Spontaneous Human Combustion

into flames right now? What if I spontaneously come busted? I actually have had these thoughts before, and not necessarily in a rocking chair, but it's one of the rocking chair does seem like be appropriate place to spontaneously It does, and you guys will all see why by the end of this podcast why a rocking chair really fits well into this scenario. But yeah, I mean, this is one of those things. I've got a irrational fear of spontaneous fire in general. And I remember which is a good

thing to be afraid of? Yeah, Fosters and you know you name it, um, But I remember seeing pictures of the spontaneous human combustion I of as a teenager and being like, Wow, this is awful and wonderful all at the same time. I had a similar experience with it because I feel like I either saw it on Unsolved Mysteries, which did a great job about creeping me out or or enthralling me about various paranormal things. Um, because Robert Stack's voice was so you know, authoritative no matter what

he's talking about, aliens or or people burning up. Uh. And then also like there was like a little book I got in uh, like in the checkout line at a grocery store for some reason, to avoid a human spontaneous It was just like a condensed tone of all sorts of paranormal scary things. I had something like that. It was like an oddities thing. Yeah yeah. And it had of course human spontaneous combustion, which is completely odd.

It's a weird thing, and it's back in the news at least it has been this fall in September of two thousand eleven, and Irish corps Er declared that the death of one Michael Flaherty. Flaherty was caused by spontaneous human combustion and that was actually the first instance of it in Ireland. It's I was reading the articles about this, and and none of the articles actually that I read were actually poking fun of the situation. But there is sort of a sense of the guy saying, I don't

know what it is because it spontaneous human combustion. It's kind of like saying, we don't know who the murder is, but I suspect it was magic because it was either human spontaneous combustion. Yeah. I don't know if that's not really irish, but yes, I totally get you're saying that. All those articles seemed to see just be him throwing his hands up in the air and saying, Okay, it's got to be human combustion. So now, I are you

about to share more about this particular story. Well, I was just gonna say that it's probably worth mentioning that it was so odd to the corner because you know, here he has a seventy six year old man found in his home, and uh, the damage was to his body, which was totally burned, the ceiling above him and the floor beneath him, and there was no other evidence of a fire. There was no foul play. There was a fire source, but it was a fireplace in the next room.

So that's why the corner perhaps just threw up his hands and said spontaneous human combustion. Oh well, I ran across another story from from two thousand eleven, and this one was out of San Francisco, and it was reported by CBS five. Uh, their their lead is great. A man was hospitalized Wednesday evening with life threatening third degree burns. All right, well, I mean that's not funny, but you know after somehow catching fire inside of San Francisco porn store,

authorities told CBS five. So, so, basically, police officers were on the street and they saw a flaming man come run out of the shop suddenly, and there were firefighters like a block away, so they able to come over and extinguish the flames. But here's another line from there, said arson investigators said it was not exactly clear how the man caught fire. Police indicated he had apparently been watching videos in private booth at the adult arcade when

the fire ignited. Well that is that is some powerful porn perhaps, or as we have found out before, there's very rare instances of pyromaniacs having to start fires in order to reach a sexual climax. So maybe he was like you know that the one out of I don't know two million people that that needs to do that. So he's like sexy firefighter film check, um, oily rags and uh and a torch check. I'm ready to go, and then he set himself off that or really powerful

porn right yeah. Or spontaneous human combustion really does exist, and that's what we're going to talk about today. Um does it? Big question mark? Yeah? And before we you know, we we've we've started off with these cases, if you will, of of of alleged spontaneous human combustion. But but now we're gonna take a step back and we're gonna look at spot spontaneous combustion. Can it happen? Yes, spontaneous outside

of humans definitely occurs. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, our senior video producer roxand sent it's a really interesting article about pistachios and apparently they will spontaneous combusted the drop of a hat because especially when they're packed really tightly for shipping because I have to remain cool and dry. But because they have such a large that content makes them really flammable. So when they're packed that densely, um, they

can actually begin to heat themselves. Um, you know, the oil, the postastia oil will start to self heat, causing spontaneous human combustion. So this is really like struck fear into the heart of pistachio shippers. Yeah, I had no idea. Postachios were always like a Christmas time sort of treat in in my household, and I never considered the possibility

that they might explode. But in the previous podcast, I was mentioning how I wasn't sure of what I was going to get my uncle Craig for Christmas because I drew his name. But but here, here are two things to consider. A he has an irrational fear of unexploded ordinance, okay, and and lives in the US. So it's like, it's not like he lives in Bosnia or this is good

or South Asia or anything. Uh. And but then the about the only thing on his wish list that that I'm thinking about getting is mixed nuts in the shell. So I'm thinking a tightly packed bag of the statuos in the shell with a copy of that article Rock sand Sinus. Well, just to throw him into full blown PTSD, right, yeah, well, no, just a happy alidays. You make it sound meaner than it is. But well, okay, I guess that you are maybe trying to educate him flash scary. It would be

a learning slash snack experience. And we know that fear has a really important role in learning, right, Yeah, So there you go. Uh, I've um, you don't have to get me a present this year, so don't worry about that. But there are other stances. Piles of hay or straw y. Yeah, they've been known to to spontaneous, spontaneously combust when they decomposed. So the bacteria inside them orchestrates that decomposition process, and that can generate enough heat to kindle a spark and

then poof which I actually saw the other day. My my neighbor had a compost pile that was smoking really yeah yeah, and I was like, hey, head's up, and they were like, hey, that's pretty normal, and I was like, all right, so just check in. You know, I didn't want my neighbor's house to burn down because of a

pile of leaves um. And then of course the pile of oily rags which you have mentioned, and and you'll see this warning on various like varnishes and what have you, where they'll say like, don't leave, don't leave the the oil rags unattended after you do this, because it may

set fire to itself. Yeah, because what we're talking about here is that oxygen is meeting an inflammatory agent and then there there has to be a spark, right, which sometimes can happen naturally, like, for instance, the pile of rags. You can't start You can't start a fire without a spark, Is that right? Is that what the boss said? Um? No, without those there? Yes? Okay, good, he was right. Let's just chat chat fact checking my basic physics with with

the boss. Well, yeah, you have to so mean when we do talk about spontaneous human combustion, what what really are we talking about? Um, well, it's it's kind of like that case and not so much the case with the dude running flaming out of the adult store, because that's more just like a dude on fire. Uh. Spontaneous human combustion as as we typically encounter it, we're talking somebody who's been burnt down like to the bone or through the bones, but then maybe like an entire arm

will be just laying there on the floor next to them. Yeah. It was identified as early as or the alleged phenomenon by a doctor Trail who claimed he had recently discovered a peculiar kind of oil in the human blood, which is highly inflammable. This oil is chiefly observed in the blood of persons who have been addicted to drinking oddent spirits. It is probably that this discovery may tend to elucidate the hitero explosion inexplicable phenomenon of the spontaneous combustion of

human bodies. So even back in the day, they were seeing these instances that were very odd. Again, there are certain hallmarks that we'll talk about that make people quite quizzical. Right, it will be someone like they're burned in their rocking chair and the chair is still there, but their their bones were incinerated, right, which is weird because you've got a wood chair, a wooden chair that is not affected

at all. Right, the room will be fine, the the you know, the the chair, the bed will be fine. There will be like a legrant arm that isn't burnt. And for all. I mean, if if you were just to open the door to all sorts of science fiction possibilities, it looks like someone was like blasted with a sci fi ray gun or a heat gun or something, because it just like just cores right through the aliens. Again, but we know it's it's not that visiting the elderly.

So the question arises, you know, what what could be going on? And there are there are various theories, um and and a number of these theories do relate to, uh, to some of these phenomenon we were talking about, for instance, methane um methane building up inside the intestines and then

ignited by enzymes. But what's the problem with that. The problem is that, as you had said before, this is largely the parts of the body that were largely affected, or the skin and the bones, and not the internal organs. So that would clue use into an external source of the fire rather than internal. Yeah. And and again just just to give you an idea of like what it takes to incinerate a body, because most of the most of the body is not flammable. I mean, that's that's

the thing. We're so much water, We're not pistachios. Yeah. Yeah, there's not a lot in this the can that can actually go up in flames. Uh. And if you even in like a crematoria, the temperatures are generally like seven

thousand centigrade and that doesn't even destroy the bones. So some of these other theories static electricity, the idea that if you were walking around your carpeted home, I guess we're just like if you didn't leave and you had socks on you and you were just walking around in circles and in circles and circles, you could eventually build up enough of a static charge to incinerate your body, which just seems soles. I mean, you don't need to go out and like build a hat out of like

you know, dryer sheaves. It just seems a little bit silly. Yes, um. And and then there's a sort of an extrapolation of this by a guy named Larry Arnold, who is a self proclaimed expert on the subject and author of a blaze, and he claims that there's a new sub atomic particle called the pyratron that has the power to ignite the body. Oh yeah, but that of course that's none of that is Is it all proven? Right? That's the problem with that.

I mean, it is kind of interesting. It kind of leads into the idea, you know, the whole equals mc square thing about matter and energy, and well, what if some or all of the matter in our body were transferred into into energy? Right? Of course, the problem with that, and this is from Dr Stephen Novella, who's a Yale neurologists and founder of the New England Skeptics Society. He points out that the mass of a single person, if entirely converted to energy, would be much more than a

few hydrogen bombs. So so even if there there was some sort of situation with matter transferred into energy inside the human body, it would have to be just a minute amount of mass, like a very minimum amount. Well, there's no process really that could kick start this in the first place. I mean, there's not even a theory for this. So it's just kind of a hey, maybe

it's this is particle. But if it were to happen to your point would be that we are basically a bunch a bunch of walking hydrogen bombs right ready to go off, right if if there was some sort of process to actually kick that into demotion. Right, And then you also have to consider that kids playing with methane, and when I say methane mean parts and lighters like you would see so many more UH instances a spontaneous human combustion among twelve year old kids. And and remember,

not everybody produces large quantities of methane. Remember our our NASA UH one of our podcasts, we maybe it is the wearwolf theory. We're talking about the ideal human body to go into space, and NASA found that that. You know that there are certain individuals that produce much less

methane and some individuals who produced no methane. Right, we find the face of the whole methane building up in your intestines theory, right, But there is one theory that seems to hold true, at least in terms of explaining how someone might burn the way that they do um with their extremities intact and with the rest of the

room completely intact. You're talking about the whip theory, believe. Yeah, this is one of the more interesting theories and definitely more interesting than things like balls of lightning or or aliens or aliens or psychic phenomena. And this is basically the idea that the human body can, under certain circumstances, be like a big fat candle. So yeah, I think

of a candles. You know, the wax ignites the wick and keeps it burning right because it's got the fat, and that fat continues to allow the candle to burn very slowly. So essentially the human body could do the same thing. Yeah, and there was there was actually BBC sponsored an experiment in ninety eight, and it was pretty great when I found It's like, normally I would not be like, hey, there's a study from ninety eight and

be proud of it, but it was. It's a pretty cool experiment they put together, and if you look it up online, it's like still like there. I don't I don't understand how some websites do their updates because they're parts of the BBC website that have never changed, like they're still this this ancient web design and it's pretty awesome because you feel like you're actually going back in

time when you look at these. So anyway, this involved this guy, Dr John Dehan of California Criminalistic Institute, and uh, they did what anyone would do when testing out the wick theory. They took a they used to pig in a blanket, by which I don't mean a tasty hot dog or vegan hot dog wrapped in some literal literally a pig in a blank literally, it was a dead pig and a blanket. Yeah, why did why did they

used to pick? Because I thought this really interesting. I mean they obviously it's something that's much more ethical than using human right, right, right. That was the number one that they couldn't get the okay from the BBC to burn any actual people. But also I believe it has to do with like the the amount of fatah to human. Yeah, coomfortable. You know the human that catches on fire and here's

a pig more or less. Um. So they wrapped this dead pig in a blanket and then a small amount of petrol was poured on gasoline and uh, after five hours of continuous burning, they found that the bones were in fact destroyed. And Dr Dehannon said, the sort of damage here is exactly the same as that from supposed spontaneous human combust. Okay. So so just like the candle, like a tallow or candlewax, it allowed the burning to

happen in distant way over consistently slowly. But you know, not in a way it's going to burn the rest of the house down, Not in a way that's going to necessarily gather a lot of attention. Yeah, it's just it also explains why only part of the body, the part that you're rich and fat, burns away, one of the rest stays intact. Yeah all right, So what what do all of these cases have in common? Well, they all know each other, they did not, and they were

not all huge drinkers. Right that the special human oil theory exactly exactly. Um. The victim is almost always completely consumed, usually inside his or her home. Okay, so it usually happens since someone's home. A sweet smoky smell usually accompanies the incident. It's like like barbecue. Yes, I mean it's a little distasteful, but yes, like barbecue. Um. And then the extremities often stay in intact, which we've talked about.

So the head and torso maybe completely charred, but the hands, feet, and legs are left unburned. And that's what you see in on some of those iconic photos, you know, someone's shoes with smoke coming out of them. Um. There are no other signs of fire in the room other than

a greasy residue sometimes left on fronture and walls. Okay, and not all spontaneous human combustion victims simply burst into flames, some developed strange burns on their body which have no obvious source, or they emanate smoke from their body when no fire is actually present. Should be a little bit weird to look down in your arm and see, you know,

smoke curling up right. Um. So that's what they all share in common, and that is why it has been such a interesting subject for a lot of people, because that's very those are weird things, right. But I do think that the wig theory in the pig in the blanket experiments actually helped to support that. Uh. And it's also key to note here that that that the throwing them with this pig in the blanket idea is the

is the notion that it's probably not spontaneous. But the spontaneous is just sort of I mean, it's kind of like, well, we don't know what the causes, so must be magic kind of a deal, where in reality, there are a number of things in any given household that could potentially set something upon. Right at issue here the heart of them out it really is is it coming from an external source or is it coming from an internal source? And obviously is we've kind of discussed um, you know today,

it's not coming from inside. There's no pyrotron. Really, that's igniting us. Um. Many of the cases have had victims who were smoking, and a good amount of them have been had been drinking as well, So it stands to reason that they fell asleep while smoking, the embers fell on them, ignited their clothes, and then poof, they become

a human candle. Um. So you know, that's not all of them explained away in such a neat fashion, but a good many of them share that sort of common right, and the individual is elderly, as a number of cases are. I mean, you confirm or infirm in some way. I mean, you can easily you can more easily imagine that happening where they they're smoking or whatever, they catch the thills on fire and stop dropping roll was not necessarily is

easily achieved. Yeah, So I mean, you know, you can you can see when you lay it out that way, you can see that it's pretty obvious that it probably is coming from an external source. And even in the case of the man, the seventy six year old man who had a fire in the next room but no fire source where he was sitting and where he died, it's very possible that he could have gotten up, stoked the fire and somehow ignited a piece of his clothing

without even knowing sat back down. I mean, you know, it's it's a little bit hard to explain any of these away, but um, to me, it seems a little bit more at least practical to to look at it more as an external phenomenon. And I just keep coming back to that, right, it's got to be some sort of external thing. And in fact, we recently circulated in the office something called an I A which is our initial approach for when we try to tackle a subject.

It's like, Hey, I'm writing an article about such and such. Here's what I'm thinking. Do you guys have any other tidbits? Yeah, yeah, pile it on. And so I know I'm sharing the secret sauce here of what we do. But um, but I'm telling you because one of the things that went out one of the I A s was Hey, what were some of the craziest headlines of because we're gonna

do some sort of round up article about that. And one of them that made the list or actually I don't know if it's made the list, but was put out there was woman's face ignites during UH standard procedure, standard operating um procedure that she was having. I think she was having maybe some moles removed or something. So what happens basically because they're using so many instruments in the operating room now that have you know, electricity that

they were you know, sometimes you know, something ignites. Unfortunately was this woman's face. And um, it's pretty awful to have to go into for something like that and come out pretty burned. But again, here's another case where fire happens, and you usually have to have a source for the ignition right right like like like the boss said, so here you go, there you can. Well, hey, speaking of spontaneous combustion, I think I see the robot coming over

here with a smoking piece of listener mail. Hello Arnold. All right, So here we hear from the Jim and Jim rites and it says, I just finished your fire podcast. So he's talking about the Pyromania podcast that came out a couple of weeks ago. He says, I don't have any feelings about fired that are beyond what I would consider it the norm. My most frequent interaction was fired with us as a boy scout, which Robert mentioned too,

there was something very alluring about it. It wasn't just the flame itself, but our ability to master it through the crep work in gathering materials, building the fire, lighting it, and finally putting it out. It was always a goal to build a fire without using newspapers or other fast starters. We were even successful with non match techniques such as

steel matches. I've never tried tried the bow or other pre match techniques, which, of course the once you see in all the movies where they're the little bow, the twine um, which I hear are very challenging. By the way, we never pete on the fire. It really stinks up the place. Um which, as we mentioned before, the alchemists know the smell. We used to know the smell urine as they were trying to turn into go after scouts.

I didn't have much direct contact with fire. A few years ago my son tried scouting to one of the first skills the boys learned his fire safety control. Would build a few fires, and the sight, sounds, and smell of a wooden camp fire brought back all kinds of memories. Um, you didn't mention fire in Frankenstein. I only mentioned it because I caught part of Young Frankenstein on cable this weekend, and of course in the films, Frankenstein is a grade of fire. Um. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one

of the really cool things about something like like bus Scouts. Um, you know that he gets kids, even kids that are um and maybe part of a more urban environment, gets them out there with fire. Sure, playing with it, there's a certain amount of playing with fire is inevitable, uh in that situation, But you're also learning the basic control of it and how to use it responsibly and indeed some techniques just to start it beyond maryly A, Uh,

you know, throwing some fire on some ladder fluid. Indeed, I'm sure that's exactly what I was trying to do when I was burning ants with magnifying you Just if if you've been in Scouts, then how many aunt lives would have been saying to tell us? So, Hey, if you have anything you would like to share with us, be it your own history with fire, your own if you if you have any personal experience with Spottany's human combustion, do tell we would love to hear about that. Or

if we left out any of hair brained theories. You can find us on Facebook um we are stuff to Blow the Mind on there, and you can find us on Twitter where our handle is blow the Mind, and you can also send us an email at blow the Mind at house to fook dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.