Everything You Need To Know About Spontaneous Human Combustion

"There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural."

- Louis Proud

What is Spontaneous Human Combustion?

Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is an unexplained phenomenon whereby the human body is reduced almost entirely to ash, generally within the period of around ten to twelve hours, depending on when the victim was last seen alive and their remains later discovered, such that it appears as though they suddenly and inexplicably caught fire, seemingly from within, and their flesh and bones consumed by the resultant conflagration. Generally, the trunk of the body is gone, with one or more limbs remaining unburned, often still clad in clothing. Nearby objects can be completely unburned and untouched. Although the spontaneous aspect of such fires is questionable, as many cases leave open the possibility of an external source of ignition, the phenomenon is nonetheless baffling. In a modern crematorium, oil, gas and other fuels are burned in the presence of forced air to produce temperatures that range between 760° and 1,150°C in order to vaporize and oxidize the body, a process that takes between 90 minutes to two hours, and even then fragments of bone still remain, so must be pulverised by means of a machine called a cremulator. The mystery, then, is this: since it takes a great deal of energy to reduce a body to ash—which, after all, is around 65 percent water—by what process is this achieved, and from where does the energy originate, in cases of SHC?

Mary Hardy Reeser Case