub camphorized brandy on her body to relieve pain.

I had to look up what that means. Camphorized means like in wax. So she's like turning brandy into like wax to like... Oh God. ...lube up with. So point being, she's absolutely covered in fucking booze. High proof. Brilliant.

She turned us up into a fucking brandy Yankee. Yes. In his article, Paul Rowley suggested that all of this booze loving and booze rubbing all over herself could have caused the. Countess Cornelia to go up in flames like a Christmas pudding. And naturally, the slightest chance that that may have actually happened caught the imagination of creatives the world over, and spontaneous human combustion started showing up in fiction as well as in medical journals.

Most famously, Dickens killed off alcoholic merchant and landlord Mr. Crook in his novel Bleak House with a case of the combustos, leaving behind a, quote, dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. In later editions, Dickens actually defended this death decision in a preface to the novel citing several famous cases and support of eminent physicians writing, I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received. Nicolai Gogol and Herman Melville made use of the human combustion mystery in their works too. And they too used it to expel moral judgment on fat alcoholics that no one liked. The moral of Bleak House, Redburn and Dead Souls being

don't be a chubby alcoholic or you will burst into brandy inspired flames and die. And you'll probably deserve it. A couple of hundred years down the line, there was a more medical interest. In the 1938 edition of the British Medical Journal, specifically, an article by L. A perry tended to agree. In all known cases of suspected spontaneous combustion, there were all of the things we know. No external ignition, hands and feet left behind, no damage to items surrounding the victim,

and horrible, stinky grease, etc. But also that they were always chronic alcoholics, and usually old ladies. This was explored further by scientific investigator, Joe Nekyll and forensic analyst John F. Fisher. They spent a couple of years studying 30 historical cases of suspected spontaneous human combustion starting in 1725 all the way up until 1982. And they published a two-part report in 1984.

And they found that most of the time, the burned cadavers had actually been found next to plausible ignition sources like a candle or a lamp or an entire fireplace. And those details were just conveniently left out of the contemporary. reports. Another correlation between cases was intoxication or incapacitation of the victims, which meant that they were careless, perhaps, and then once they were in trouble, they were too fucked up to do anything sensible about it. And then in cases where the victim's bodies were not too badly damaged, the fuel for the combustion usually came from clothing or a blanket or something like that. But when there was significant damage to the deceased body,

they deduced that it was down to something called. And this is disgusting, the wick effect. In alleged SHC cases where extensive additional fuel sources were the cause, like upholstery, floor coverings, chair stuffing, etc., because materials like that retain melted fat. So when the fat old drunk woman sets herself on fire with maybe a forgotten fag end, she melts into the fabric surrounding her,

which is collected by the fabric, raising the temperature of the fire, meaning more fat gets melted and held. The low and slow circle of life means that very little damage happens to the bodies, or the surroundings, and the fire is contained to the body. That is the wick effect.

So basically, buying the wrong carpet can mean that you could die whilst becoming an actual human torch. So fire, like, my understanding is that most things in the natural world don't go out of their way. They'll take the path of least resistance, right? So the fire isn't spreading because it doesn't need to because the fat keeps melting. And then the fat keeps melting into the chair or the upholstery or the blanket or whatever. And then it holds it there.

So the fire gets hotter, but melts more fat. And then that gets stuck into the chair as well. So it's all contained into the human candle. And it doesn't spread to the rest of the house because it doesn't need to. The good news is for your fat to melt, one does already have to be dead. So it's not happening while you're alive. Okay. And a tear in the skin has to happen for the fat to run out onto the surrounding fabrics.

But it really does seem like that just can't happen without an external flame. According to Roger Byrd, a pathologist at the University of Adelaide, the reality is that people combust, but not spontaneously. If people could spontaneously burst into flames, you'd be down at Walmart and suddenly the little old lady beside you pushing the trolley would explode. And that just doesn't happen ever. So in what we perceive to be cases of spontaneous human combustion, the argument is it's usually a cigarette that gets dropped because that burns with it. There's no evidence that that will be left behind. In 1998, forensic scientist John DeHan wrapped a dead pig up in a bunch of blankets,

not bacon one, and set it on fire. And that little piggy burned for hours, broadcast by the BBC. The fire didn't spread anywhere else and very eventually the pig's entire midsection had been reduced to ash, leaving only his little trotters behind. There are other reasons that the fire doesn't spread to the surroundings other than the tantalizing attraction of melted fat to a flame. Firstly, as Nickell and Fisher pointed out, fire generally burns upwards, and in cases of alleged SHC, the fires were quite small, so may not have easily spread to surrounding objects.

Secondly, as illustrated by the University of Tennessee in 2002, osteoporotic bones, so the bones of old people, particularly old ladies, fragment at a far higher rate when cremated than healthy ones, meaning that when somebody with osteoporosis is burned, the flame produces a smaller amount of heat, making it unlikely to spread from burning tissue. With all that in mind, what do we think really happen to poor old Mary Risa

and her extremely famous leg? Well, most people think that she took a bunch of sleeping pills and fell asleep mid-cigarette, which ignited her nighty and turned her into a candle of doom. And the floor was cement, so there was nothing. else to spread to and nothing else around her butt. And the reason that it's just legs or feet or trotters left behind is they don't have very much fat in them. Yeah, okay. So humans may not spontaneously burn from the inside out, but there is

something on our earthly plane that does. Hey, it's hey, it's gross, like what you would feed a horse. This amazing horse food can light up out of nowhere at low ambient temperatures with no external ignition source at all. If you leave a bunch of hay lying around for too long, it starts to decay and that can cause an exothermic reaction and lead to a big fire. The conditions do have to be quite specific. Thank God, the hay has to be damp and stacked into a big pile and left for at least a couple of weeks. but it can happen and apparently does happen quite often. Oh. So let's get back to humans, because plants are boring.

That's not what you came here for. In all of the cases of suspected spontaneous human combustions, there are a similar set of factors. Almost all of them were not very mobile people, due to age or in some cases obesity, and they were all, therefore, in reasonably poor health. Almost all of them appeared to have died in their sleep or were unable to move once they caught fire.

A majority of the deceased were also smokers, which is never great for you and is a leading cause of heart attack, increasing the likelihood that the person had a heart attack, midfag, died, and dropped the lit tab onto themselves, starting the fire. And the mysterious reason the flames never seem to spread to the rest of the room after the person catches a light,

giving the real air of mystery to the situation, is the wick effect, the literal human candle. After the small external flame from the dropped cigarette, for example, charles the clothing of the victim, their skin splits and all of their delicious subcutaneous fat blobs out and is absorbed into their clothes and or upholstery and it becomes a wick. The fire will be continuous as long as the fuel is available, just like how candle wax is drawn into a lit candle. Humans contain a lot of water, which is usually a fire enemy, but in all of our cases it would appear that the combustion was so slow that it went on for hours,

leaving plenty of time for all of the water in a person to evaporate and recondense nearby, most likely on a window. So not only are you walking in and finding two little nubby ankles, their human water is just hanging to the panes of glass around you on a mirror or something. Oh, oh no. And quite a lot of the cases have a booze whiff to them, and although we're not reining down Dekensian moral judgment on our victims, alcohol might have something to do with a person's ability to turn into a candle.

Biologist Brian J. Ford reckons that ketosis, which is called by alcoholism or a super low-carb diet, produces acetone, which not only takes your nail varnish off, it's extremely flammable, and if you are full of it, you are just a bit more of a fire hazard than a normal person. So, humans absolutely can become a renewable fuel source, but I can say with some certainty, it does appear we cannot just go on fire without a bit of help. Wow. Well, there you go. Now we all know more about that picture that we've probably all seen.

Yeah, just don't smoke in bed would be my, or on your armchair toilet. No, and definitely. Don't rub yourself in sort of fucking brandy butter while you're doing it. No. Save that for the Christmas pud, and we'll see you next week. Goodbye. Bye.