Stuff You Should Know - Is spontaneous human combustion real?

Episode Date: May 28, 2009

Scientists have proven that spontaneous combustion, or burning without an external ignition source, can occur in some objects. But what about human beings? Tune in and learn more about spontaneous human combustion in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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slash family fun. Mississippi Wanderers, welcome. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. No, that didn't count because I was shitting. Oh, well do your cheek thing then too. Chuck. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck Bryant is staring Dolly forward. You have the dull stare of the dairy cow, not the eye of the tiger, Chuck. Right. This is in tribute to the lobotomy episode. Nice. Did I just give you a verbal lobotomy? You did. You don't want to know what we're talking about. Yeah, bad things. Hey Chuck, when I was a kid, I was in the Cub Scouts. Okay, sure. Yeah, Cub Scouts. I never

made it to Boy Scouts. I don't even, yeah, I definitely didn't. And I, you would think that that would have helped shape me as a young man, right? Yeah. You would be wrong. Okay. I can tell you one thing that shaped me more than Cub Scouts ever did and it was a single picture, a photograph and all it was was a leg and there was a sock and a slipper attached to it, black and white. And the thing about this leg is it wasn't severed. The end of it was charred. Yes. And it turns out that this leg belonged to a guy named Dr. Irving J Bentley and the photo was taken in 1966 in his Pennsylvania home. And what happened to Dr. Bentley was that he spontaneously combusted and I thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever heard of in my entire young life. You really

remember seeing that? Oh yeah. Wow. And actually strangely enough, I was at a nursing home once and I saw in real life something that startled me because it looked just like it. It was a prosthetic leg and it was just dumped on this gurney that also had like a TV bedpan. It was apparently like a mobile storage closet right out in the hallway. Right. But there was a prosthetic leg that went from the knee to the foot and it had like knee high pantyhose on it and a shoe still. I'm like, all these people are going to die soon. Can we maybe keep this out of their line of sight? Right. But yeah. So I saw that. I immediately thought of Dr. Bentley's leg. But yeah. Yeah. So I used to just think spontaneous human combustion is the coolest thing ever. It is pretty

remarkable. Yeah. Let's talk about it. Why not? That's a great idea. And I feel bad because someone requested this last week and I don't have the name. I apologize to whoever is out there. This is for you. Becky. Becky, this is for you. No, Binky. Binky. That's right. So yeah, this is a listener request. Have you noticed the uncomfortable pauses have been increasing in frequency lately? It's because you're wearing sunglasses and it's weird. No, it's not just today. Okay. Yeah. You don't like the shades? It's just off-putting because I can't see your beautiful browns. Your dream boat, Chuck. So Chuck, let's get back to spontaneous human combustion. Yes. The earliest written account of it occurs in 1663. Right. And Dutch anatomist Thomas Bartolen

wrote of a woman in Paris who, quote, went up in ashes and smoke. Right? While she was asleep. Right. Which is normal enough. The weird thing is, is this woman, you know, as I imagine was normal for the era, was sleeping on a straw mattress and the straw mattress didn't go up. Yeah. Just the woman did. That was the first clue that something was odd. Something amiss. And then a couple of years later, there was a guy who, he was French. His name was Jonas Dupont. And he apparently, there were enough stories of spontaneous human combustion that he put a collection of them together called the de-incendous caporus, humane, spontaneous. Latin. Dead language. Not a dead language. Oh yeah? No. Trust me. Listener mail came in and scolded us for saying

it was a dead language. I know. It's just a phrase. Sure. That it's dead. Yeah. It's a figure of speech. Yes. It's been said that a day of traveling will bring a basket full of learning. Fill your basket to the brim in Mississippi with family-friendly experiences like the new Mississippi Aquarium, the recently expanded Hattiesburg Zoo, the Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo, and sports and literary attractions too. Expand your sense of wander today at visitmississipi.org slash family fun. Mississippi. Wanderers, welcome. I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild present Bridgewater Season 2. A lot of people now actually believe that there is some kind of mystical force in this region that attracts monsters and

paranormal activity. The Bridgewater Triangle. Now that sounds about right. You're still denying that there's something beyond our understanding going on here? Starring Supernatural's Misha Collins, The Walking Dead's Melissa Panzio, and Rogue One's Alan Tudyk, written by Lauren Shippen and created by me, Erin Mankey. Something about all of this doesn't feel right. Hello? Is someone there? Something went wrong here. Olivia, we should hurry. We have a much bigger problem. What is that? Olivia, run! Listen to Bridgewater now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more over at grimandmild.com slash Bridgewater. So apparently this has been around for a while, at least since the 17th century. And it's only happened a couple hundred times,

I think, between two and three hundred times. People burning up inexplicably a couple hundred times. That's pretty significant. I mean, that lends a lot of credence to it, in my opinion. So let's talk about spontaneous human combustion. And it's actually differentiated from just spontaneous combustion because you stick the human in there, it means a person is burning up. Yeah, other things can spontaneously combust. I know like a bucket of oily rags or hay bales have been known to combust. Which is weird because we know how a bucket of oily rags can combust. As the oxygen interacts with the oily rags, it can actually raise the temperature to the ignition point and then boom, there you go. Or a kid goes by and throws a match in it.

Yeah, one of those two. You know, we used to believe that field mice were born from leftover grain. So maybe oily rags don't really combust spontaneously. It is just little kids. I never thought about it. So let's talk about this, Josh. The deal is your extremities remain intact. That's one of the telltale giveaways. Sometimes. I thought it was all the time. No, it's most of the time. But not always. So what we're saying is by that we mean that the torso and the head are usually burned through. And then there's usually a foot or a leg or an arm or. Dr. Bentley. Yeah, exactly. Another characteristic is that the surroundings, the immediate surroundings are often left untouched. Yeah. Or they have strange burn marks to them, not your typical burn marks.

Or, you know, the room doesn't catch on fire for some reason. A sweet smoky smell and a greasy residue. Greasy residue. Yeah. Imagine licking a greasy residue off of a piece of furniture in a room where someone spontaneously combusted. I prefer not to. It would be gross. So unnecessary. So, and then a lot of times the, like you said, the limbs are left untouched. Very rarely in cases of spontaneous human combustion does do the victim survive, but they have. Yeah. This is freaky. Sometimes it's just burn spots forming on somebody's body. Or somebody will start smoking. Yeah. Imagine smoking. Just smoking. Yeah. That's with no fire present. No, none. There's no flames whatsoever. You're just smoking or all of a sudden you're burning.

So those are very, very rare, but they have been documented before, right? Yeah. I can't imagine. That'd be so bizarre. So what's up next about it? Well, I guess some theories on why it happens. Well, first let's point out why this is weird. If it's not obvious enough. Yeah. But the combustion, for combustion to take place, you need intense heat. Right. You need a flammable substance. Right. We're not too terribly flammable. We'll burn, right? If somebody douses gasoline on us and throws a match. Yeah. But that's about that. So that's why spontaneous human combustion, scientifically speaking, is so weird. Yes. Right. And what's the earliest explanation you came across for how spontaneous human combustion works? The earliest explanation,

are you talking about the Dickens, Charles Dickens? Well, he reflected a widely held belief at the time. Right. In his novel Bleak House, he had a character that he killed off by spontaneous human combustion, which I thought was kind of funny or not funny, but kind of cool. The character's name was Crook and he was an alcoholic. So at the time they posited a theory that maybe excessive amounts of alcohol, which as we all know is flammable in the body, caused this. Yeah. Apparently, one theory is that methane builds up in the intestine. Which is flammable, methane flammable. Definitely. It's very flammable. And it's a terrible greenhouse gas. Did you know that? I did. And then some sort of enzyme that acts as a catalyst in cellular processes and builds up heat

as a byproduct ignites this methane and kaboom. But there's a problem. There's a big problem with it. Yeah. Most of the victims, when they spontaneously combust, they have more damage to the outside of the body than the internal organs. So that kind of flies in the face of that theory. Definitely. So we poo-poo that one. We poo-poo that one. Static electricity? Yeah. Go ahead. I guess. I mean, that's pretty much it. You get static electricity buildup on the outside of your body. Yeah. Again, kaboom. Right. Or magnetic force, a geomagnetic force exerted on the body is another one kind of along those lines. Again, these are entirely possible. There's another one that's possibly a little less credible, posited by Larry Arnold, who is an expert and investigator.

A self-proclaimed expert. Whatever. I mean, aren't all? No. Some people are vetted. Okay. Well, he also wrote a book called Blaze. And it's like an account, an amazing account of spontaneous human combustion stories, which I got to tell you, I would have eaten alive at age eight. Oh, sure. But yeah. So he has his own hypothesis, and it's that there's a subatomic particle called pyroton, right? Yeah. And that when it interacts with cells in a certain way, it can create an explosion. The big problem with this is that a miniature explosion, we should point out. Okay. Not some huge. Depending on how much methane is built up in your intestine. Yeah, if you know what I'm saying. The big problem with it is that this particle is theoretical. It

hasn't been proven to exist. Yeah, he made it up or made up the name, at least. Yeah, pyroton. That's a good name. Yeah, it means fireton. You know what I like? What? I like the wick theory. This one makes the absolute the most sense to me. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So the wick theory, you know how a candle works, Josh? I do, Chuck. Would you like me to explain that? No, I will. Okay. A candle has a wick, which everyone knows, and that wick is surrounded by wax, which is made of flammable acids, fatty acids, or it can be petroleum like paraffin wax. Right. Or my wife's candles are soy. Oh, on loveyourmama.com? Yeah. Are they available for sale on loveyourmama.com? They are indeed. So the wax ignites the wick, and it keeps the wick burning. And so a lot of

people, a lot of scientists were scientists actually come in and say they think that folks may drop a cigarette, and then that cigarette catches their clothes on fire. The wick? Which is the wick. And then the fats of the body start to ignite and melt. Which they are flammable. Right. We said earlier that we're not generally flammable. We will burn, and what's burning most readily is our fat. Right. But that kind of creates like a contained slow burn. Mm-hmm. It surrounds like, say, your pajamas are on fire. Right. It surrounds it, and it continues. It allows the wick to continue to burn very slowly. Right. Right. But what about extremities, Chuck? Why are people's limbs left intact? Well, my thought would be that the limbs

don't have as much fat going on. That actually is a pretty good explanation. What I read was that it has to do with the temperature gradient. Oh, okay. That they simply don't contain as much heat. Like, you know how your arms get colder than, say, your torso? Oh, right, right. So like, if you hold the match upside down, what's at the bottom of something that's burning is usually cooler than what's at the top. Yes. Which is why when you light a match, you're supposed to hold it upright. If you hold it upside down, a lot of times, they'll go out because there's simply just not enough heat to sustain a flame. Right. So the idea with the wick effect is that eventually the flames, the candle, the human

candle, but that's something to see. Yeah. The human candle eventually gets to a point in the body where there's not enough heat to sustain the flames. And if so, facto, you have just somebody's foot sitting there. Right. Did you see the graphic in the article? I didn't. I saw like the print out of it. I haven't gone through and looked at the flash. Yeah, it's pretty cool. There's like little three stages you can click on. It shows the body burning and then the body torso, you know, decomposiving and then at the very end, you're left with limbs laying on there. Awesome. I'm checking out. Is it as cool as the face transplant illustration? Negative. Not even close, but it's good. A day of travel brings a basket full of learning in Mississippi with family-friendly

places like the Mississippi Aquarium, the Hattiesburg Zoo, and Tupelo Buffalo Park. Explore today at visitmississippi.org slash family fun. Mississippi, Wanderers, welcome. I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild present Bridgewater Season 2. A lot of people now actually believe that there is some kind of mystical force in this region that attracts monsters and paranormal activity. The Bridgewater Triangle. Now that sounds about right. You're still denying that there's something beyond our understanding going on here? Starring Supernatural's Misha Collins, The Walking Dead's Melissa Ponzio, and Rogue One's Alan Tudyk, written by Lauren Shippen and created by me, Erin Mankey. Something about all of this doesn't feel right. Hello? Is someone there?

Something went wrong here. Olivia, we should hurry. We have a much bigger problem. What is that? Olivia, run! Listen to Bridgewater now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more over at grimandmild.com slash Bridgewater. So that's what science says. And that's what I say too. I think that makes a lot of sense. It does. Drop a smoke on your chest and that's what happens. And that's supported actually by a lot of revelations of people who have spontaneously combusted that they were in fact smokers. And they probably caught themselves on fire in this really strange series of events. They turned into human candles. Right. And then some people... I believe some people they've

decided after the fact were pretty hardcore alcoholics. So they may have been passed out in a stupor and then some people were infirm and they couldn't get out of bed in a normal state. And so they were kind of trapped there. So these things come out after the fact that kind of make scientists think, well, it's really not spontaneous combustion. Someone dropped a cigarette and they were passed out drunk until they burned. I think the point is, is that if you're a caregiver to an infirm individual, if you light a cigarette and stick it in their mouth, stick around to make sure that you put it out once they're done with it. Yeah. Because it can end up really bad for me. Right. What's weird to me is that nothing else burns in the house. Well, that's that wick

effect. That's the fact protecting the actual burning. It's burning inside. It still seems like it wouldn't be so hard for a bed sheet to spark up. Right. It is odd. I agree with you. But that's what makes it so cool is that it's so, you know, unexplained. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, yeah. And it seems like it will probably always be unexplained because there's no way to replicate it in a laboratory. Yeah. Not at all. And they always find this after the fact. It's sure. So that's all they can do. Yeah. So Chuck, let's talk about some real life amazing incidents of spontaneous human combustion. Man, do you hear the eight year old me coming out? I do. But that's not unusual. 1938. Set the scene for us, Chuck. It's 1938. It's a warm night.

A 22 year old woman named Phyllis Newcomb was leaving a dance hall in England in Chelmsford, England. And she was going down the staircase of the hall and her dress just caught on fire out of nowhere for no reason. And she ran to the back of the ballroom and collapsed on fire, which I bet was quite a sight too at the dance. And people rushed to her aid, but it was too late and she died in the hospital. And, you know, there were theories that it that combusted, but then some other people said, no, it was probably just a cigarette that someone dropped. So yeah, that one's actually the weakest one I've heard. Well, that's because I saved the pearls for you. Let me know. You've got the biggest pearl since you started and there's three of them.

All right, go ahead. This one's pretty. No, I think you should do the last one. This case, Mary Reeser, a 67 year old widow who in 1951 was discovered in her house in Saint Petersburg, Florida. Her front door was actually hot and a neighbor broke it down and found that Mary was sitting in her easy chair. There was a black circle around her. I imagine a charred circle and her head had been burned down to the size of a tea cup. That's pretty good. That was about all that was left except for her backbone and part of her left foot. That was it. Yeah. And apparently her easy chair was still at least enough intact for her to be sitting up and it to be erect. Right. So it didn't burn completely up. No. That reminded me of Beetlejuice.

Yeah. Visually when I read it. That's the first thing I thought of. Yeah. The waiting room scene. Sure. Yeah. It's a great scene. Yeah. So yeah. And actually the coroner, Dr. Wilton Crogman, he wrote about the incident in his notes apparently that where I living in the middle ages, I'd mutter something about black magic because it was just so curious. Interesting. I thought that was probably the coolest thing a coroner's ever written. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. All right. So Chuck, take it home, baby. Knock it out of the park. Yeah. In 1982, I'm just a mere 11 year old rug rat in Atlanta, Georgia. Josh is, what do you like, four, six, six? So you're already causing trouble. Yeah. A mentally handicapped woman named Jean Lucille Jeannie Saffin was sitting with her

82 year old father in Northern London. And according to her dad, he saw a flash of light out of the corner of his eye and he turned to his daughter and saw that her upper body was enveloped in flames out of nowhere. So he and his son-in-law, Donald Carroll, managed to put out the fire, but she died of third degree burns. Tell them what he said later of the incident. This is the best part. He said, quote, the flames were coming from her mouth like a dragon, and they were making a roaring noise. That is so nuts. I know. That is crazy. Can you imagine seeing your daughter with flames roaring out of her mouth? No, because I don't have a daughter. Okay. That would be really weird. Yeah, it would be. It'd be a little disconcerting, especially

since some people suspected that it's possible an ember from his pipe set her daughter on fire right and led to flames coming out of her mouth and making a roaring sound. You know, the TV show Fringe actually covered spontaneous human combustion recently. What? Just like House did Alien Hand Syndrome recently, but they were both kind of sensationalized. So it wasn't very. How so? Well, they just, it wasn't really science-y. It was, you know, it was for TV. So. Sure. But they tried. Science can be boring, Chuck. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you to our friends at the Fox Network for taking science, exploiting it, and making it much more interesting. And let's see. I guess that's what, the listener mail time? It is. So, Josh, I'm just going to call this

amusing fan mail. Okay. Got a couple of light ones for you. I like the sound of this. I remember a couple of weeks ago when I said, yeah, I'm going to plug it like, and I couldn't think of a plug analogy. Nothing you could say. Nothing I could say. We had a guy named Scott right in. A Scott. His last name is something, A Scott Blank. He, he wrote in and said, he gave us a few suggestions. We're going to plug it like a Dutch boy at a dyke. Nice. We're going to plug it like a B-list celeb on Letterman. Okay. We're going to plug it like an out-of-work plumber at a rest stop. We're going to plug it like a hair club for men convention. I like that one. That's pretty good. Or we're going to plug it like the notorious B-I-G. Okay. Which I don't get that one.

I think that's a reference to shootings, maybe. I don't know. I wasn't a big, biggie fan, so maybe there's something to know. And then this one comes from Katie in Wisconsin. Katie says, hi, Chuck. Hi, Josh. Long time listener, first time writer. Love you. Love your podcast. But seriously, Wisconsin? She took us to task. Yeah, I know. No, the way you said Wisconsin the first time was just fine. Nobody here really says it like that. I'll try to explain how a Scani says it. The Scani? We. Sounds like the start of whistle. So, with. Yeah. Scan. The O sounds like O and con, man. Not can, man. So, with. Scan. Wisconsin. Okay. Sin, S-I-N, like the seven W sins. Sin. So, Wisconsin. So, the way we're saying it the first time, Wisconsin. Wisconsin. Yeah, right.

Right. So, it's just Wisconsin. And we, you don't need to drag out the A like that. She said that's just a bunch of bunk. And she said, I guess some French still spell it O-U-I of Wisconsin. So, Wisconsin. She thinks that's neat. And I do too. As do I. So, Katie from Wisconsin. Thank you for pointing that out. And we love you guys in Eau Claire. Yeah. And elsewhere. Eau Claire? No, it's Eau Claire. Oh, that's right. So, yeah, if you have any amazing facts about Wisconsin or any other place on the planet, or if you just want to say hi or whatever, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage.

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