Spontaneous combustion of a person. On the Criminal Burning of Corpses

Like other anomalous phenomena, cases of spontaneous combustion of people have been known since ancient times.
During excavations in Thebes, a papyrus was found describing "the transformation of a priest into a fiery torch." There is evidence of such emergencies from ancient Greek authors and medieval monks.
And from the beginning of the 18th century, they began to be registered in police records, and therefore they can be considered quite reliable.

Spontaneous combustion of Countess Cornelia Bundy

In 1731, the whole of Italy was shocked by the case of Countess Cornelia Bundy of Casina. In the morning, the maid found in her mistress's bedroom next to her bed a heap of ash, in which lay the countess's head, three fingers and both legs. She had been alive the night before, and at night no strangers had entered her house. This mysterious death was never explained, since there were no traces of a fire in the bedroom.

Possible spontaneous combustion of George Temple Johnson

About 200 years later, on April 7, 1919, the English newspaper Dartford Chronicle published a controversial article about the mysterious death of the writer George Temple Johnson. At half past three in the night, he was found dead in his room. The lower part of his body was completely burnt, although there were no signs of fire on his clothes or in the room, and there was a large wad of paper money in his trouser pocket. “At the time of death, the deceased did not sleep - he was dressed. Why then did he not try to escape, to call for help from his neighbors? Finally, why were clothes, banknotes and furniture not damaged by the fire? " - the reporter wondered, who did not receive an answer to these questions from scientists.

The case of Mary Carpenter

So, in the summer of 1938, a certain Mrs. Mary Carpenter, accompanied by her family, went on a sea voyage on a yacht near Norfolk. Suddenly, the woman flashed like a torch and in a matter of minutes, before the eyes of her husband and children, petrified with horror, she turned to ash. They themselves and the yacht were not damaged by the fire.

Life after spontaneous combustion

But the greatest interest, of course, are the stories of those who became victims of spontaneous combustion, but survived.
The first of these was an American professor James Hamilton, professor of mathematics at the University of Nashville. In the morning, waking up, he was still sitting on the bed when he suddenly felt a burning pain in his left leg. Hamilton looked down and saw a tongue of bright flame, about 10 centimeters high, which burst out of his leg like the light of a lighter.
He tried to extinguish it by slapping his ankle several times with his hand, but it had no effect. Then the professor came up with the only correct decision: it is necessary to block the access of oxygen to the fire site. He gripped the place tightly with his palms, and the flame disappeared.
This incident took place in 1835 and was received with great skepticism. But in December 1916, another person witnessed a similar phenomenon.
Thomas Morphy, the owner of a hotel in the American city of Dover, New Jersey, discovered the housekeeper Lillian Greene lying on the floor in her living room. She was conscious, but her body smoldered under her clothes, and there was an unpleasant smell in the room. Fortunately for the victim, the burning stopped almost immediately. The very same unfortunate woman, who received serious burns, could not explain what happened to her.
But the American Jack Angel became a victim of spontaneous combustion during sleep. In November 1974, while in a suburban parking lot in Savannah, Georgia, he went to sleep in his trailer house. Angel fell asleep on November 12, and woke up four days later with a charred right arm and lighter burns to his chest, legs and back. All this time he was unconscious and, according to him, did not feel any pain when his body was burning. Moreover, there were no traces of fire in the van.

Spontaneous combustion in Russia

In Russia, the FMF phenomenon was first widely discussed only in 1990. Now they write about the LSL without any hint of a sensation, as about ordinary accidents. Here are just a few recent examples.
Vecherniy Bishkek newspaper told a story Valentina Fyodorovna Aseeva, who worked as a chief accountant in one of the commercial firms. In the evening, she watched the series on TV until midnight, then went to bed. I woke up about three o'clock to the voices coming from the children's room. I woke up my husband and went up to see what was the matter. When Valentina opened the door, she saw a bright flash of light, felt a sharp pain in the area of ​​the heart and lost consciousness. Her husband carried her to the bedroom. And two hours later, the woman who was lying in bed was suddenly engulfed in flames. The husband began to put out the fire, and he succeeded. But the consequences of the unexpected spontaneous combustion were terrible: the left side of the body, especially the chest, was covered with blisters, the hair on the head was singed to the very roots, but the eyebrows and eyelashes were not damaged. The nightgown and the sheets remained intact.
The doctors who arrived on call, having examined the victim, could not understand anything. Therefore, in the medical report they wrote that “there are multiple burns of unclear etiology on the patient's body,” that is, the origin. After the doctors, a few hours later, firefighters arrived, who also could not clarify what had happened in the Aseevs' apartment. The protocol drawn up by them only indicated that "... a fire occurred, the causes of the occurrence and termination of which could not be established." The fact is that Valentina's husband did not have time to do almost anything: he only poured a glass of water on his burning wife, and the fire went out as unexpectedly as it broke out.
In the city of Tomsk, a year ago, on Rosa Luxemburg Street, a homeless man was burned to death, sitting on a wooden bench in the evening and drinking vodka. Later, bystanders found him lying motionless on his back, and his body was burning with a bright flame, and the bench next to him was completely intact.
The police squad who arrived at the scene of the emergency did not find a canister or even a can of gasoline nearby. Therefore, the law enforcement officers wrote in the protocol that there was too much alcohol in the victim's body, which flared up from some "outside source", possibly when a homeless person tried to smoke. But, according to the doctors of the ambulance, who also came to Rosa Luxemburg Street, even if the body was doused with pure alcohol, it could not cause such fatal burns.

No one is immune from CCL

So, spontaneous combustion of people is not a figment of fantasy, but a real fact. In the old days, in such cases, it was said that a person was burned by the "devil's fire" or Satan was incinerated.
It was believed that the victim sold his soul to the Prince of Darkness, but then violated a secret agreement, for which he paid. In the 18th century, it was believed that drunkards, whose bodies were alcoholized to such an extent that they flashed from an accidental spark, for example, from a smoking pipe, became victims of spontaneous combustion. But this theory did not stand up to criticism, since many victims did not drink or smoke at all.
Until the end of the 19th century, scientists did not want to hear about the FMF phenomenon, considering reports of such cases to be fiction. The main "suppliers" of these horrible stories were newspapermen and ... writers who collected stories of witnesses of mysterious emergency situations. Among those who described this anomalous phenomenon in their books, one can name such serious authors as the American writer Herman Melville, the French classic Emile Zola, the English writers Thomas De Quincey and Frederic Mariette. And the famous Charles Dickens wrote a whole work "On the spontaneous combustion of the human body", which was published in 1851 under the editorship of the famous German chemist Justus von Liebig, who discovered the phenomenon of isomerism. As the author of the chemical theory of fermentation and putrefaction, Liebig believed that some chemical processes unknown to science occur during spontaneous combustion.
In the second half of the twentieth century, serious researchers of the paranormal began to study the FMF phenomenon. They collected and systematized more than two hundred cases of self-incineration. Their analysis made it possible to establish the characteristic features of this process. It runs very intensively and quickly - in a matter of minutes or even seconds, and not for a long time during normal combustion. In most cases, the clothes on the corpses and the surrounding flammable objects are not affected by the fire.
This suggests that the rise in temperature and inflammation occurs inside the body and not outside.
Otherwise, the clothes would have burned out first. And sometimes even parts of the body remain intact: fingers, hands, legs, head, as if they had fallen out of the hearth of combustion. In addition, two types of combustion are noted: the transformation of the victim's body into ash or sintering into a charred mass without losing its original shape.
Researchers of the paranormal have proposed several hypotheses about the causes of this terrible phenomenon. According to one of them, FMF, like a poltergeist, is a manifestation of cosmic energy controlled by someone's will. Like kundalini, that is, the "dormant force" that accumulates at the base of the spine, the deadly fire dormant in the human body until a "short circuit" occurs between his normal bioenergy and the cosmic one. This causes a powerful flash of heat that incinerates the tissues of the body. On this score, one can object only one thing: "dormant cosmic energy" controlled by someone unknown, in fact, is no different from the "devil's fire" of the Prince of Darkness and therefore does not explain the physical nature of the "powerful heat flash" leading to spontaneous combustion of a living body.
Orthodox physics, despite the facts, still completely rejects the FMF phenomenon. Its main argument is simple. The human body is not a combustible material, since it consists of two-thirds of water. It takes a temperature of 1300 degrees and at least four hours to burn a deceased in a crematorium. This requires a huge amount of energy, which is not in a living organism, and from the outside it has nowhere to come. But even if we assume that combustion with a high temperature still occurs, then why does this temperature not affect flammable objects, for example, the same clothes that are in the immediate vicinity of the fire?
Yet biophysicists have recently found an explanation for these seemingly inexplicable mysteries. This is what the famous Russian academician, director of the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, says about the FMF phenomenon V. Kaznacheev: “Suppose that some unknown energy processes are going on in the cells, which are equal in their power to cold fusion. A major surgeon, a member of the Russian Physical Society, Professor Gennady Petrakovich, conducted a number of unique experiments on tissues and came to the conclusion: thermonuclear reactions are the basis of cellular energy, and the cell itself is a real nuclear reactor. This means that our body is able to create the necessary chemical elements by itself. But what if this mechanism fails?
Then the cellular reactor "goes wild", an uncontrolled nuclear reaction begins. If it becomes a chain, then this is accompanied by a colossal release of energy that can burn, turn into ash the cells of tissues and bones of our body. But again the question arises: why does nothing happen to the clothes? "
As for the reason for such "micro-chernobyls", then, according to Academician Kaznacheev, they can be provoked by geomagnetic disturbances of the Earth. Specialists from the American National Institute of Meteorology and Oceanography in Boulder, where information about changes in magnetic fields is transmitted from all over the world, found a characteristic pattern: in nine out of ten FMF cases, it coincided in time with a sharp increase in the intensity of the geomagnetic field.
Based on this thermonuclear version of spontaneous combustion, one can explain why in such cases the clothes of the victims do not burn. The distances between particles, atoms and molecules are as great as the distances between planets, stellar systems and galaxies at the planetary level. Therefore, it is quite possible that "Chernobyls" occur only inside living cells, a kind of stellar systems in a galaxy-organism, and do not affect other "galaxies" - clothes, shoes, surrounding objects.
Of course, in this hypothesis there is still a lot that is not clear. It is not clear, for example, why a chain reaction in living cells does not always cover the entire organism, but leaves its individual parts intact. It is also unknown how to protect oneself from the "devil's fire". We can only console ourselves with the fact that FMF is an extremely rare phenomenon and the likelihood of being a victim of it is negligible.

edited news Fox - 3-04-2011, 16:01

Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is a rare phenomenon, often described as a paranormal phenomenon, in which a person can ignite without an external source of fire visible. Spontaneous human combustion is the subject of numerous rumors and controversies. Until now, there is no exact physical evidence for the existence of this phenomenon, and its very possibility is today rejected by most scientists. There are two main hypotheses explaining cases of human spontaneous combustion, and both imply an external source of fire: this is the Human Candle hypothesis and ignition from static electricity or ball lightning. Although from a physical point of view, the human body contains enough energy stored in the form of fatty deposits, under normal circumstances a person cannot ignite spontaneously.

1. History

2 Characteristics of spontaneous combustion

2.1 False characteristics

3 Hypotheses

3.1 The Human Candle Effect

1 BBC Experiment

3.2 Static fire hypothesis

3.3 Other hypotheses

4 Statistics and cases of survival after spontaneous combustion

5 References in literature

6 Mentions in popular culture

7 Notes

8 See also

9 Bibliography

History

The phenomenon of human spontaneous combustion is often mistakenly called an urban legend, although its descriptions are found in antiquity, for example, in the Bible:

The people began to murmur aloud against the Lord; and the Lord heard, and his anger was kindled, and the fire of the Lord was kindled among them, and began to consume the end of the camp. (Num. 11: 1)

Medieval literature also records cases of human spontaneous combustion: for example, during the reign of Queen Bona Sforza (between 1515 and 1557) in Milan, in front of his parents and sons, the knight Polonius Vortius died: after two ladles of wine he had drunk, he suddenly began to spew flame from his mouth and burned out ...

The most detailed evidence of human spontaneous combustion begins to appear since the 18th century. In 1731, under unclear circumstances, Countess Cornelia di Bandi died in the Italian city of Tsesena: her legs, dressed in stockings, and part of a skull were found in the bedroom.

In April 1744, in Ipswich (England), the daughter of a 60-year-old alcoholic, Grice Pet, found her father dead on the floor of the house: according to her, "he burned out without fire, like a bundle of firewood." The old man's clothes were practically intact.

The first most reliable evidence of cases of human spontaneous combustion dates back to 1763, when the Frenchman John Dupont published a book with a collection of cases of Human spontaneous combustion called De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis. In it, among other things, he mentions the case of Nicolas Millet, who was acquitted of the charge of murdering his wife when the court was convinced that she died as a result of spontaneous combustion. Millet's wife, a heavily drinking Parisian, was discovered at home when she was left with only a pile of ash, skull and finger bones. The straw mattress on which she was found was only slightly damaged.

Around 1853, in Columbus, Ohio, the owner of a liquor store, a German by nationality, caught fire and was devoured in flames. This incident was mentioned by Charles Dickens in the preface to the second edition of his novel Bleak House, in which he described a fictional case of human spontaneous combustion. In 1861, the literary critic and philosopher Georg Henry Lewis published his correspondence with Dickens, in which he accused the writer of spreading fables:

“These notes usually write that oily soot and some remnants of bones remain from the human body. Everyone knows that this cannot be. "

In 1870, a note "On Spontaneous Combustion" was published by the Associate Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Aberdeen. In it, he wrote that he found about 54 modern scientists who had ever written about human spontaneous combustion, of which 35 unequivocally expressed their opinion about this phenomenon.

Five (including Justus Liebig) argued that spontaneous combustion was impossible and that all documented cases were hoaxes.

Three (including Guillaume Dupuytren) believed that the cases of spontaneous combustion are real, but they have a different nature, namely: there was some kind of external source of fire.

Twenty-seven scientists (including Deverji and Orfil) insisted that spontaneous combustion of the human body is quite possible.

Characteristics of spontaneous combustion cases

All cases that are commonly referred to as human spontaneous combustion have a number of distinctive characteristics:

The victim's body ignites with no visible external source of fire.

The human body during spontaneous combustion burns much more thoroughly than with ordinary ignition. The injuries, however, are unevenly distributed throughout the body: sometimes a whole skull and, less often, limbs remain.

Most cases of human spontaneous combustion occur indoors, although this may only be due to an incomplete sample of cases of spontaneous combustion.

The combustion temperature of the body in case of spontaneous combustion is much higher than that used in crematoria. In order for human bones to turn to ash, a temperature of over 1700 ° C is required, while crematoria uses a temperature of about 1100 ° C, and for the complete combustion of the corpse, it is necessary to crush the bones. Even if a person's body is doused with gasoline and set on fire, it will not be able to burn completely: the fire will stop immediately after the liquid fuel runs out: the human body contains too much water, which will extinguish the flame. It is known that Adolf Hitler ordered that his body, after committing suicide, be doused with gasoline and burned. Despite the fact that the body of the dictator was doused with 20 liters of gasoline, the soldiers of the Red Army found Hitler's corpse practically intact.

When igniting spontaneously, the flames are very small, but exposure to hot air can damage nearby objects: for example, the TV screen can burst.

Men are more likely to be presumed victims of spontaneous combustion than women.

In most cases, the presumed victims are the elderly.

The alleged victims don't feel like they're on fire. In some cases, it was found that the victims were dying of heart attacks.

There are people who survived spontaneous combustion.

False characteristics

Some characteristics are often mentioned in connection with human spontaneous combustion, but in fact, they do not reveal any pattern in this phenomenon.

The alleged victims are usually fat. This is not the case: most of the alleged victims are of normal weight. Usually this explanation is used by supporters of the Human Candle Hypothesis.

The alleged victims always suffer from alcoholism. Alcoholism is often used as an explanation for this phenomenon by moralists of the time of Queen Victoria, as well as supporters of sobriety and religious morality. It was believed that alcohol permeates the body to such an extent that a spark is enough to ignite it. In fact, this is not possible. Many researchers, including Yakov Perelman in his "Entertaining Physics" noted that the tissues of the human body cannot be soaked to such an extent with alcohol.

The skulls of the alleged victims are shrinking from the heat. A skull devoid of skin, hair, eyes, nose and muscle fibers may appear to the observer to be smaller than the size of a head. There are no temperature conditions under which human bones would shrink in size. The only case in which a decrease in the skull was wrongly documented is associated with the death of Mary Hardy Reaser in 1951. This case later became the reason for jokes related to human spontaneous combustion.

The alleged victims of spontaneous combustion set themselves on fire with an inadvertently thrown cigarette. This is not the case: most of the alleged victims were non-smokers. An inadvertently thrown cigarette can lead to a fire, but it cannot set fire to the human body: if you press the burning tip of a cigarette against the skin, only a minor burn will occur, and the cigarette itself will go out.

Hypotheses

Most hypotheses about the origin of the phenomenon are based on the idea that such spontaneous combustion does not exist. In addition to physical interpretations of the phenomenon, there are more prosaic explanations. In 1847, Count Gorlitz, who lived in Darmstadt, came home and found that the door to his wife's room was locked, and the countess herself was nowhere to be found. When the door to her room was broken open, the partially burned body of Countess Gorlitz was found on the floor, and the room itself was also damaged by a fire: a writing desk burned down, a window and mirrors were broken, and things in the room were in disarray. The question arose as to whether this case was spontaneous combustion.

Three years later, a man named Stauf, a former servant of the count, was charged with the murder of the countess. Stauf confessed that he once accidentally got into the countess's room, and was attracted by the jewelry and money of the deceased. Stauf decided to steal them, but at that moment the mistress of the house unexpectedly returned. Stauf managed to strangle the woman, and in order to hide the trail of the crime, he set fire to.

It should be noted that very often cases that can be attributed to spontaneous combustion are often mistaken by forensic science for an attempt to hide the traces of a crime. Usually, however, the belongings and jewelry of the alleged victims of spontaneous combustion remain intact.

Among other versions, one can also highlight the hypothesis of Alan Byrd and Dougal Drysdale: suppose that a person works in a garage and usually cleans his clothes from detritus with a jet of compressed air, but this time he cleaned the overalls with a jet of pure oxygen, which for a while, but very significantly increased the flammability clothes. A lit cigarette is enough for a person to be engulfed in flames.

Modern researchers explain the combustion of a person under ordinary conditions with two main hypotheses: the theory of the Human candle and the theory of ignition from static electricity.

Human Candle Effect

The Human Candle Effect refers to the phenomenon where the victim's clothing is impregnated with fused human fat and begins to act as a candle wick. Such a phenomenon can indeed occur under certain conditions. The theory assumes an external ignition source: after it dries up, combustion will continue due to smoldering fat.

In 1965, Professor David Gee conducted an experiment simulating the effect of a Human Candle. He took a small portion of human fat and wrapped it in a rag to simulate clothing. Then he hung this "candle" over the Bunsen burner. He had to keep the burner on for over a minute before the fat began to smolder. This is explained by the fact that human fat contains a lot of water. In describing his experiment, David Guy noted that the fat burned with a smoldering yellow flame, and it took about an hour for the package to burn completely. This explains the duration of the combustion process in cases attributed to human spontaneous combustion, as well as the possibility that the victim may be left with body parts without fat deposits.

In judicial practice, there are several cases demonstrating the effect of this effect. In February 1991, in a forest belt near the city of Medford, Oregon, USA, two vagrants discovered the burning body of an adult woman, lying face down on fallen leaves. They raised the alarm, and soon the sheriff arrived at the scene. It was stated that the victim was obese. There were several stab wounds on her back and chest. The soft tissues of the right arm, torso and upper legs were completely burned away. Most of the bones in the affected areas were preserved, but the bones of the pelvis and spine were completely destroyed and turned into a gray powder by the fire. The killer was subsequently arrested: he confessed that he doused the body with barbecue liquid and set it on fire. Also, according to his testimony, it turned out that the woman's body, by the time of its discovery, had been burning for about 13 hours. Thus, the occurrence of the Human Candle effect was facilitated by a combination of circumstances: the presence of a catalyst and an artificial fuse, as well as the completeness of the sacrifice.

BBC experiment

In August 1989, the BBC's QED TV show featuring Dr. John de Haan of the California Institute of Forensic Science showed the following experiment: the pig's body was wrapped in a woolen blanket, placed in a tightly closed furnished room, doused with a little gasoline and set on fire. It took some time for the touch to flare up. Pig fat was heated with a low yellowish flame at a very high temperature. It was found that the pig's meat and bones were completely destroyed by the fire, and the surrounding objects practically did not suffer (with the exception of the melted TV screen).

The results of the experiment generally confirmed the theory of the Human Candle, however, some researchers, including John Hymer, stated that the experiment itself was falsified.

It should be noted that the Human Candle theory does not answer a number of questions related to cases of spontaneous combustion:

Why were the majority of the victims thin people, practically devoid of body fat?

What was the source of the fire in most cases (most of the victims were not smokers)?

Static Electricity Ignition Hypothesis

The hypothesis of ignition from static electricity is based on the fact that under certain conditions the human body can accumulate such an electrostatic charge that when it is discharged, clothes can catch fire.

The current during electrostatic discharge is relatively small, but the potential difference with it can reach several thousand volts. An electrostatic discharge of up to 3 thousand volts is not noticed by a person, however, depending on the state of the atmosphere (especially air humidity), as well as the surface with which the human body comes into contact, the charge can reach large values. For example, walking on a carpet can create a potential difference of 35,000 volts. There are cases when people have accumulated up to 40 thousand volts of static charge in their bodies.

Static discharge can ignite gasoline in gas stations, and statistically it is the most common explosions that are caused by static electricity, not the radiation from cell phones. About 70% of explosions are caused by static electricity, the accumulation of which is especially favored by cold, dry weather.

For the first time, the idea that a powerful electrostatic discharge can cause human spontaneous combustion was expressed by a professor at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute Robin Beecham, although he also expressed doubts that there is such an electrostatic discharge that could lead to the ignition of the human body. However, in some cases, static discharge can produce a bright glow, and also be accompanied by hiss. Occasionally, the discharge can ignite dust or lint adhering to clothing, which can also lead to a fire.

There is evidence of people surviving powerful electrostatic discharges. Most claim that they absolutely did not feel pain or any discomfort. Perhaps there may be electrostatic discharges with a power of more than 40 thousand volts, which can really serve as a fuse and subsequently lead to the effect of the Human Candle effect.

Other hypotheses

There are other, much less popular hypotheses:

In his 1996 book "Enchanting Fire", John Hymer analyzed a number of cases of spontaneous combustion and concluded that lonely people who fall into prostration right before they catch fire are most often its victims.

Hymer suggested that psychosomatic disorder in people suffering from depression can lead to the release of hydrogen and oxygen from the human body and to the start of a chain reaction of mitochondrial microexplosions.

Another researcher, Larry Arnold (chairman of ParaScience International), in his book Ablaze! (1995) suggested that a still unknown subatomic particle called a pyroton, emitted by cosmic rays, could be the cause of spontaneous combustion. Usually, this particle freely passes through the human body without causing harm (like a neutrino), but sometimes it can touch the cell nucleus and lead to a chain reaction that can completely destroy the human body. This hypothesis was not supported. In Fortean Times magazine Ian Simmons reacted to this hypothesis as follows: "There is no proof of the existence of such a particle, and to invent it just to explain human spontaneous combustion is a stupid idea."

There is a hypothesis that cases of human spontaneous combustion are caused by a discharge of ball lightning, however, due to the fact that the phenomenon of ball lightning itself is poorly understood, it is too early to draw any conclusions about the involvement of this phenomenon in human spontaneous combustion.

Statistics and cases of survival after spontaneous combustion

It is almost impossible to compile accurate statistics on cases of spontaneous combustion. In the USSR, all cases that resembled spontaneous combustion were usually attributed to careless handling of fire, or they were given a different rational explanation even when the victim's body was completely burned out and the clothes remained intact. Some world statistics can be compiled on those cases when the cause of the fire remained unknown, and the investigation into the case was terminated.

1950s: 11 cases

1960s: 7 cases

1970s: 13 cases

1980s: 22 cases.

There are people who survived spontaneous combustion. Among the most famous, documented examples are 71-year-old Briton Wilfried Gouthorpe and American salesman Jack Angel. In both cases, doctors were unable to determine the cause of the spontaneous combustion. The affected limbs had to be amputated.

References in literature

In Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House, human spontaneous combustion is the main theme of the book.

In the poem Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, the landowner Korobochka mentions that her serf blacksmith burned down.

"... Inside he somehow caught fire, drank too much, only a blue light went from him, all decayed, decayed and blackened like coal ..."

Emile Zola's novel "Doctor Pascal" describes in detail the death of old man Macquart, who suffered from alcoholism. In a dream, he dropped the pipe on his clothes and completely burned out.

Jules Verne's novel Fifteen-Year-Old Captain describes a case when the leader of a Negro tribe, who also suffered from alcoholism, caught fire and burned to the ground.

Herman Mellville's story "Redburn" tells of a sailor who caught fire, possibly from alcohol.

Popular culture references

Cases of human spontaneous combustion were often played up in popular culture:

In the episode "Spontaneous Combustion" of the South Park animated series, some of the city's residents died of spontaneous combustion after holding back the gases for too long.

In the episode "Fire" of the X-Files series, a criminal (possibly an IRA partisan) could independently cause his spontaneous combustion and commit murder in a fiery guise.

In the film, Bruce Almighty, one of the characters has a head spontaneous combustion.

In the film Spontaneous Combustion (1990), spontaneous combustion is associated with the nuclear plans of the Pentagon, which conducted tests on volunteers in the 50s.