One morning in January eighteen ninety nine, a tragic but curious story appeared in the Halifax Evening Career. The article concerned a young family who lived in Sowerby Bridge in West Yorkshire in the north of England. Sarah Mitchell and her ex husband John Kirby shared two daughters between them. Five year old Alice lived with her father and grandmother on Wakefield Road, while Alice's four year old sister Amy lived with her mother just over a mile away on
Hargreave's Terrace. At roughly ten thirty am on Thursday, the fifth of January, Alice's grandmother left Alice at home, sleeping in her bed, to visit her daughter, who lived up the road. It was about forty five minutes later when a neighbor, missus Ramsden, noticed the flickering of flames coming from inside the house. When all of a sudden, the front door burst open to reveal the horrifying sight of the young Alice, screaming in agony as flames leaped up
from all over her body. In a panic, Ramsden rushed home and grabbed a rug, then threw it over the child in an effort to douse the flames. A doctor was promptly called and soon after arrived on horse and cart to find the girl barely clinging on to life. Her entire body was burned from head to toe, so
badly in parts that it had blackened and charred. After Alice was rushed to hospital, a neighbor was sent off to inform her mother, Sarah, of the terrible news, But just as the neighbor was nearing Sarah's home, they saw a traumatized looking Sarah coming towards them from the other direction.
Assuming Sarah had already heard the news, the neighbor was completely bemused when Sarah tried to explain between sobs that she was running to her ex husband's home to tell him about what had just happened to their daughter Amy. Only minutes before, Sarah had gone outside to pull some water from the community well when she heard the sound of screaming coming from inside her house. Racing back, she found four year old Amy standing in the middle of
the kitchen with foot high flames shooting up from her head. Incredibly, both Alice and Amy appeared to have caught fire at almost exactly the same time, despite living in separate homes a mile away from each other Tragically. Alice didn't survive the night, while Amy succumbed to her injuries the following morning. No explanation for how exactly they caught fire was ever found.
Some nine years before the mysterious case, in Sowerby Bridge, just over three thousand miles away on the outskirts of air Massachusetts, in the United States, a doctor picks his way through the woods, beckoned forward by a distraught young woman. As he moves deeper into the trees, he becomes aware of the faint smell of burnt flesh in the air. The further he goes, the stronger the smell becomes, until he's forced to cup a handkerchief to his nose to
block it out. There, says the woman, finally pointing towards something on fire in a small clearing. The doctor stood startled for a moment as he tried to comprehend the peculiar and shocking scene. It was a body covered in fifteen inch flames, pitched forward on one knee, with its face, arms and chest lying flat against the ground while its right leg remained rigidly stuck up straight. The body hissed and crackled as it burned. Then a pop was heard.
Was the right tibia snapped off completely, leaving the foot hanging from a string of quickly blackening tendons. Well put her out, for God's sake, shouted the doctor. Moments later, as others arrived to help, a spading fork was used to shovel earth over the corpse until the flames died out, and then they all just stood watching the blackened figure, its clothes all but burned off, quietly smoking in the woods.
Shortly before she caught fire. The victim, the mother of the woman who'd called for the doctor in the first place, had been clearing stumps and roots from an area close to her home. Some suggested she must have accidentally set fire to herself. However, not only was the body found a good ten meters from the fire, but there was also no damage to the forest floor around it, with
only a slight charring of the leaves underneath. Even the straw hat the woman was wearing at the time she caught fire lay several feet away with only minor scorchings. The doctor who attended the scene, a doctor Heartwell, gave his account of this peculiar story in the February eighteen ninety two edition of the Boston Medical Journal. It is thought to be the first officially recorded case of a medical professional finding a human body combusting in which the
material of the body itself was feeding the fire. Heartwell's own conclusion was that the woman, despite being well known as a diligent and sober individual, had likely been caught out by a sudden burst of flame from the fire she'd made, which had then latched onto her clothes and quickly overcome her. But could it have been something a little stranger you're listening to unexplained? And I'm Richard McClane Smith. Mary wasn't her usual self ever since she'd moved out
to Florida. Her son Richard couldn't help but notice how unhappy she'd become. It had all seemed like such a good idea at first. Only three years before the sixty seven year old Mary's beloved husband and Richard's father, Richard Riesa, had died. Mary and Richard Sor had lived together in Columbia, Pennsylvania, where they enjoyed a lively social life, often hosting their many friends that their beautifully turned out home that was full of antique furniture and art. When Richard died, however,
everything changed. The home where her son had also grown up so grand and full of wonderful memories, was now just a painful daily reminder of her husband's absence. Though she tried to carry on like before, it was clear to her son that his father's death had taken a heavy toll and she needed help. After graduating from Cornell Medical School, like his dad, Richard was sent to Florida to look after US troops stationed there as part of their training to being sent overseas to fight in the
Second World War. Richard liked it so much that he and his wife, Ernestine, along with their three daughters, decided to stay there and moved into a large family home in Saint Petersburg. The obvious solution, therefore, was to have his mother moved down to be closer to them, and so in late May of nineteen fifty one she did, taking an apartment on Cherry Street in the east of the city, just by the coast. By July first, however,
only five weeks later, Mary was struggling. It was the heat and humidity more than anything else, being such a marked contrast to what she'd been used to in Columbia, Pennsylvania. She missed her friends too, and her apartment was also beginning to depress her. With only one bedroom and three rooms in total, it was a far cry from the much prettier house she'd shared with her husband, and once
again something had to break. In the end, Mary decided to keep the place in Florida, but moved back to Columbia in Pennsylvania for the remainder of the summer and asked her friends to help her find somewhere to stay. Sadly, however,
finding a place proved an almost impossible task. Undeterred, Mary succeeded in convincing a friend to drive her back to Pennsylvania so she could organize something herself, only for her friend to then break her leg, and so Mary had no choice but to stick it out in Saint Petersburg indefinitely. In the early afternoon of July first, clearly withdrawn, Mary arrived at her son's house to look after her youngest granddaughter while the rest of the family went out to
the beach. According to Richard's account given to the police the following day, while he was at the beach, he couldn't stop thinking about how down his mother seemed, and decided to head home early. Once back, Mary insisted to him that everything was fine and asked to simply be driven back to her apartment, which Richard agreed to do after he'd taken a shower. By the time he came back down, his mother had left, having decided just to
walk home. Not being fully dressed. Richard asked his wife, Ernestine, to chase after her in the hope of picking her up on the way, but Mary was nowhere to be seen. When Ernestine eventually arrived at Mary's apartment, she wasn't there either. Ernestine waited unsuccessfully until five pm before deciding to drive back home, having heard nothing from his mother by eight pm.
Richard then claimed to have driven back to her apartment with one of his daughters, where he found the door open and his mother sitting silently in her easy chair, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio. Richard later said that she seemed oddly relaxed given the circumstances, perhaps helped by the two sleeping pills she'd just taken. He said that Mary insisted she was fine, again, saying that she planned to go to bed as soon as her
program was finished. Satisfied that his mother was at least home safely. Richard said he simply gave her a kiss good night, then promised to call in on her in the morning before he and his daughter drove back home. Alamander Apartments, where Mary was home to a hotel and five apartments in total. However, Mary was the only person living there at the time, along with her landlady Pansy Carpenter. Pansy said she saw Mary a short time before Richard's
arrival and again after he left. Having noticed her tenant's downbeat mood, Pansy had chatted to Mary briefly about her disappointment and not being able to get back to Pennsylvania, and had then gone off to buy her some ice cream to try and cheer her up. When she returned to the apartment, however, the lights were off. Assuming that Mary had gone to bed, Pansy decided not to disturb
her and soon after went to sleep herself. It was five am the following morning when Pansy was woken by the thud of what she assumed was a door slamming somewhere on her property. Stepping out into the warm morning darkness, her flip flops clacking against the concrete path. Pansy's relief at finding the place deserted was soon tempered by the whiff of something burning. Thinking it was the water pump overheating,
she headed into the garage to inspect it. With the smell of burning having by then dissipated, she decided to air on the side of caution and switched it off before returning back to bed. Pansy was up again at sixty five and stepped outside to collect the morning paper when she noticed Mary's apartment was still dark, which was unusual since Mary was such an early riser. Just over an hour later, a telegram messenger arrived with a telegram for Mary. Since she didn't appear to be up yet,
agreed to deliver it herself. She felt a sudden pang of nerves as she set off toward Mary's apartment, which was located beyond a screen door and down a corridor to the left. Pansy grabbed the screen door, then pulled back her hand in shock. It was searingly hot. It was also unlocked, which was never the case. Taking care not to burn her hand, Pansy poured the screen door open again and stepped through into the corridor. Beyond. A
disturbing warmth hung in the air. As Pansy made her way down to Mary's apartment, where she found the door slightly ajar and knew immediately that something was terribly wrong. Pansy ran outside and called out to the telegram messenger for help, along with two decorators who were busy working on a house across the street. The men told Pansy to wait outside as one of the decorators, Albert Downet,
headed inside toward Mary's apartment. A thick plume of black smoke escaped as Albert pushed open the door, batting it away. He stepped inside, where a thick smell of grease clung to the air. Through the smoky darkness, he could just make out some flames licking up through the springs of an easy chair that had clearly been destroyed by a fire, and at the base of what remained at the chair
was a bizarre, gelatinous, red, smoldering mass. Albert ran straight out and yelled for Pansy to call the fire brigade. Assistant fire Chief Stephen Griffith was one of the first to arrive on the scene. He noticed first that a plastic face plate for a switch in the hall had morphed completely out of shape, suggesting a significant heat had
been generated from within the apartment beyond. Then, pushing open the door, he entered inside as he called out Mary's name, Barely able to see more than a few meters in front of him through the smoke, he headed straight for a window and opened it up. Turning back, he saw then that one of the joists in the living room and the remains of the easy chair, was still on fire.
Using a hand held water pump, Griffith quickly extinguished the flames. Then, with the smoke now steadily clearing, he looked down to the floor and saw next to the remains of the chair a large pile of ash, surrounded by a dark globular mass, and sticking out of it was an almost perfectly preserved leg, burned off from just below the shin, with an unburned black satin slipper on its foot. The pile of ash and sticky mass, it seemed, along with
the leg, was all that was left of Mary. Griffith stood bemused by the whole thing, looking about at the rest of the apartment that appeared almost completely undamaged by the apparent blaze, Though there were undeniable signs that a fire had taken place, such as the ceiling having been blackened by the smoke, an internal screen window clogged with soot, and a degree of burning between the partition separating the
kitchen and living areas. Very little of the apartment appeared to have actually caught fire, aside from the chair where Mary must have been sitting when it happened, a small table next to it and a wooden lamp on top of that were all that was burned, and even then only partially. Not one of her two day beds or the sheets on them, nor the dining table and four chairs, all located close to the apparent source of the fire, were affected, while nothing in her dressing room or bathroom
was damaged either. Once the room was cleared of smoke and cool enough to investigate. Alongside Mary's lower leg, forensics also found some teeth, a charred piece of liver attached to some spine, as well as a hip bone and a piece of Mary's skull buried within the ashes. Though there was little doubting the identity of the body for sixty seven year old Mary Reesa was ultimately identified by the black slipper on her foot, which her son recognized
as hers. So unusual was the incident that the Saint Petersburg Police were forced to enlist the help of the FBI to try and untangle it. Attention soon focused on Mary's son, Richard, whom her landlady Pansy Carpenter, reported seeing arriving at the apartment the night before she died. As she explained to the police, although that wasn't unusual, it was strange that she found Mary's door had been left open and the screen door unlocked when she went to
call on her the following morning. That Mary's bed also appeared to have been slept in, despite the fact that she clearly died while sitting in her easy chair, was also a little suspicious. In the end, however, Richard was never seriously considered a suspect. Two electricians were tasked with examining all the electrical items in the flower to determine if an electrical fire was the cause, but no faults were found. The apartment also had an electric fire, which
wasn't far from where Mary's remains were found. However, according to those who first arrived at the apartment, this was switched off when they got there. For someone so disgruntled with the Florida heat, it also seems highly unlikely that
Mary would have had reason to turn this on. After three weeks spent analyzing smoke samples, pieces of rug, and segments of the easy chair, among other things, the FBI concluded that no oxidizing chemicals, petroleum hydrocarbons or other volatile fluids, or any other chemical substances used to initiate or accelerate combustion were found at the scene. As investigators struggled to explain it all, a raft of amateur detectives contacted the
local fire department to offer their own theories. Everything from lightning to an accident with napalm was suggested, with one individual even claiming that they'd watched a ball of fire come through the open window and hit Mary. With all the various theories about what had happened floating around, Mary's
daughter in law, Ernestine, had one of her own. Speaking to the Saint Petersburg Times in nineteen ninety one, she said that Mary was a heavy smoker who most likely fell asleep in her chair while smoking and set herself on fire. With Mary having taken sleeping pills that night while wearing a night dress made of rayon acetate, a highly flammable material. It is certainly plausible that this is
what happened. It was also true that the floor under the carpet was concrete, which may have helped to contain the spread of any resultant fire. And yet such deaths are by no means unheard of, but rarely, if ever, do they result in the complete cremation of the victim, something that would likely require well over a thousand degrees celsius to occur. By comparison, the heat generated from a burning chair would be more akin to six hundred degrees celsius.
One theory put forward was that the reason the apartment hadn't burned down was because Mary hadn't been set on fire, but had instead burned from the inside, with her body fat sustaining the burn like a candle while simultaneously keeping the resultant fire localized around her body. Famed anthropologist de Wilton Krogeman of the University of Pennsylvania was also brought
in to consult on the mystery. Considered an expert on the effects of fire on the human body, Krogeman made the intriguing point that had the fire been a common one, Mary's skull should have exploded rather than shrunk, as it
was found to have done. Krogeman, who regarded the case as the most amazing thing he'd ever seen, and who felt the hairs bristle on the back of his neck whenever he thought about it, stated that he couldn't conceive of such a complete cremation without more material having been burned in the apartment where I living in the Middle Ages, he said, I'd mutter something about black magic. To this day,
the bizarre death of Mary Esa remains unexplained. A few days to Mary's remains were discovered, Pansy Carpenter, her landlady, remembered that she still had Mary's undelivered telegram in her office, handing it over to Mary's son, Richard. He read it and wept. It was a message from Mary's friends in Columbia, Pennsylvania. They'd managed to find her an apartment after all, and couldn't wait to see her again. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us, you can now
do so via Patroon. To receive access to ad three episodes, just go to patron dot com, Forward slash Unexplained Pod to sign up. Unexplained, The book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of unexpl Blamed, including the show's music, are produced by
me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com, or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast