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There was a blue flame coming from his stomach, about four inch slit in his stomach, and it

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was making a noise like a blow lump.

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Did this fireman witness a case of spontaneous human combustion?

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For more than 40 years this American physician has been trying to discover the truth about

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his mother's death.

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How was Mary Risa reduced to ashes?

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This log cabin remained unsinged while inside a retired fireman was consumed by flames.

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Charles George Mott also a case of spontaneous human combustion.

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Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 and inventor of the communications

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satellite.

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Now in retreat in Sri Lanka he ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.

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There's one mystery I'm asked about more than any other.

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Spontaneous human combustion.

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Fires of course are all too common, but occasionally regaids like this one near my home in Colombo

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are called out to deal with cases which baffle even the experts.

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Apparently for no reason people have suddenly burst into flames.

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Their bodies are almost totally consumed yet amazingly their surroundings are barely singed.

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When I first investigated spontaneous human combustion the explanations seemed even more

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fantastic than the facts.

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However new evidence has now emerged so I'm returning rather reluctantly to this most

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gruesome of mysteries.

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And it still is a mystery.

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We talk about the case today just like we did 20 years ago when I first started and

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even in 1951 when the incident occurred.

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A great deal of speculation, a great deal of conjecture, everybody has an angle but nobody

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has the answer.

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The bizarre death of this man's mother has kept Florida talking for 40 years.

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In the bedroom of her wooden bungalow on that fateful summer night in 1951 Mary Reeser

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kissed her son Richard goodbye.

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To the young physician everything seemed normal.

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At eight o'clock I remember the landlady who called me and said that there had been

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a terrible accident.

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She didn't go into details and that I was to come right down.

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And across the way when we came down there were painters painting the house across the

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street.

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Then they were totally unaware that anything had happened in the apartment.

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I was prevented from going in the room by I believe the fire chief who said that I shouldn't

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see what is inside so I didn't go in.

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Of course I later saw what it was, what the picture was from photographs and descriptions.

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My recollection is that I entered the apartment at the fire scene with a hand pump which is

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a small tank of water that is maneuverable by hand.

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Of course interior extinguishment.

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And noticing a pile of debris in the center of the room I started to squirt it and was

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stopped immediately by other people who had preceded me into the room.

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It turns out that it was not just debris but part of a corpse of the lady who had been burned

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to death unbeknownst to me.

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It was just her foot and a shoe.

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All that I recall seeing ever there.

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It was an incredible, unexplainable thing to me then and is still now.

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She was consumed almost completely.

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Just what remained was a heel of her left foot and just a piece of the skull.

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Just a little ash remains of her body.

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Everything had been consumed.

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The room was covered with a sort of a smoky, oily ash up to the level of about four feet

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completely around.

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But that was it.

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The bed that had been turned down was undisturbed and ready as if it were ready to be slid.

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The piece leapt in and the clock that was nearby had stopped running at about 4.20 in

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the morning.

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I believe Ms. Reeser was known to be a smoker.

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So there was some speculation that possibly she dozed off or dropped a cigarette on her

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clothing which initially started to fire.

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But that still doesn't speak to how this total consumption occurred.

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We have had many, many cases where people have fallen asleep smoking, burned their clothes,

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in fact burned themselves and unfortunately succumbed to the fire, but never anything

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like this.

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I believe there probably was some type of external ignition source.

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Now what that was, I couldn't begin to speculate.

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But I think in my mind what happened, Ms. Reeser's body began to burn much like when

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we cook food.

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And you can essentially cook food down to nothing by applying the proper amounts of

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heat over the proper period of time.

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Unusual as that may seem, I think the human body in this case actually became a fuel for

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fire as opposed to just the recipient of heat-related injury.

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The possibility of it being a spontaneous combustion arose and was written.

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All kinds of theories were brought out such as even lightning that came through an open

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window.

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But there was nothing concrete and the fire people here had no explanation for it.

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No one had any explanation.

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And in looking back, I just think that no one ever knows how a person of her size and

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weight, she weighed about 170 pounds, could be totally consumed by a fire that only involved

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a portion of her room, the chair, which was of course completely burned.

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All that was left were some springs that were found near the ashes of her body.

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Yes.

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Like Richard Reeser, this man, Jack Stacey, is still gripped by a fire from the past.

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On this spot in Lambeth, South London stood Auckland Street, the scene of the strangest

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sight of his 30 years as a fireman.

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The memory has brought him back to search the records at the Fire Brigades Museum.

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We got the call at about 20 plus five in the morning and when we arrived, two or three

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minutes down the embankment, there were about half a dozen office cleaners outside this

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Dillek building.

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And they were pointing to the first floor and said, we think there's a fire in there

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and sure enough, there was a flickering blue flame coming from the upstairs window.

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Well, when we got up the ladder onto the first floor, there was a man's body laying on the

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stairs and there was a blue flame coming from his stomach, about four inch slit in his stomach

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and it was making a noise like a blow-lump.

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And it was about eight inches long.

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That was the first thing we saw.

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A man came up the ladder with the hose reel and we actually put the hose reel inside the

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man's body.

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It was actually, he was burning from the inside out.

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It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen at a fire.

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I think this is why I remember it so vividly.

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I've seen bodies in fires before, but we've always been able to say, this happened or that

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happened or we know how this started.

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But this one, I'm afraid we didn't know and we still don't know and the cause of the fire

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is still unknown.

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The official cause of death by the coroner was the inhalation of fire films, suffocation

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due to inhalation of fire films.

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I have my doubts about that.

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I have my doubts about that.

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I think it is one of these human spontaneous combustion mysteries which we'll never solve

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at the moment.

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The moment the fire starts, the evidence is destroyed.

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Firemen are used to things igniting spontaneously.

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For example, haystacks can generate enough heat by fermentation to catch fire.

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And I've even heard of a case in Britain of a laundry which was raised to the ground

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when a pile of very dirty washing apparently went up in smoke on its own accord.

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But people spontaneously combusting is quite another matter.

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In earlier centuries, that old scapegoat, alcohol, was blamed by investigators and popular

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novelists.

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The idea of spontaneous human combustion fascinated the Victorians.

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In Bleak House, Charles Dickens chose it to dispose of a troublesome character.

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Popular belief linked the phenomenon with excessive drinking and improving text-worn

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drunks that they ran the risk of spontaneous combustion.

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Mysterious research was scarce.

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One sober report from Dr Mackenzie Booth in Aberdeen, Scotland couldn't explain how

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a soldier was found burned up in a hayloft.

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Yet straw inches away was untouched by the flames.

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Despite increasingly lurid reports, science stood back until the 1960s.

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Professor David G., then a young pathologist, was called in to investigate the mysterious

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death of an old person.

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She had fallen in the grate and been reduced to a pile of ashes.

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She had burned almost completely.

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Only a fragment of flesh and bone remained.

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Professor G. wanted to discover how this could have happened.

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He published an account of his audacious experiment.

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I thought if I made a model that in one sense reproduced a body by using a glass test tube

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which would provide a sort of central firmness and then wrapping it around with some human

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fat and then putting around that a number of layers of cloth, perhaps five or six layers

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to reproduce several different layers of clothing and ignited one end of it with a gas Bunsen

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burner, it then burnt with a rather smoky flame and it took about three quarters of

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an hour to burn down about six inches of model.

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What was left was a very blackened charred remains that looked very similar to the body

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that I had been examining.

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That it was like a candle only instead of having as candles do a wick down the middle

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with the wax on the outside, this was really a candle with a wick on the outside and the

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combustible material on the inside.

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Today Dr. Siva Loganathan leaves his local butchers with a bag full of pork.

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It's the material he needs to carry on experimenting where Professor G. left off.

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The question Dr. Siva wants to solve is why do the victims' surroundings not burn as

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they do?

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I've taken some pork with a little muscle and some fat.

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I've rolled it into a cylinder and then covered it with a cloth.

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Now the idea being that the rolled up piece of meat would represent a human body and the

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cloth would then represent the clothing on it.

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When the fat melts it would then soak into the cloth and then that would continue to burn

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exactly like a candle, excepting in this case the wick is on the outside of the fat as opposed

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to being in the middle.

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The bodies are found burnt and almost ashed with very little burning in the surroundings

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and perhaps a little bit of the leg is left behind with almost a fairly well marked line

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of demarcation.

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We want to know why the rest of the surroundings didn't go up in flames.

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We want to know why this progressive burning occurred.

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This gives you as a fairly good working model as to how this whole process occurs.

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The slowness of the process, the lack of violence of the flames proves to us that this is quite

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a feasible explanation for this phenomenon.

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I think essentially we'll find that when the body is burned in this sort of situation it

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is only the melted fat that's burning and therefore the melted fat most likely would

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continue to burn just about this same sort of level.

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So the flames are not splurting out all over the place.

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It is fairly well localized to a few inches around the body.

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That's what's happened.

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That's the skewer that I'm keeping in order to keep it stiff.

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I don't think there's anything miraculous about it at all.

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I think it's perfectly logically explainable.

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So this experiment just shows that it is possible.

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I haven't really done a complete body but this is the principle by which this whole

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phenomenon occurs.

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In the British Medical Journal comes a further clue in a report on a stomach operation by

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Jonathan Earnshaw.

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He was using electrical cutting equipment.

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When I opened the stomach with the electrocortry device there was an explosion and the gaseous

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contents of his stomach ignited and splattered stomach contents all over the ceiling light

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and on those who were surrounding the operating table.

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It was all rather frightening at the time and there was a blue flame and a sort of thump

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and in fact the flame lasted for a second or two and then stopped.

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As you can imagine it's a pretty frightening sort of thing to happen to you when a patient

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explodes on the operating table and there was a stunned silence initially and we then

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checked and we checked the patient, we checked all his vital signs and we checked the inside

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of the stomach but in fact because the gaseous had been coming out of the stomach under pressure

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when they'd ignited fortunately there was no damage to the patient and we carried on

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with the operation and the patient did very well afterwards.

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But when we published this paper in the British Medical Journal I then got a whole sheaf of

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letters from other doctors, particularly elderly doctors who'd seen this occurrence on several

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occasions in the past and there are some lovely letters here from surgeons and GPs, from a

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soldier who was under my care in 1941 who was rude enough to belch whilst lighting a cigarette

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and the resulting flash and explosion seriously disturbed his comrades.

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So obviously it's like a lot of things in medicine we were only rediscovering what people

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had known about in the past.

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Organisms can proliferate and produce methane which is obviously flammable.

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If you then ignite it with a spark like I did then that's not spontaneous combustion,

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that's ordinary combustion.

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John Hamer developed his own theory about spontaneous human combustion while he was

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a Scenes of Crime officer with Gwent police in Wales.

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Two deaths, only three weeks and 15 miles apart inspired him.

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It was the coincidence that the two cases got me really going.

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You had the same pile of ashes, the burning was the same and the burn line went straight

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across from one leg to the other.

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That's what got me interested and started me on actually investigating other cases.

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In the first case in January 1980 at Ebu Vale, Sergeant Terry Russell was called to

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a house where a 73 year old man had died in a fire.

213
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My immediate thoughts on seeing the deceased was that this was not an ordinary death.

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There was no external damage, there were no windows broken.

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We entered a living room of the premises.

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It was a site that will never ever really leave me.

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I found it totally fascinating.

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All law to the relatives it must have been really devastating and gruesome.

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Well as you see here is a sketch I made just after the event actually which shows the lack

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of damage to other materials in the room.

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This was the remains of a 73 year old man who had been reduced to ash on the floor of

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his living room.

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A pair of glasses were lying on the edge of the grate, totally undamaged and perfectly

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clean.

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The fire was out in the grate, the dead coals tidy.

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I had heard the term spontaneous human combustion but never really given it much thought.

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When seeing the site that I saw on that day I now believe that this kind of thing is a

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possibility and there are certainly some questions which haven't been answered to my satisfaction

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in relation to that death.

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The next case, only 27 days later, came at Newport, the county town.

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This time an old woman had died, Inspector Colin Durham investigated.

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There was a report of fatality as a result of fire at a house in Corporation Road and

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this poor old lady, she was reduced to ashes except for two lower parts of both legs and

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this was amazing to me to see a body in such a condition.

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The most abnormal thing about it was that there was nothing in the room damaged.

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There's no doubt that it was a case of a human body catching fire and it was called spontaneous

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human combustion.

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I have no doubt at all.

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But I eventually started thinking about it and the difficulty was that your bodies laden

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with water, the average ten stone body contains ten gallons of water being reduced to ashes

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in circumstances where normal combustible materials cease to burn.

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That is an impossibility but it happened.

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I realised that the water must be the source of the fuel.

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John Hamer believes that by some as yet unknown alchemy, water in the body can be split into

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oxygen and hydrogen to concoct a highly flammable mixture.

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Now hydrogen burning in oxygen burns with a fierce blue flame and will cut through steel

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and steel melts at 1500 degrees centigrade.

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Now that sort of flame could indeed reduce a corpse to ashes without releasing enough

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oxygen to sustain burning elsewhere in the room and it will also explain a lack of water.

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Now I have no belief in spontaneous human combustion as a paranormal or supernatural

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event.

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It is an entirely natural event, the mechanism of which we do not yet understand.

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The scientists rather stomach churning experiments show that most of these cases do have a rational

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explanation.

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There's usually some source of ignition near the victim, perhaps a cigarette or a faulty

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electrical appliance.

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Some cases still seem to defy explanation and leave me with a creepy and very unscientific

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feeling.

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If there's anything more to SHC, I simply don't want to know.

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In Ticonderoga in New York, the men of the volunteer fire brigade are still baffled by

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the untimely death of one of their number.

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George Mott was a non-smoker, famously cautious about fire, yet he burned to nothing in his

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log cabin in the woods in 1986.

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Kendall Mott used to get a call from his father every day.

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When the phone didn't ring, Kendall went to check on him.

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The door handle was warm when I grabbed the door handle, it was unlocked.

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So I knew right then I opened the door I could tell it wasn't whole inside the house

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was black.

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Of course there was no lights because electricity was out, it would burn out.

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So I knew something would happen but you couldn't see anything.

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So we went and called the state troopers, Dickel Valley, come down.

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The first room that we walked into was nothing too much out of the ordinary other than I

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couldn't help but notice as I looked around that the walls were slightly brownish colored

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and appeared that the place had been subjected to intense heat.

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The TV was melted, the guns on the wall were all charred, the refrigerator was all black.

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Everything was black, it was just like it had really been hot but hadn't quite burnt.

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In the bedroom itself there was a single bed with a dresser adjacent to it as I remember

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and the mattress had been burned through and the floor which was wooden structure below

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the bed was burned through and there were some fragments of bones and possibly a skull

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as I remember lying on the floor beneath the bed.

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He hadn't smoked for quite a while and there was a sign on the door that said no smoking

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in the house because he had lost the use of one of his lungs a long time ago.

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All the signs indicated that there had been an extreme amount of heat but nothing had

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caused anything to ignite and the only thing that had burned itself was George Mont's body.

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There was the theory of the spontaneous combustion theory that possibly the body may have ignited

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itself for whatever reason and consumed itself through extreme heat.

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Other than that, putting that aside I don't think that there's too many other plausible

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explanations for it that I can think of.

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Well he was a fireman for quite a while, he was pretty picky as to you know, letting

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and leaving things around you know, but I don't know, I don't think it was fire, I just

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think it was like they said spontaneous combustion, I don't see any other answer for it.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.