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Spontaneous Combustion: Spontaneous Human Combustion
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Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is the alleged process of a human body catching fire as a result of heat generated by internal chemical or nuclear action. While no one has ever witnessed SHC, several deaths involving fire have been attributed to SHC by investigators and storytellers. Charles Dickens used SHC as the cause of death of a heavy drinker in his novel Bleak House (1852), fueling a popular belief that excessive drinking could lead to SHC. Responding to criticism that he was encouraging nonsense, in the second edition of Bleak House Dickens claims he knew of some thirty cases of SHC, but he mentions only two.* Both cases allegedly happened over one hundred years earlier. Dickens or his source probably got his information about SHC from stories collected by Jonas Dupont published in De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis (1763).*
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The physical possibilities of spontaneous human combustion are remote. Not only is the body mostly water, but aside from fat tissue and methane gas, there isn't much that burns readily in a human body. To cremate a human body requires a temperature of 1600 degrees Fahrenheit for about two hours. To get a chemical reaction in a human body that would lead to ignition would require some doing. If the deceased had recently eaten an enormous amount of hay that was infested with bacteria, enough heat might be generated to ignite the hay, but not much besides the gut and intestines would probably burn. Or, if the deceased had been eating the newspaper and drunk some oil, and was left to rot for a couple of weeks in a well-heated room, his gut might ignite.
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Spontaneous human combustion seems to strike without warning and without leaving a clue. It seems to occur primarily among the elderly and among women, but there is no standard rule for these grim cases of preternatural combustibility. Nearly every theory, such as that those who imbibe heavily might be more susceptible to the burning death, has been disproved and rejected. At this time, no investigator has determined the critical set of circumstances that might bring body cells to the stage at which they might spontaneously burst into the flames that feed on the body's own fatty tissue, and SHC remains a baffling mystery in the annals of the unexplained and the unknown.
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The problem with this class of reactions and Spontaneous Human Combustion is that no pyrophoric compounds exist in the human body, nor is there an oxidising agent present. So it seems very unlikely, if not impossible, for human beings to combust spontaneously. A few alternative explanations have been suggested for an internal source of spontaneous combustion, such as Larry Arnold's "Pyroton Particles", but such explanations seem to be invented in order to match the theory rather than based on any evidence.
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Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC) is a supposed supernatural burning of otherwise healthy people into a pile of ashes with no discernible cause. SHC had become a fad in the latter quarter of the twentieth century and books and TV programmes were written about it. This fad replicated the similar fad for it in the mid-nineteenth century when authors like Captain Marryott and Charles Dickens even featured it in their novels.
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In the last two centuries a variety of explanations for spontaneous human combustion have been offered, ranging from the scientific to the paranormal. Some have tied it to leys, magnetic irregularities in the Earth, and UFOs. Writing in 1995, Larry Arnold, currently the leading proponent of a paranormal explanation for the phenomenon, was not the first to suggest that the image on the Turin Shroud might have been caused by spontaneous human combustion.
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Spontaneous Human Combustion