112. Morbid Medicine: Spontaneous Human Combustion
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Just before 3 a.m. on December 22nd, 2010, Tom Mannion of Galway, Ireland, woke in the middle of the night to a shrieking smoke alarm. As he leapt out of bed, he quickly realized the noise wasn't coming from his own home. It was coming from the little red brick house next door, where 76-year-old retiree Michael Faherty lived. Tom rushed to check on his neighbor.

As soon as he got outside though, his heart dropped. Clouds of dark smoke billowed from Michael's home. Tom raced up the cobblestone walkway, heat radiating off the house, and he pounded on the front door, but there was no reply. He kept trying, banging so loudly that nobody could possibly sleep through the racket.

Still, there was no sign of Michael. And Tom was really worried. Michael was older. He had diabetes. What if he was inside, unconscious?

Eventually, the police arrived on the scene, but as they pulled up, they noticed the first strange thing about what was going on. Though black smoke poured from the windows, there wasn't actually any flames, like whatever had caught fire had already been put out inside. But with Michael nowhere to be found, they were going to have to go in to be sure. They forced their way into the smoke-filled house, but when they got in,

they still didn't see anything on fire. The kitchen and everything around it looked worse for wear, but again, nothing was engulfed in flame. And that's when they noticed the next strange thing about the scene. There on the floor was what looked like the source of the fire. And it took them a moment to realize that they were looking at Michael Ferdie himself.

or at least what was left of him. Almost all of his body had been reduced to ashes.

Yet, aside from the scorched floor directly underneath him and some fire damage on the ceiling directly above him, nothing else in the room had burned. Even highly flammable items, including a pack of matches sitting on the mantelpiece, were completely untouched. And there were no clues as to how exactly Michael had burned to death.

He was found on his back with his head pointing towards the fireplace where there was a small fire going, which initially seemed suspicious, but investigators quickly ruled that this wasn't how Michael caught fire. The fireplace was working properly and nothing between it and Michael had been burned. When the local coroner, Dr. Kieran McLaughlin arrived on the scene, he was equally baffled.

In his 25-year career, he'd never seen a fire death he couldn't explain. There was always a source of ignition, a cigarette, a candle, a pan left unattended on the stove. But here, there were no answers to be found. Even after a medical examiner conducted an autopsy on the few parts of Michael's body that didn't completely burn.

Months later, after conducting a full coroner's inquest, Dr. McLaughlin ruled that Michael Faraday's death was caused by something to this day scientists don't have a concrete answer for. Something that can happen at random, potentially to anyone, and reduce an entire human being to ash without harming anything around them. He said it was spontaneous human combustion.

Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding. I'm your host, Kalen Moore, and today is a bad day to be a hypochondriac. Because today we're talking about a seemingly supernatural medical event known as spontaneous human combustion. It's when people seem to catch fire completely out of the blue. But is it paranormal or is there a more clear medical explanation for why this happens? We're going to get into that today.

But before we do, it's time again to shout out another creepy little listener. You guys have been sending me your macabre and dark hobbies, jobs, but also spooky, scary things that just happen around you. And this week, Mac reached out to let me know that she works in a haunted warehouse. And she thinks this warehouse is haunted, get this, because the owner of said warehouse keeps the mattress his mother died on

in the building. Mac says that she's heard a woman whisper her name multiple times. Please keep these creepy little tidbits coming. I absolutely eat them all up. And I also wanted to mention that if you are a Patreon or Apple podcast subscriber, get ready for this month's bonus episode on Antarctic conspiracy theories.

That's coming out Friday. And as always, it was suggested by patrons and voted on by the Patreon High Council. This was a really fun one to do. So if you're not a subscriber and you want to see what's going on down there, hint, it is very strange. You can sign up for a free trial on Apple or Patreon and check it out. And as always, thank you so much for your support.

Now, let's get settled into the study here at the Rogue Detecting Society headquarters and see if we can figure out what's going on with all these people that are bursting into flame. And as always, listener discretion is advised.

Spontaneous human combustion is a term that's been used to describe the strange phenomena of a person seemingly bursting into flames for no discernible reason, hence the spontaneous nature of it. The term has been around since 1746 when a man was trying to make sense of the death of Countess Cornelia Zangaree Bandy,

One morning, the countess's maid entered her room to see that her body had been reduced to a pile of ash. Just her lower legs below the knee, three fingers, and the front of her skull remained intact. The rest had been burned away. But stranger still, nothing else in the room had been scorched, despite the furniture and linens being flammable. The

The room, however, was covered in a greasy, oily substance that reportedly smelled very bad.

No one knew what to make of this death. Nothing in the room indicated how the countess could have caught fire, they said. It must have been something paranormal. And so the diagnosis of spontaneous human combustion was first used. Over the years, the phenomena has continued to occur. And a lot of these cases have seemed stranger than fiction, fueling the speculation that it is indeed paranormal.

And the strangest of these cases might be that of Amy Kirby and her sister, Alice Ann.

On January 5th, 1899, recently separated young mother, Sarah Kirby of West Yorkshire, England, went out to fetch water from the well. Her four-year-old daughter, Amy, remained inside along with her two younger siblings. Her other daughter, Alice Ann, was down the street at her grandmother's house. It only took Sarah two minutes to fill her bucket and get back up to the house. When she returned...

She found Amy completely engulfed in fire, screaming horribly. Sarah saw flames a yard high coming from her daughter's body. It had happened so fast, as if Amy had caught fire the moment Sarah turned her back. Sarah used her bucket of water to extinguish the flames, but Amy was already horribly burned.

Sarah ran towards her estranged husband's home for help, but as she was running, she saw her neighbor from down the street running in her direction, looking panicked. The neighbor flagged Sarah down and said that she needed help. There was a horrible accident involving Alice Ann, Sarah's other daughter. "'What do you mean?' Sarah asked. The neighbor explained, "'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

that five-year-old Alice Ann had also just spontaneously caught fire. Earlier that morning, Alice Ann's grandmother, Susan Kirby, left the house, leaving Alice Ann asleep at home. Alice Ann hadn't been feeling well, and her grandmother expected her to sleep until about 12:30 p.m., as she typically did when she was under the weather.

But at around 11:00 AM, the neighbor saw a blaze inside the home and then saw a young girl approach the door engulfed by the flames. Neighbors rushed her her aid and wrapped her in a rug to put out the fire.

The two sisters, one year apart in age and a mile apart in distance, had burst into flames at the exact same time in two different houses while under the care of two different adults. Sarah fell to her knees, stunned. It was bad enough watching Amy burn and then having to leave her there on the floor to go get help.

Learning that Alice Ann was in the same condition was almost too much for the mother to bear. A horse-drawn ambulance took both girls to the hospital, but unfortunately, neither of them made it.

After her children passed, all Sarah wanted to do was lay them to rest with as much dignity as possible. But the local church refused to allow the girls to be buried in consecrated ground in the plot previously bought by their family. Instead, they were interred in unmarked graves in the unconsecrated section of the cemetery.

Their entire family would later be buried in the unconsecrated section next to them. Locals believed that the church was afraid, as if the fire that struck the girls down was sent directly from hell.

Sensationalized tabloid coverage certainly didn't help with that belief. It continued for weeks after the girls' funerals, seizing on every salacious detail to sell papers. For example, we found a Halifax Courier headline that read, "'Fire from Heaven?' Or were they flames from hell that turned two sisters into human torches?'

Whether you believe it was hellfire, spontaneous human combustion, or something else, we're all left with the same question. How could two girls have burst into flame at the exact same time in two different locations?

Was the church right? Was this some sort of paranormal phenomenon? And is it something that could happen to any of us at any moment? I mean, should I start traveling with a fire extinguisher? Because I'm a hypochondriac. I'll do it. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to discuss some of the theories, both scientific and otherwise, about exactly why this might happen. This episode is brought to you by Hero Bread.

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So spontaneous human combustion, or SHC, revolves around the theory that a human being can catch fire through some sort of internal or supernatural process without having to be exposed to extreme heat or an open flame, causing them to burn to death.

And there's a very real basis for this theory. For centuries, people have documented genuinely bizarre burn deaths that look nothing like the aftermath of a typical household fire, just like the cases we've discussed already. And some of these deaths tend to have similar characteristics.

The first one being that in SHC cases, the victim's body is largely reduced to ash, including the bones. Fire needs to be really hot for this to happen. So not everyone who dies in a fire is reduced to ash. Yet in cases of SHC, they are.

In other words, they're burned more similarly to how human bodies in crematoriums are burned. And crematoriums produce much hotter temperatures than are typical of house fires.

Another characteristic they share is that many of these cases also involve legs or feet left largely intact while the rest of the body is completely burned. Like in the case of the Countess, which has given rise to theory that whatever is happening, the fire might be starting in the person's abdomen.

There's also how several cases throughout history involved an oily, yellowish residue left behind in the room, often smeared all the way up the walls to the ceiling. Sort of like an extreme version of what you would see if you cooked bacon on your stovetop every day and never wiped the splatter off the walls.

That was also described at the scene of the Countess, the greasy, oily residue that covered everything in her room and smelled terrible. They didn't know what the grease was when the Countess burned, but it has since been discovered that the grease found in these cases is human fat that liquefies under extreme heat. Sometimes there's a pool of liquid fat left under the ashes as well.

And not all SHC victims fit the same profile, like the two small girls we spoke about earlier don't really fit this. But there is a quote, typical victim, elderly and in poor health with limited mobility and a substantial amount of body fat, likely a smoker, a drinker or both.

But what really causes these bizarre burn deaths? I knew I needed to get to the bottom of this or I would simply never sleep again. And it seems like throughout history, there have been many theories ranging from the spiritual to the scientific.

Over the centuries, right up until today, some people have believed SHC to be a completely unnatural phenomenon. For example, British author Michael Harrison theorized that SHC is a result of poltergeists setting people on fire from the inside out.

Some people, especially the further back in history you go, associate SHC with demons or hell. The tabloid headlines about the Kirby sisters suggested hellfire as an explanation for their sudden ignition. And these deaths are so horrific, it's easy to imagine them as some sort of punishment from Satan himself. I mean, just picture explaining all of this to a pilgrim. They're going to think you're a witch.

But if ghosts and hellfire is what's causing SHC, SHC cases shouldn't be less common today than they were in the Victorian era. And yet SHC is much rarer now. Another theory from the Victorian era is a less literal kind of demon, and that's alcohol addiction.

Back in the Victorian era, when cases of SHC peaked, these deaths were generally attributed to habitual drinking. Maybe so much alcohol had been stored in a person's body that if they were near a fire or a cigarette dropped on them, they would be completely engulfed in flame. And we see this theory in a 1641 book that tells the story of an Italian knight named Polonus Vorstius.

This was before the term spontaneous human combustion was really used, but it tells the story of a knight who one evening drank a few glasses of strong wine with his parents. He reportedly burped fire and then became engulfed in flames.

However, experimental human and animal specimens are often preserved in much more alcohol than a person could possibly consume, and those specimens don't easily ignite and burn completely to ash.

Also, this theory doesn't really fit cases that involve children, like the Kirby sisters. I know it was a different time, but kids were not hitting the pubs back then. And the alcohol theory also fails to explain why this would happen so rarely, given the high rate of alcoholism in the Victorian era.

So maybe we need to look at a different unexplained phenomenon to explain SHC. Well, some scientists have suggested that victims are ignited by chance encounters with high energy, a somewhat mythical substance called ball lightning.

For centuries, people have reported seeing bright, moving spherical objects during thunderstorms. Some reports say these balls come through walls or windows or even come out of telephone receivers. Unlike normal lightning, ball lightning is said to last for several seconds at a time before the ball bursts, sometimes leaving behind a strange odor.

Is that what happened on August 27th, 1938, when 22-year-old Phyllis Newcomb reportedly caught flame out of nowhere while she was leaving a dance in England? Partygoers were stunned to see the woman erupt into blue flames while no one else around her was touched, as if hell had opened up to swallow the girl whole.

Phyllis later died from her burns. Scientists have been unable to create ball lightning in laboratory conditions, though, but they have gotten close. Running a very strong electrical current through saltwater can create a glowing ball of plasma that rises out of the water and hovers briefly.

If ball lightning is real, and if it's involved in SHC, this very brief contact with a high-energy ignition source could possibly explain why only certain parts of the body burn while others appear untouched.

There have also been many other theories that just haven't stuck. Author Larry Arnold proposed that SHC occurs due to an as yet undiscovered subatomic particle within the human body that sometimes experiences a type of collision that starts an out of control reaction leading to rapid inside out ignition of the body. Think of it like a little atomic bomb going off inside of you.

Similarly, author Gerald Callahan suggested that some sort of thyroid malfunction could cause human mitochondria to combust internally, triggering a fission-like reaction. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some speculated that, under certain circumstances, the human body could become so unusually combustible that even static electricity could cause ignition, followed by complete immolation.

There was the thought that high levels of carbon monoxide poisoning could cause someone to spontaneously ignite.

But experiments that were done on livestock that are very not okay by today's standards showed that you would have to expose them to high levels of carbon monoxide for eight months for them to burn like SHC victims. A person would most likely have to be exposed for even longer than that. And by that point, they would have very intense and noticeable symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning.

So I guess there is the chance that Michael's home had a gas leak that no one knew about. Many other victims of SHC have not shown any symptoms of poisoning before their immolation. So none of these explanations from history really feel like they're a perfect fit for any of the cases we've discussed. But we do have a theory today that feels like it fits a little bit better.

One modern scientific explanation for SHC is that people with certain traits become unconscious, either in front of a fire or while smoking. Their clothes will catch fire and whatever they're sitting on smolders at a high temperature. And this eventually causes their body fat to ignite.

This is called the fat wick theory because theoretically human fat can act as a candle while combustible clothing and furniture act as a wick, causing most of an entire human body to burn to ash without really burning much of the surrounding room.

In theory, by the time anyone finds the body, whatever the ignition source was, such as a lit cigarette, has also burned to ash, making the combustion look truly spontaneous. And it's not unusual for people to burn to death after falling asleep or passing out with an open flame or cigarette nearby. But the weird part about cases labeled SHC is that they burn so completely.

And if we look at the history of SHC, it is interesting to note that cases appear to have peaked at a time when many homes were heated by open fires, indoor smoking was common, and many people still got their light from lanterns. In the age of electricity, furnaces, and smoke detectors, SHC is vanishingly rare.

But in 2010, Michael Faraday's death in Ireland was officially attributed to spontaneous human combustion.

Some limited experiments with pig carcasses have supported the fatwick theory, but experimenters have had a really hard time replicating it on human cadavers. They say that it's quite difficult to generate temperatures sufficient enough to carbonize human bones without a significant amount of outside fuel. So they would need something more than just a lit cigarette.

So as a result, the Fatwick theory does have some support, but it is far from proven. It is, however, what is most often cited in one of the most famous cases of SHC, the case of Mary Reeser.

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Excludes restaurant orders. Service fees and terms apply. On July 1st, 1951, 67-year-old widow Mary Hardy Reeser had a tense visit with her son, Dr. Richard Reeser Jr., during which she complained that she hated living in Florida. Mary moved south after her husband's death to be closer to the kids and grandkids, but she never really adjusted. It was just too hot, too humid, and there were too many bugs.

She wanted to take a trip home to Pennsylvania and became so agitated about this that she refused supper. Dr. Reeser reluctantly left his mother's apartment at 9 p.m. He didn't think she should be alone, but she insisted he should go. The next morning, at around 8 a.m., landlady Pansy Carpenter tried to deliver a telegram to Mrs. Reeser, but found her apartment's doorknob too hot to touch and

Pansy sprung into action. There were painters working in the building and getting their help was faster than calling the fire department. The painters forced Mary's door open and inside the apartment was hot and smelled like smoke with scorch marks on the floor and streaks of grease all over the walls. At first, Pansy was relieved. They couldn't see Mary anywhere. The fire must have started while she was out, perhaps running an errand or visiting her grandchildren.

the painters saw something truly awful. A slipper and part of a woman's leg sticking out of a pile of ashes. Horrified, they called the police. Upon arriving, the police officers were just as confused as the painters. Sifting the ashes, they retrieved Mary's left foot and a portion of her spine. But that was really all that was left of her.

Despite apparent extreme heat, sufficient to turn her bones to ash, the fire hadn't spread in her apartment at all. And it also didn't really appear to generate much smoke. Mary's bedsheets were still a crisp white, not even a streak of soot on them. Most of the room where Mary's body was found looked fairly normal, except for the greasy, yellowish residue all over the walls.

Candles near Mary's remains had also melted into puddles of liquid wax, but their wicks did not burn. Nobody in town had ever seen anything like this before. In fact, the police had a hard time finding anyone out of town who had seen anything like it. The FBI ended up getting involved because of the strangeness of the case, but their investigation was inconclusive.

The feds weren't able to determine a cause of ignition. There just wasn't anything that obviously had set the fire and no reason why the only thing that burned was Mary's body. Though, interesting enough, their report did actually rule out spontaneous combustion, but her case remained unsolved. However, the scientific community wasn't really ready to let go of Mary Reeser's case just yet.

A two-year reinvestigation by Joe Nickel and John F. Fisher concluded that Mary likely died in a similar way to most house fire victims, even though her body burned differently.

They thought that she had become unconscious, probably due to her sleeping pills, before finishing her cigarette. Then the lit cigarette ignited her highly flammable rayon acetate nightgown, the fire spread to her easy chair, and the chair smoldered at high temperatures for many hours without producing open flames. This superheated Mary's body fat, causing her to burn like a candle.

By the time she was found, her cigarette had burned up completely, leaving no sign of how the fire started. In other words, the case of Mary Reeser gave rise to the fat wick theory, now the most widely accepted hypothesis about SHC.

So maybe we do have it. Maybe it is fatwick theory after all. But is that something that we all have to worry about? Can the fat inside of us just combust at any given moment if we're near an open flame? Well...

Probably not. You're probably okay. Fatwick theory definitely doesn't apply to everyone. There are certain conditions that make a person more susceptible to burning from the inside out. For instance, bones that have been weakened, like the bones of people with osteoporosis, burn more easily and more completely than healthy bones. And many SHC victims were at an age where they likely suffered from at least some bone density loss.

There's also a theory that diabetic people or people on a keto diet may actually be in a state of ketosis where so much acetone has accumulated in their system, it makes them more flammable.

This is not entirely proven. It has been very difficult for researchers to replicate, though they have found that pig abdomens soaked in acetone do burn with the blue flame that is sometimes associated with SHC. People who are more prone to being combustible, like diabetics or people with brittle bones, find themselves near a combustible source, like a cigarette in Mary's case or a fire in the countess's case,

And the ignition causes all of the fat in their body to ignite. And actually, that leads me back to Michael's case. Because remember, Michael was diabetic. And though it says spontaneous human combustion still on his death certificate, people now have a different understanding of how Michael likely died. But let's go over some of the facts of his case again.

76-year-old Michael Faraday died alone at home on December 22nd, 2010. He was found lying on his back in his sitting room with his head facing the fireplace. Scorch marks were observed above and below his body, but nothing else in the house was burned, though there was extensive smoke damage.

Michael was found near a fireplace with an active fire. However, forensic experts did not believe that fire caused his combustion. No accelerant was found at the scene. There was no evidence that anyone had entered or left the home between the time Mr. Faraday must have ignited and shortly after 3 a.m. when firefighters found him dead.

Coroner Dr. Kieran McLaughlin's best guess, after months of studying the body and conducting a full coroner's inquest, was that Michael died of shock due to being burned. With no ignition source identified, the coroner was forced to list SHC as the cause of death for the first time in a 25-year career. But there is another theory.

Though she was never able to prove it, based on her report, the state pathologist, Dr. Grace Callagy, appears to believe Mr. Faraday was dead before he caught fire. She noted a lack of soot in Michael's partial lung and his trachea, meaning that he did not inhale any smoke.

And it would be difficult for a living person to burn to death without inhaling any smoke. So if this is true, Michael was probably dead when his body caught fire. And that leads us to another theory that maybe if he had a severe buildup of acetone in his body, potentially from being diabetic...

When he died, maybe it caused him to exude a lot of acetone vapors, and those maybe were ignited by the fire in the fireplace.

And it's interesting to note here, but since Michael's death, the coroner in this case, Kieran McLaughlin, has continued to make headlines in Ireland. Some Irish publications have characterized this particular coroner as an attention seeker who was a little too eager to report on the first case of SHC in decades. Perhaps he knew something else killed Michael most likely, but he wanted to draw up some attention by calling it spontaneous human combustion.

But maybe, after all, SHC isn't as supernatural as people believed it to be. But then, what happened to those little girls in West Yorkshire, Alice Ann and Amy? How did two children, who most likely were not diabetic or suffering from brittle bones, how did they catch fire at the exact same moment?

Well, children at the time were often dressed in highly combustible fabrics and raised in homes heated by open hearths. Even the district coroner, William Barstow, in presiding over the inquest, expressed that children often burned to death in the area. Separately, both Kirby sisters were left alone in rooms with open flames. The coroner's inquest revealed that one of them did have a history of playing with fire,

And the other one had a history actually of pulling her younger siblings away from the fire. Some believe that most likely both of the girls got too close to the fires, their flammable clothes ignited and their panicked reactions only fed the flames. By the time an adult was able to extinguish them, the sisters were too badly burned to survive. It was only coincidence that it happened at the same time.

The girls' parents were separated at the time of the immolation, and at a time when divorce was quite rare and even separation was highly stigmatized, the public may have been predisposed to think the tragedy was punishment for the Kirby family's sins, and so it was believed to be a supernatural case of SHC.

So where does all of this leave us today? With so few cases to study and only one of them occurring in the current millennium, it is hard to draw any definitive conclusions about SHC or what causes it. Some cases like the Kirby sisters were probably just accidents. Others were probably homicides or suicides that actually got mislabeled as SHC over the years.

But that still leaves at least a few cases we can't completely explain. The acetone theory is pretty convincing and it does potentially fit the Michael Faraday case.

But at least for now, it's just a theory. And the fatwick theory does have to be studied more. It does definitely align with Mary Reaser's death, but it doesn't really explain the source of ignition in Michael Faraday's case, especially if he was dead when he caught fire.

And the problems with these theories is that they are very hard to ethically test. Unless one of you wants to volunteer and see how a person could catch fire and just have the fat in their body burned to ash, I don't know how we'll ever prove any of these. And to me, at least, that's the thing that is the spookiest about this condition. To this day,

All we have are theories. No one really knows why a human being can be reduced to a pile of ash out of seemingly nowhere. But as we all sit here in the rogue detecting society headquarters around the flickering flame of my fireplace...

Perhaps we are all just one rogue ember landing on our shirt sleeve away from finding out for ourselves. That's all I have for you this week. Next week, I'm dragging all of you with me to the North Sea, one of the scariest, most dangerous remote locations on Earth to hear stories of folklore, legends, and real-life horror. And until then...

Stay away from open flames, my dear listeners. Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by Kaylin Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Amanda Olson is our associate producer. Additional research and writing by Yelena War. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com.

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