May 28, 2009 • 20 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. Chuck. That doesn't count because I was shifting.
Well do your cheek thing then, too, Chuck. Hey, and
(00:20):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Chuck. Brian is
staring dully forward. You have the dull stare of the
dairy count, not the eye of the tiger, Chuck. Right.
This is in tribute to the lobotomy episode. Would 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, yeah,
(00:44):
cub Scouts. I never made it a boy scout. I
don't even Yeah, I definitely didn't. Um and I you
would think that that would have helped shape me as
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
(01:07):
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. And
it turns out that this leg belonged to a guy
named Dr Irving J. Bentley, and the photo was taking
a nineteen sixty six in his Pennsylvania home. And what
happened to Dr Bentley was that he spontaneously combusted. And
(01:30):
I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever
heard of in my entire young life. You really remember
seeing that? Oh yeah? And actually, strangely enough, I was
at a nursing home woods 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 bedpants.
(01:50):
It was apparently like a mobile storage closet right out
in the hallway. But there was a prosthetic leg that
went from the knee to the foot and it had like, um,
knee high pantyhose on it and a shoe. Still, I'm like,
all these people are gonna 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, so I used to just think spontaneous human
(02:12):
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, that's right. So yeah, this
(02:33):
is a listener request. Have you noticed the uncomfortable pauses
have been increasing in frequency lately? It's because you're wearing
sunglasses and its 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. Um.
(02:55):
The earliest written account of it occurs in sixteen sixty three,
and such anatomist Thomas Bartolin wrote of a woman in
Paris who quote went up in ashes and smoke right right,
which is normal enough. The weird thing is is this woman,
you know, as I imagine, was normal for the era
(03:15):
was sleeping on a straw mattress, and a straw mattress
didn't go up, just the woman did. That was the
first clue that something was odd, something amiss. Uh. And
then the 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
(03:37):
that he put a collection of them together called d
Incentdus corporus humany spontaneous Latin dead language, not a dead language, no,
trust me, listener. Mail came in and scolded us for
saying it was a deadline. It's just a phrase, sure
that it's dead. Yeah, it's a figure speech. Yes. So um,
(03:58):
apparently this has been around for a while. Yeah, at
least since the seventeenth century, and it's only happened, uh,
a couple of hundred times. They think between two and
three d two people burning up inexplicably a couple of
hundred times. That's pretty significant. I mean, that leads a
lot of credence to it, your opinion, you know. So
let's talk about spontaneous human combustion, and it's actually differentiated
(04:18):
from just spontaneous combustion because you stick the human in there,
it means a person is burning up. Yeah. Other things
can spontaneously combusts, I know, like a bucket of oily
rags or yeah, hay bales have been known to combust,
which is weird because we know how a bucket of
oily rags can combustum the as as the oxygen interacts
with the oily rags, it can actually raise the temperature
(04:39):
to the ignition point and then there you go. Or
a kid goes behind 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 yeah,
so maybe oily rags don't really combust spontaneously. It is
just little kids. I never thought about it. Yeah, uh
so let's let's talk about this, Josh. We have. The
(05:00):
deal is is your extremities remain intact. That's one of
the tail tail giveaway. Sometimes I thought it was all
the time. No, it's most of the time, yeah, 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 completely Yeah exactly, um. Another characteristic is
(05:23):
that the surroundings, the immediately surroundings are often left untouched,
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, imagine licking a greasy residue
off of a piece of furniture in a room or
(05:43):
someone spontaneously combusted. Yeah, that would be gross, so unnecessary.
So uh. And then a lot of times the um,
like you said, the limbs are left untouched. It's very
rarely um in cases of spontaneous human combustion. Does do
the victims survived? But they have? Yeah, this is freaky.
Sometimes it's just burned spots forming on somebody's where somebody
(06:07):
will start smoking. Yeah, imagine smoking, just smoking, that's no no,
and there's no flames whatsoever. You're just smoking, or all
of a sudden you're you're burning. Um. So 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
(06:29):
it happens, well, first, let's point out why this is
weird if it's not obvious enough. But the combustion. For
combustion to take place, you need intense heat, you need
a flammable substance. We're not too terribly flammable. We'll burn
right if somebody does is gasoline on us and throws
a match. Um, but that's about that. So that's why
(06:49):
spontaneous human combustion, scientifically speaking, is so weird, right, um?
And what what's 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
(07:12):
off by spontaneous human combustion, which I thought was kind
of funny, or not funny, but kind of cool. Um.
The character's name was Kruke and he was an alcoholic.
So at the time they positive a theory that maybe
excessive amount amounts of alcohol, which as we all know,
is flammable in the body, caused us. Yeah. Um, apparently
one theory is that methane builds up in the intestine,
(07:36):
which is flammable. Methane flamable, definitely, it's very flammable, and
it's a terrible greenhouse gass. Did you know that? I did? Um?
And then some sort of enzyme that acts as a
catalyst in cellular processes and builds up heat as a
byproduct ignites this methane in kaboom. But there's a problem.
There's a big problem with it. Yeah, most of the
(07:57):
victims when they spontaneously combine us, they have more damage
to the outside of the body than in internal organs.
So that kind of flies in the face of that theory. Definitely,
So we poo poo that one. That one static electricity, Yeah,
go ahead, I guess. I mean that's pretty much it.
You get static electricity build up on the outside your
body again, kaboom, right. Or magnetic force a geomagnetic magnetic
(08:22):
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 a an expert, an investigator, a self proclaimed expert. Well,
whatever I mean, are in all now some people are vetted. Okay, Um,
well he also wrote a book called Blaze, and it's
(08:43):
like an account, an amazing account of spontaneous human combustion
stories which I gotta tell you I would have eaten
alive at age eight. Um. But yeah, so he he
has his own hypothesis, and it's that there's a subpotomic
particle called pyra ton, all right, uh, and that when
it interacts with cells in a certain way, it can
(09:05):
create an explosion. The big problem with this is 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. Um, the big problem
with 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, good name. Yeah,
(09:26):
it means fire ton. You know what I like? What
I like? The wick theory. This one makes the most
sense to me. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, so the wick theory. Uh.
You know how a candle works, Josh, I do, Chuck?
Would you like me to explain that, no, I will.
A candle has a wick, which everyone knows, and that
wick is surrounded by wax, which is made of flammable acids,
(09:49):
fatty acids, or it can be petroleum like paraffin wax.
Right or my wife candles are soy oh on um,
love your Mama dot com? Are they available for failing
Love your Mama dot com? Indeed? Uh? 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
(10:10):
may like drop a cigarette and then that cigarette catches
their clothes on fire, the wick which is the wick,
and uh then what the fats of the body start
to melt, ignite and melt, which they are flammable. We
said earlier that we're not. We're not generally flammable. We
will burn, and what's burning most readily is our fat.
(10:31):
But that kind of creates like a contained slow burn,
and that it surrounds like say, your your pajamas are
on fire, It surrounds it and it continues. It allows
the wick to continue to burn very slowly. Right, but
what about extremities chuck wire, people's limbs left intact. Well,
my thought would be that the limbs don't have as
(10:51):
much fat going on that That actually is pretty good explanation.
What I read was that, um, it has to do
with the temperature gradient. Okay, that they simply don't contain
as much heat. Like you know how your arms get
colder than say your torso, so like if you hold
the matchupside out, what's what's at the bottom of something
that's burning is usually cooler than what's at the top.
(11:14):
That's why would light a match. You're supposed to hold
it up right, If you hold it upside down, a
lot of times you'll go out because there's simply just
not enough heat to sustain a flame. Right, So, the
the idea with the wick effect is that eventually this
the the flames, the candle, the human candle, I'll put
that's something to see. Um, the human candle eventually gets
to a point in the body where there's not enough
(11:36):
heat to sustain the flames. And if so, fact though,
you have just somebody's foot sitting there. Right. Did you
see the graphic and the article. I didn't. I saw
like the print out of it. I haven't gone through
and looked at the flesh. And 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,
decompose it, and then at the very end you're left
(11:57):
with limbs laying on there. Awesome, I'm checking out. Is
it as cool as the face transplant illustration? Negative? Not
ere close, But it's good. So that's what science says,
and that's what I say to I think that makes
a lot of sense. It does, and drop the smoke
on your chest, and that's what happened. And that's supported
actually by a lot of revelations of people who have
(12:18):
been who have spontaneously combusted that they were in fact smokers, um,
and they probably caught themselves on fire and in this
really strange series of events they turned into human candles, right.
And then some people, at least some people they've decided
after the fact, we're pretty hardcore alcoholics, so they may
(12:39):
have been passed out and 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 makes scientists think, well, it's really not
spontaneous combustion. Someone dropped a cigarette and they were passed
out drunk, and so they burned. I think the point
is is that if you're a caregiver to an firm individual,
(13:01):
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, because it can end up
really bad for him. 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's it still seems like it wouldn't be so hard
for a bed sheet to up. That is it is odd.
(13:24):
I agree with you. And that's what makes it so
cool is that it's so you know, unexplained. Yeah, well
I think, um yeah yeah. And it seems like it
will probably always be unexplained because there's no way to
replicate it in a laboratory, not at all, and they
after so that's all they can do. Yeah, So, Chuck,
let's talk about some real life, amazing, uh incidents of
(13:44):
spontaneous human combustion. Man, do you hear the eight year
old me coming out too? But that's not unusual? Uh?
Ight set the set the scene for us Chuck warm Night.
Twenty two year old woman named Phillis Nuka was leaving
a dance hall at in England and chelmps for England,
(14:05):
and she was going down the staircase of the hall
in 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 that 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 combusted, but then some other people said, now it
(14:26):
was probably just a cigarette that someone dropped. So that
one's actually the weakest one I've heard. Well, that's because
I saved the pearls for you. Let me. You know,
you've got the biggest pearls since she started. And there's
three of them, all right, go ahead, and this one,
this one was pretty Now I think you should do
the last one. UM. The this case Mary Research, sixties
seven year old widow who in nineteen fifty one was
(14:46):
discovered in her house in St. Petersburg, Florida, um her
front door was actually hot and a neighbor broke it
down and found that um Mary was sitting in her
easy chair. There was a black circle around her, I
imagine a charred circle. Um, and her head had been
burned down to the size of a teacup. That's pretty good.
That was about all that was left except for her
(15:08):
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, so 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 Yeah, that's
(15:29):
a great scene. Yeah. So yeah, And actually the coroner,
uh Dr Wilton Krogman Um 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 of coroner has ever written. Yeah. Yeah, alright,
(15:50):
so chuck take it home, baby, knock it out of
the park. Yeah, I'm just a mirror eleven year old
rug rat in Atlanta, Georgia. Josh's what are you like?
Four six six? So you're already caused in trouble. A
mentally handicapped woman named jean Lucille Jeanie seven was sitting
with her eighty two year old father in northern London,
(16:14):
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 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
(16:36):
making a roaring noise. I know that is crazy. Can
you imagine seeing your daughter the flames roaring out of
her mouth because I don't have a daughter, that would
be really weird. Yeah, it would be. It would be
a little disconcerting, especially since some people suspected that it's
possible in ember from his pipe set her daughter on
(16:57):
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, just like
House did. Alien Han syndrome recently. But they were both
kind of sensationalized, so it was how so well they
just it wasn't really sciency. It was you know, it's
for TV, so but they tried science can be boring,
(17:19):
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 gonna call this amusing fan mail. Okay, I
got a couple of light ones for like the sound
(17:40):
of this. I remember a couple of weeks ago when
I said, yeah, I'm gonna 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 and his last name is something
a Scott blank. He he wrote in and said he
gave us a few suggestions. We're gonna plug it like
a Dutch boy at a dike. We're gonna plug it
like a B list celeb on Letterman. We're gonna plug
(18:03):
it like an out of work plumber at a rest stop.
We're gonna plug it like a hair Club for Men
convention that was pretty good, or we're gonna 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 now. And then this one comes
(18:25):
from Katie and Wisconsin. Katie says, Hi, Chuck, Hi Josh,
a longtime listener, first time writer. Love you love your podcast,
but seriously, Wisconsin, she's took us the task. Yeah, uh 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 Askanni says it. We uh sounds like the
(18:47):
start of whistle So with yeah scan the O sounds
like oh and con Man not can Man. So with
wiscon sin s I n like the Seven Deadly Sins
sin uh so Wisconsin. So the way we're saying at
the first time, Wisconsin, Wisconsin. Yeah right, So it's it's
(19:07):
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. Oh U, I sconsin so Wisconsin and she
thinks that's neat and I do too, as do I.
So Katie from Wisconsin, thank you for polling that out
and we love you guys. And oh Claire yeah, and
elsewhere you Claire nos so Claire, Oh that's right. So yeah.
(19:31):
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 how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
(19:54):
check out our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot
com home page. Brought to you by the re invented
two thousand twelve Camri. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. Chuck. That doesn't count because I was shifting.
Well do your cheek thing then, too, Chuck. Hey, and
(00:20):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Chuck. Brian is
staring dully forward. You have the dull stare of the
dairy count, not the eye of the tiger, Chuck. Right.
This is in tribute to the lobotomy episode. Would 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, yeah,
(00:44):
cub Scouts. I never made it a boy scout. I
don't even Yeah, I definitely didn't. Um and I you
would think that that would have helped shape me as
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
(01:07):
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. And
it turns out that this leg belonged to a guy
named Dr Irving J. Bentley, and the photo was taking
a nineteen sixty six in his Pennsylvania home. And what
happened to Dr Bentley was that he spontaneously combusted. And
(01:30):
I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever
heard of in my entire young life. You really remember
seeing that? Oh yeah? And actually, strangely enough, I was
at a nursing home woods 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 bedpants.
(01:50):
It was apparently like a mobile storage closet right out
in the hallway. But there was a prosthetic leg that
went from the knee to the foot and it had like, um,
knee high pantyhose on it and a shoe. Still, I'm like,
all these people are gonna 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, so I used to just think spontaneous human
(02:12):
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, that's right. So yeah, this
(02:33):
is a listener request. Have you noticed the uncomfortable pauses
have been increasing in frequency lately? It's because you're wearing
sunglasses and its 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. Um.
(02:55):
The earliest written account of it occurs in sixteen sixty three,
and such anatomist Thomas Bartolin wrote of a woman in
Paris who quote went up in ashes and smoke right right,
which is normal enough. The weird thing is is this woman,
you know, as I imagine, was normal for the era
(03:15):
was sleeping on a straw mattress, and a straw mattress
didn't go up, just the woman did. That was the
first clue that something was odd, something amiss. Uh. And
then the 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
(03:37):
that he put a collection of them together called d
Incentdus corporus humany spontaneous Latin dead language, not a dead language, no,
trust me, listener. Mail came in and scolded us for
saying it was a deadline. It's just a phrase, sure
that it's dead. Yeah, it's a figure speech. Yes. So um,
(03:58):
apparently this has been around for a while. Yeah, at
least since the seventeenth century, and it's only happened, uh,
a couple of hundred times. They think between two and
three d two people burning up inexplicably a couple of
hundred times. That's pretty significant. I mean, that leads a
lot of credence to it, your opinion, you know. So
let's talk about spontaneous human combustion, and it's actually differentiated
(04:18):
from just spontaneous combustion because you stick the human in there,
it means a person is burning up. Yeah. Other things
can spontaneously combusts, I know, like a bucket of oily
rags or yeah, hay bales have been known to combust,
which is weird because we know how a bucket of
oily rags can combustum the as as the oxygen interacts
with the oily rags, it can actually raise the temperature
(04:39):
to the ignition point and then there you go. Or
a kid goes behind 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 yeah,
so maybe oily rags don't really combust spontaneously. It is
just little kids. I never thought about it. Yeah, uh
so let's let's talk about this, Josh. We have. The
(05:00):
deal is is your extremities remain intact. That's one of
the tail tail giveaway. Sometimes I thought it was all
the time. No, it's most of the time, yeah, 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 completely Yeah exactly, um. Another characteristic is
(05:23):
that the surroundings, the immediately surroundings are often left untouched,
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, imagine licking a greasy residue
off of a piece of furniture in a room or
(05:43):
someone spontaneously combusted. Yeah, that would be gross, so unnecessary.
So uh. And then a lot of times the um,
like you said, the limbs are left untouched. It's very
rarely um in cases of spontaneous human combustion. Does do
the victims survived? But they have? Yeah, this is freaky.
Sometimes it's just burned spots forming on somebody's where somebody
(06:07):
will start smoking. Yeah, imagine smoking, just smoking, that's no no,
and there's no flames whatsoever. You're just smoking, or all
of a sudden you're you're burning. Um. So 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
(06:29):
it happens, well, first, let's point out why this is
weird if it's not obvious enough. But the combustion. For
combustion to take place, you need intense heat, you need
a flammable substance. We're not too terribly flammable. We'll burn
right if somebody does is gasoline on us and throws
a match. Um, but that's about that. So that's why
(06:49):
spontaneous human combustion, scientifically speaking, is so weird, right, um?
And what what's 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
(07:12):
off by spontaneous human combustion, which I thought was kind
of funny, or not funny, but kind of cool. Um.
The character's name was Kruke and he was an alcoholic.
So at the time they positive a theory that maybe
excessive amount amounts of alcohol, which as we all know,
is flammable in the body, caused us. Yeah. Um, apparently
one theory is that methane builds up in the intestine,
(07:36):
which is flammable. Methane flamable, definitely, it's very flammable, and
it's a terrible greenhouse gass. Did you know that? I did? Um?
And then some sort of enzyme that acts as a
catalyst in cellular processes and builds up heat as a
byproduct ignites this methane in kaboom. But there's a problem.
There's a big problem with it. Yeah, most of the
(07:57):
victims when they spontaneously combine us, they have more damage
to the outside of the body than in internal organs.
So that kind of flies in the face of that theory. Definitely,
So we poo poo that one. That one static electricity, Yeah,
go ahead, I guess. I mean that's pretty much it.
You get static electricity build up on the outside your
body again, kaboom, right. Or magnetic force a geomagnetic magnetic
(08:22):
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 a an expert, an investigator, a self proclaimed expert. Well,
whatever I mean, are in all now some people are vetted. Okay, Um,
well he also wrote a book called Blaze, and it's
(08:43):
like an account, an amazing account of spontaneous human combustion
stories which I gotta tell you I would have eaten
alive at age eight. Um. But yeah, so he he
has his own hypothesis, and it's that there's a subpotomic
particle called pyra ton, all right, uh, and that when
it interacts with cells in a certain way, it can
(09:05):
create an explosion. The big problem with this is 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. Um, the big problem
with 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, good name. Yeah,
(09:26):
it means fire ton. You know what I like? What
I like? The wick theory. This one makes the most
sense to me. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, so the wick theory. Uh.
You know how a candle works, Josh, I do, Chuck?
Would you like me to explain that, no, I will.
A candle has a wick, which everyone knows, and that
wick is surrounded by wax, which is made of flammable acids,
(09:49):
fatty acids, or it can be petroleum like paraffin wax.
Right or my wife candles are soy oh on um,
love your Mama dot com? Are they available for failing
Love your Mama dot com? Indeed? Uh? 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
(10:10):
may like drop a cigarette and then that cigarette catches
their clothes on fire, the wick which is the wick,
and uh then what the fats of the body start
to melt, ignite and melt, which they are flammable. We
said earlier that we're not. We're not generally flammable. We
will burn, and what's burning most readily is our fat.
(10:31):
But that kind of creates like a contained slow burn,
and that it surrounds like say, your your pajamas are
on fire, It surrounds it and it continues. It allows
the wick to continue to burn very slowly. Right, but
what about extremities chuck wire, people's limbs left intact. Well,
my thought would be that the limbs don't have as
(10:51):
much fat going on that That actually is pretty good explanation.
What I read was that, um, it has to do
with the temperature gradient. Okay, that they simply don't contain
as much heat. Like you know how your arms get
colder than say your torso, so like if you hold
the matchupside out, what's what's at the bottom of something
that's burning is usually cooler than what's at the top.
(11:14):
That's why would light a match. You're supposed to hold
it up right, If you hold it upside down, a
lot of times you'll go out because there's simply just
not enough heat to sustain a flame. Right, So, the
the idea with the wick effect is that eventually this
the the flames, the candle, the human candle, I'll put
that's something to see. Um, the human candle eventually gets
to a point in the body where there's not enough
(11:36):
heat to sustain the flames. And if so, fact though,
you have just somebody's foot sitting there. Right. Did you
see the graphic and the article. I didn't. I saw
like the print out of it. I haven't gone through
and looked at the flesh. And 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,
decompose it, and then at the very end you're left
(11:57):
with limbs laying on there. Awesome, I'm checking out. Is
it as cool as the face transplant illustration? Negative? Not
ere close, But it's good. So that's what science says,
and that's what I say to I think that makes
a lot of sense. It does, and drop the smoke
on your chest, and that's what happened. And that's supported
actually by a lot of revelations of people who have
(12:18):
been who have spontaneously combusted that they were in fact smokers, um,
and they probably caught themselves on fire and in this
really strange series of events they turned into human candles, right.
And then some people, at least some people they've decided
after the fact, we're pretty hardcore alcoholics, so they may
(12:39):
have been passed out and 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 makes scientists think, well, it's really not
spontaneous combustion. Someone dropped a cigarette and they were passed
out drunk, and so they burned. I think the point
is is that if you're a caregiver to an firm individual,
(13:01):
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, because it can end up
really bad for him. 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's it still seems like it wouldn't be so hard
for a bed sheet to up. That is it is odd.
(13:24):
I agree with you. And that's what makes it so
cool is that it's so you know, unexplained. Yeah, well
I think, um yeah yeah. And it seems like it
will probably always be unexplained because there's no way to
replicate it in a laboratory, not at all, and they
after so that's all they can do. Yeah, So, Chuck,
let's talk about some real life, amazing, uh incidents of
(13:44):
spontaneous human combustion. Man, do you hear the eight year
old me coming out too? But that's not unusual? Uh?
Ight set the set the scene for us Chuck warm Night.
Twenty two year old woman named Phillis Nuka was leaving
a dance hall at in England and chelmps for England,
(14:05):
and she was going down the staircase of the hall
in 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 that 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 combusted, but then some other people said, now it
(14:26):
was probably just a cigarette that someone dropped. So that
one's actually the weakest one I've heard. Well, that's because
I saved the pearls for you. Let me. You know,
you've got the biggest pearls since she started. And there's
three of them, all right, go ahead, and this one,
this one was pretty Now I think you should do
the last one. UM. The this case Mary Research, sixties
seven year old widow who in nineteen fifty one was
(14:46):
discovered in her house in St. Petersburg, Florida, um her
front door was actually hot and a neighbor broke it
down and found that um Mary was sitting in her
easy chair. There was a black circle around her, I
imagine a charred circle. Um, and her head had been
burned down to the size of a teacup. That's pretty good.
That was about all that was left except for her
(15:08):
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, so 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 Yeah, that's
(15:29):
a great scene. Yeah. So yeah, And actually the coroner,
uh Dr Wilton Krogman Um 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 of coroner has ever written. Yeah. Yeah, alright,
(15:50):
so chuck take it home, baby, knock it out of
the park. Yeah, I'm just a mirror eleven year old
rug rat in Atlanta, Georgia. Josh's what are you like?
Four six six? So you're already caused in trouble. A
mentally handicapped woman named jean Lucille Jeanie seven was sitting
with her eighty two year old father in northern London,
(16:14):
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 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
(16:36):
making a roaring noise. I know that is crazy. Can
you imagine seeing your daughter the flames roaring out of
her mouth because I don't have a daughter, that would
be really weird. Yeah, it would be. It would be
a little disconcerting, especially since some people suspected that it's
possible in ember from his pipe set her daughter on
(16:57):
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, just like
House did. Alien Han syndrome recently. But they were both
kind of sensationalized, so it was how so well they
just it wasn't really sciency. It was you know, it's
for TV, so but they tried science can be boring,
(17:19):
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 gonna call this amusing fan mail. Okay, I
got a couple of light ones for like the sound
(17:40):
of this. I remember a couple of weeks ago when
I said, yeah, I'm gonna 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 and his last name is something
a Scott blank. He he wrote in and said he
gave us a few suggestions. We're gonna plug it like
a Dutch boy at a dike. We're gonna plug it
like a B list celeb on Letterman. We're gonna plug
(18:03):
it like an out of work plumber at a rest stop.
We're gonna plug it like a hair Club for Men
convention that was pretty good, or we're gonna 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 now. And then this one comes
(18:25):
from Katie and Wisconsin. Katie says, Hi, Chuck, Hi Josh,
a longtime listener, first time writer. Love you love your podcast,
but seriously, Wisconsin, she's took us the task. Yeah, uh 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 Askanni says it. We uh sounds like the
(18:47):
start of whistle So with yeah scan the O sounds
like oh and con Man not can Man. So with
wiscon sin s I n like the Seven Deadly Sins
sin uh so Wisconsin. So the way we're saying at
the first time, Wisconsin, Wisconsin. Yeah right, So it's it's
(19:07):
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. Oh U, I sconsin so Wisconsin and she
thinks that's neat and I do too, as do I.
So Katie from Wisconsin, thank you for polling that out
and we love you guys. And oh Claire yeah, and
elsewhere you Claire nos so Claire, Oh that's right. So yeah.
(19:31):
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 how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
(19:54):
check out our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot
com home page. Brought to you by the re invented
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Josh Clark
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