===TRANSCRIPT START===

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're gonna take a look at one of the hottest ways to die that is not Sidney Sweeney making a real life reboot of Basic Instinct with me. I'm talking about spontaneous human combustion, or the idea that there is some phenomenon we don't understand that causes otherwise normal people to burst into flames. When I was just a wee lad reading books about ghosts and monsters and weird supernatural stuff, I have to admit spontaneous human combustion was a subject that would come up and I would usually skip right past it. I think I always told myself it was boring, but the more that I've thought about it, the more I think I was just really terrified by the idea of it. Because unlike some of the fears that we've covered on this show, spontaneous human combustion can happen to anyone at any time. You don't have to get on a plane or tangle with a bear or take too much Benadryl. Apparently, you can just burst into flames, like whenever. No one knows what causes it. All we know is that once it starts, it cannot be stopped. So listener, strike a match, light a candle, start a fire, preferably somewhere safe, and get ready to feel the burn.

What are we?

Scared.

When are we?

Now it is time for Time for Scared All The Time.

Hey, welcome back everybody. We wanted to kick off this episode by mentioning that we have officially crossed 500 fans on Facebook. Really stunning to Ed and I since we started this in October. We've already crossed 500 fans.

And nearing 500 on Instagram.

Nearing 500 on Instagram. So now we're on to the next 500 to hit 1000. So if you guys want to help out with that, tell your friends.

Grow the show, scare up some listens.

Scare up some listens. Something I like to do is go to Best Buy and on all of the display phones, I pull up Spotify and Apple and put Scared All The Time up so that if someone walks by, they see Scared All The Time on display.

I highly doubt you do that, but it's not a bad idea.

I've done it. I don't do it every day. I don't like walk over to Best Buy and bring things up, but I did it when my movie came out, too.

Do you remember you used to have to put in a little thing in DOS to open up Duke Nukem and Doom and stuff? You had to type in C, colon, slash, whatever, then some crap. I used to always type that in at the store and just see which computers had Doom or Duke Nukem on them. I would play those while I waited for my mom.

That's cool. That's a good idea.

And a lot of times the store computers had those installed.

I think at one point Doom came bundled with like Windows 95 or something. Cause there's that video of Bill Gates dressed in like a trench coat and holding a shotgun and pretending to be in Doom.

With different time.

Different time. Anyway, thank you guys for 500. Let's get 500 more. Spread the word.

Scare up some listens.

Scare up some listens. Are we gonna try to get a hashtag going?

Scare up some listens isn't bad. It's a very long hashtag.

Very long hashtag.

We'll figure something out. All right, quick square update that nobody asked for. Still getting square. I think it's going well. I've been hitting the gym a bunch and also made a little gift for Chris to further inspire our square escapades.

Our square journey. I think we started this podcast maybe just as.

We started it to work out our creative muscles and then at a certain point we were like, you know what has fully atrophied? Our regular muscles. We should maybe do something about that.

Yeah, all however many thousand of you are our accountability buddies for getting in shape. We have to talk about it here to prove to ourselves that we're doing it.

I'll post my little gifts to ourselves and get everybody in a little tizzy about it.

I'll say this though, like you will hear us talk a lot about getting square and as a person who really did not like exercise for a lot of my life, I will say in a completely non pushy or judgmental way, 30 minutes of heavy exercise a day is a gift that you give yourself. Find something you like to do that makes you sweat and do it and don't judge yourself while you do it. Just do it, man. And then when you're done, you feel better. It's crazy.

I hate every second of it, but I definitely, I get what you're saying.

There's a tweet I think someone made once that was like, doctors, hey, make sure to drink water and exercise every day and it'll cure your depression. Me, no thank you. And I feel like that oversimplifies it for sure, but as a medicated, depressed person, exercise really does help. So give it a shot.

Okay, as an overfed, sour puss of a person, I think it's also helping, those two things. And if anybody's like, oh, getting square, what is that? You know, if you're not great with context glues or anything, we will actually in this episode, give a further definition of that. So you got that to look forward to. All right, so we're back, we're jacked and we're looking to scare up some listens. Now as for something to scare down, something I would like to fucking scare away is this frog you have. It almost broke me, this edit. Your frog, I don't know if it's mating season.

It is mating season.

But it was going so crazy. Oh, I guess there's more than one. They were going so crazy this whole episode. So, and I'm done apologizing to people. I hate doing it every week. So hopefully this is the last time we hear from those frogs. We are currently working on a system that isn't just frog murder because Chris wouldn't allow it. I wouldn't feel comfortable with it. That is going to eliminate them from the audio. So we'll see how that goes.

Yeah, it's crazy that they've never been. I guess we recorded the first couple episodes at your place. And then I recorded some episodes back in Pennsylvania.

Yeah, we've been all over the place. But now that you're parked right in front of them, it's difficult. I personally had a very fun time making this episode. With you, I just had a pretty horrible edit, but we've talked about bullshit long enough. So let's just get to the episode. Hope everybody enjoys.

Ed, how much do you know about spontaneous human combustion? Do you know anyone who has spontaneously human combustion?

I definitely don't know anybody who's done that. I will say in your opening, you used the term otherwise normal people.

Yeah.

So are there people who are specifically kind of predestined to or predisposed to blowing up? Like who the fuck is the opposite? Who is the people that you're like, oh, well that's Sean and he always explodes.

No, well, that's what I mean. Like people who are just regular healthy, maybe I shouldn't have said otherwise. I meant other than the fact that they've burst into flames for no reason, they were normal. Although as we get into this, you'll see there are some things that make you more susceptible to spontaneous human combustion that people have theorized about over the years.

And normal is whatever normal is to you. We're not gonna say what is and isn't normal. We know fucking blowing up is probably not normal.

That's all that I mean. Whatever you are, not on fire.

Is normal.

Is normal.

Correct, so when we say normal, it's just a catch all. Don't start sending letters.

Yeah. So the first thing I wanted to establish about the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion is that it is different from pyrokinesis. Excuse me? Do you know pyro? You know pyro.

I'm going to guess that pyrokinesis is like fire starter.

Yes.

I did that by just putting the root words together. I didn't know that. I didn't know it had a term.

Context clues, man.

Yeah.

We're good at them. But yes, it's the ability to start fires with your mind, like in the movie Fire Starter. And I think one of the X-Men.

No, pyro can't start a flame. It's why it's a carrier lighter. He can only manipulate fire.

That might kinda count as pyrokinesis. He can manipulate it with his mind or with his hands?

I think it's unclear. But his mutant ability is the ability to manipulate fire, but he can't create the fire he manipulates.

Interesting.

I mean, I'm sure there are other potential mutants who can create fire.

Right.

I don't know. I'd have to ask Steve. People who don't know, Steve is our resident comic book expert that we rarely, if ever, need to use on the show, but maybe we'll ask him.

We'll have him call in.

We'll have him call in.

So yes, to be clear, pyrokinesis, creating fire with your mind, spontaneous human combustion, exploding with fire from within two different things. Obviously, we don't really have much evidence of pyrokinesis being a genuine phenomenon, but my theory is that possibly when someone randomly bursts into flames, maybe it's not evidence of spontaneous human combustion. Maybe it's actually evidence of pyrokinetic people killing their enemies.

Oh shit, like a scanners situation, but with fire.

Yeah, now again, I have no evidence. I'm sure the CIA has probably looked into trying that on somebody, but that could be what's going on here with spontaneous human combustion. Point is, for those new to the subject, we're focusing on the people who mysteriously catch fire, not the people who mysteriously set them. That being said, this is one of the topics I'm more skeptical of in the realm of the supernatural. Or I should say, I was before I started doing some of this research. I knew of a couple of the more famous cases of spontaneous super combustion from unsolved mysteries or sightings or whatever. And to me, it always seemed pretty obvious that these are cases of people who fell asleep with a cigarette in their bed and burn up.

Also, by the way, I don't want to alarm anyone who owns IKEA furniture, but I have a buddy who every year has to be the fire, I don't know, I never worked in an office building like this, but I guess working in a big office building, each office in that building has to pick a fire marshal or whatever on their staff. So they all get taken once a year to a class where it's like, hey, here's how to use a fire extinguisher, here's how to whatever. And every year it comes up, I mean, I'm not trying to drag the name of IKEA, these are fire professionals dragging the name of IKEA, but they're like, IKEA furniture? Just fucking, it goes up so quickly. If you have the opportunity, they always suggest you buy old, proper wood made from fucking trees, furniture. Because they're like, IKEA furniture, it might as well be kerosene. But if you have like an old wooden desk or something, it'll take a while to burn through and catch fire and shit. So I just think about that. I have no shortage of IKEA furniture, but I also have renter's insurance.

Don't buy the IKEA bed called the Tinder Boxen.

Yeah, exactly. But it is funny that that is constantly as an example, it's like, oh, you bought from IKEA? Well, I guess you don't love your family. They're gonna burn up. They're gonna burn right up. Oh, you little cigarette 30 feet from a Skadookin or whatever the hell they're called. Yeah, that's too close.

Well, look, I don't wanna besmirch, like you said, the good name of IKEA. I will say these spontaneous human combustion cases stretch way back into human history, long before IKEA, long before cigarettes. But well after we learned to control fire. So sort of like the idea was the hat man, did the hat man exist before stories of men in black? I'd love to know if there's any cases of spontaneous human combustion from prehistory before we were fucking around with flames. But I didn't realize there are sort of two levels of mystery involved in spontaneous human combustion. The first is the spontaneous combustion part, how these strange fires start. And that's where I'm kinda, eh, who knows? Maybe they are weird accidents, anything is possible. But the second and much more interesting element to me is the way these fires burn. Many of them reach insane temperatures that should obliterate everything around them, but they don't. Many times a victim of spontaneous human combustion will be found on a bed as just like a skull and an arm and a shoe incinerated at professional cremation temperatures. But the bed and the walls and the room are not only standing, but oftentimes completely untouched.

Oh my God, imagine being a detective who's like, okay, let me get this straight. We got an Ikea bed and the only thing that went on fire was this man, this is witchcraft. This Ikea should have went up so quickly.

So fast. But before we get into the research and the history of the topic, I thought it might be a really fun way to start the podcast by reviewing what happens when you burned a death.

I thought you were gonna say reviewing our beds. And I'm like, I bought my mattress from a girl in the back of a van, like 11 years ago and the box spring couldn't get up the stairs so I just tossed it. So I have an undesirable bed. So I would love for that to catch on fire.

You do, that sounds like a mattress that might be filled with like hair and teeth.

No, no. It was in a bag. Like it was a new mattress, but it was an unmarked van and it was very cheap.

Well, great. You are now a cocaine distributor.

I wish.

Little did you know.

Could you imagine I've been sleeping on cocaine for like a decade and I never knew, I just knew it was an uncomfortable bed and there's so many like cartel murders all throughout the city as people are looking for this missing mattress.

Yeah, like I brought this mattress into my room and now my room is so dusty and I can't sleep.

It's the most counterintuitive bed I've ever purchased.

You know, the cartel to segue back into this has probably burned a lot of people to death.

Allegedly.

Allegedly. That's why this topic is so scary, right? Like it wouldn't be so bad if it was a phenomenon called like spontaneous bubble bath submergence. Burning to death is one of the worst things a human body can experience. And the idea that it could happen with no warning is fucking terrifying.

I think the idea of it happening with warning is pretty terrifying. So that's bad all the time.

That's true.

I don't know. I'm of two minds. Like I'm equally worried about someone being like, I'm gonna burn you fool.

Yeah.

As I was being like, am I on fire?

Yeah.

Like those are both I think equal parts terror.

Yes. I guess I would agree with that. They're both very scary. But from science and people who have survived being set on fire, we know a few things to be true. First of all, it is at least at first extraordinarily painful. I'm sure listener, you've burned yourself on a stove or a blow torch or whatever. And we all know how much it hurts for the skin to be exposed to high temperatures like that for even a split second. Imagining that sensation all over your body at the same time is almost literally the definition of unimaginable. Like I don't know that I can imagine what it would feel like from you know, ooh, I burned my fingers on the stove to like that all over your body. Sure. To illustrate how painful it can be. I had a friend once who tried to give himself like a tiger scar. You remember when those got popular for a second? Like people who would get like little scarification.

I sure don't.

They'd get like.

That is not the friend circles I was in.

There was, maybe they weren't that popular. I feel like I saw it, I don't know, in media or read about it. But people would get like tiger scars. It's a thing called scarification. Anyway, I don't know if you can still get them done, but my buddy wanted them and he tried to do it at home with a blow torch and a piece of hot metal.

Nope, nope. That's not a good idea. Just, I mean, just saying it out loud, he should have been, that's a bad idea. I shouldn't do this.

No, I love the guy to death. I think he may have been going through like a mental health crisis at the time. The reason I'm telling the story is that he did it. He burned these tiger claw marks into his arm and it was so painful that the second he pressed the metal onto his flesh, he passed out and he woke up on the floor with the blow torch next to him. He had to go to the hospital because the flesh was like hanging off his arm.

So now I feel bad for like all the cattle we brand.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's enough pain every few inches to make you pass out, but all over your body. So maybe you pass out pretty quickly when you burn. You'd be lucky. Depending on how you're burning alive, some people die from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning before the flames even hit them, which is also lucky because for the people who feel it happening, whew, it's a rough way to go. According to Valerie Rao, MD, in her article, Forensic Pathology of Thermal Injuries, people who burn to death see their skin turn black and then split open to expose the tissue beneath the flames. They may choke on smoke and soot and their muscles seize up painfully. It's often even painful to breathe because the air around you super heats so you're breathing hot air into your lungs which sears your body from the inside. According to The Guardian, quote, the pain is most intense when the flames first burn the skin and then subsides when the nerves have basically been burned away. So there is some relief in the sense that your flesh will only hurt when it's on fire until the nerves burn, but then as the flames spread, it begins the process all over again on the next area of skin. So if you survive long enough to feel yourself burning to death, the pain comes in stages. And then it's just numbness as death kind of takes you. And if you somehow survive for more than five minutes, fat will start to leak out of your body and your capillaries will burst causing you to lose blood rapidly. And hopefully, I guess maybe your eyes have boiled out of your head before you have to witness any of that.

Doesn't sound great.

No, it's a pretty horrible way to go. This did lead me down a quick side street, if you'll allow me. What am I asking for permission for? I'm asking you, audience.

I'm the one being subjected to this in real time telling me this gross shit.

I'm asking the audience. So this made me curious. I was like, okay, so burning to death by fire is pretty awful. What would it be like to die by falling into lava or if you were trapped and lava hit you?

I think it's gonna be better. I don't know what you're gonna say yet, but I'm thinking everything you just said, just put that shit on a fucking speed run. That's just gonna be so much faster.

Yeah, sort of. Well, so first of all, I learned that lava, the technical term for lava is pyroclastic flow.

Shit, that sounds like a really good rapper. Oh, that guy's got pyroclastic flow. You should hear it.

Ooh, yes. I'm sure we have a ton of young rappers listening to this podcast. And if they are, steal it. Pyroclastic flow. So lava flows, pyroclastic flows, can attain temperatures of 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit. So like you guessed, Ed, if you have the misfortune of falling into one of these, you would basically die instantaneously. But I don't know if you would, you know, last episode we talked about the math of would you feel what happens if you die in a plane crash? And you wouldn't because you would die faster than your nerves would process pain. I don't know if that's the case here. I don't know if it happens fast enough. So if you don't die faster than your body can process the fact that you're dying in a lava flow, it would be a really terrible split second because the instant that you are touched by this pyroclastic flow, your skin is getting cooked Thanksgiving turkey style all over your whole body. And you would instantly contract into what's called pugilistic pose or boxer's pose as your entire body slams into an instant rigor mortis, which I imagine probably breaks some bones, shreds the muscle off the skin, and your brain might also boil inside your skull, which would shatter your skull in the process.

Question.

Yes.

So the people in Pompeii that they find, you know, I guess they didn't die from a lava, but they were, they're like hardened. So I don't know what, I have to look into exactly what happened, but they're not all in pugilistic pose. They're not all just sitting there like fucking third round of a bout.

No. Well, pugilistic pose, if you're on your side, can kind of look a little bit like fetal position because you got your arms out and clenched. In Pompeii though, I'm sure some people died from lava or heat or fire, but a lot of people I think died from ash, the soot covering them. Yeah. So it was almost like they saw it coming. That's why a lot of them are like laying down or holding a loved one or whatever, or curled up in a ball. And then it just, I think the ash just like ripped through the town and like just instantly covered everybody.

That makes more sense. Although there was that during the Eat and Alive episode where they referred to just standard drowning position or whatever. So at least this one gives a little more information than in Eat and Alive where it's like they were found in positions consistent with drowning. They gave no information on that.

Yeah. This is basically if you get hit by a lava flow, I imagine it sort of, and this was making me laugh as I was researching it, but I feel like you're a human Jiffy Pop Colonel. If you get hit by a lava flow, you just sort of like bang in an instant.

And that's what I'm thinking, but it's gotta be a full body. It can't just be hit you in the fucking toe. I've talked about this on this podcast, I think before. My favorite tweet that I have no idea who tweeted it from like 2009. It just said in a paraphrasing, cause it was 2009, but I think it just said, if you touch lava for even just a few seconds, you'll get a burn, which is so funny to me because obviously it takes less than even one second and yeah, you'll definitely get burned.

Yeah. Like it's such a stupid thing. I guess I'm curious if you were standing still and lava drove over your feet. Two inches of lava went over your feet. Yeah, I mean, your feet, I guess would instantly dissolve and you would fall into the lava and then this would happen. So.

Yeah, it's like a Mortal Kombat finishing move or something.

Yeah. So, okay, we've established it really, really fucking sucks to get burned alive, which feels like a great time to dive into the research of spontaneous human combustion and see how often people have been burned alive with no warning. So the first thing to note is that spontaneous human combustion, like I said, is not a modern phenomenon. There are stories going back to at least the 1400s. The first case that I could find is from the accounts of a Danish physician, Thomas Bartholene, who claims that he heard this story from a direct descendant of the victim. So we only really have his word for it, but it's the earliest case. He wrote about it in his book, Hysterarium Anatimicarum Rerorium.

AKA things I heard from a guy I know.

Yeah. I think it seems like the way that if I was doing like pretend Latin, I would try to write out a history of rare anatomy.

Using exclusively pig Latin.

Yeah, basically. And this book was a collection of strange medical phenomena. I assume this probably was up there with some of the strangest. According to Thomas Bartholene, around the year 1470, an Italian knight named Polonus Vorstius was enjoying glass after glass of strong wine.

Hell yeah, this guy sounds awesome.

Yeah, and the wine from one of the sources I read sounds really more like it was like a brandy than a wine. So this was strong, and he was enjoying these glasses of drink when he suddenly burst into flames and burned to death in front of his parents. I don't know why he was drinking like this around his parents.

Well, he's a knight, like who's gonna tell him what to do.

That's true.

But also it does sound like maybe it was just a cautionary tale to keep younger kids from drinking to excess, be like, well, you don't wanna blow up like that knight. That sounds like it really could have been a bedtime story for people drinking to excess.

Yeah, there's a really interesting, we're gonna get into it in a minute, but there's some interesting crossover history, exactly what you're saying of spontaneous human combustion and drinking to excess. Oh wow. So hold that thought. A few hundred years later in 1613, I guess not really a few hundred, that would be like 130, 140 years later, a pamphlet was written about another spontaneous combustion story. It was called, Fire From Heaven Burning the Body of One John Hitchell. So really straightforward title.

Wait, so the title includes of one John Hitchell or it's written by John Hitchell? So it's basically a police report.

Yeah, basically. And I did include who it was written by because his name was also, it was like John Mitchell. So it was like fire from heaven burning the body of one John Hitchell by John Mitchell. So it was very confusing. So forget who wrote it. But you can actually buy copies of this pamphlet on Amazon, but I couldn't find a digital copy and I couldn't get a physical copy delivered to me in time. So I'm not relying on primary sources here. I'm relying on a summary of the pamphlet on a website called anomalyinfo.com. But according to this summary, on Saturday, June 26th, 1613, John Hitchell, a carpenter in Christchurch, Southampton, England, had just finished up work for the day and he went to bed where he was joined by his wife and child. So all three of them slept in the same bed. The pamphlet says that, quote, In the deep of the night, lightning came on so fiercely that it woke Agnes Russell, Hitchell's mother-in-law, who had, quote, received a terrible blow on her cheek by what means I know not. Now, to be clear, I think this lightning is supposed to be a supernatural flame, the fire from heaven, both because there's no mention of a storm and because the lightning struck inside the house, which, unless the house didn't have a roof, would be pretty unusual.

I mean, what year is this?

1613.

1600s? I mean, the roofs are thatched potentially. They're like living in wood. So yeah, I could see lightning being like, fuck your wood house and just come right on through. But it is interesting that she was awoken by lightning, which is to say, I guess, physically altered because you don't hear lightning, it's thunder you hear. So, or it's like it struck something and then a piece of the house flew across the room, hit her in the noggin.

Well, what it struck was John Hitchell.

Oh no, it was his fucking knuckle bones flew at her.

Yeah, I don't know what she got hit by, but-

Every time you say hit by, in my mind, they've all been hit by and struck by a smooth criminal. So that's all that pops in my head every time you say hit by.

Well, Agnes starts screaming for help. She cries out to John Hitchell and her daughter who were, the family's in one bed on one side of the room and Agnes is in another bed on the other side of the room. So she's yelling because she's been awoken by a smooth criminal. There's no answer. Agnes runs over to try to shake them awake and finds her daughter, quote, most lamentably burnt on the side of her body that was facing her husband and child, both of whom were dead and apparently burning slowly with no flame, like human coals, basically.

Oh, weird.

And at this point, despite her own burns, Hitchell's wife drags her husband out of the bed and into the street where, according to the pamphlet, the intense heat from his body led her to abandon it and the corpse lay there and burned, smoking with no visible flame for three days until it was reduced to ashes and a few bits of bone.

Is that, do you think they lived in a really rural area where it can just sit out there or is there people just stepping over it every day being like, are you gonna do something with this smoldering body? I'm trying to get my wagon through here.

Yeah, I'm not sure what that says about how their marriage was going at the time.

I think it was going well because, no, I think it went well, well enough that she would put herself in harm's way to address or attend to his injuries.

But then she just left him in the road.

Well, I think at a certain point, you gotta cut bait a little bit.

Yeah.

Like it's hot to the touch, dude. Or she was like, this bed is worth more to me than our marriage and she's just like, I gotta save this bed and dragged him out to keep the bed from him alien blooding through each floor.

Right, a hole through, yeah. Well, and again, I haven't read the actual pamphlet, but Anomaly Info reports that the story is treated as if the heat that burned John's wife and child was coming from his body. Like basically it sounds like this wasn't a lightning strike from above so much as John burst into flames as if struck by lightning. Now, again, this is 1613. It does seem like there was a fairly contemporaneous record of it that was then accessed. We'll get a little bit. There was another researcher in the 1700s who actually referenced this story. So it's a little bit of telephone, but.

The 1600s was a hell of a time for, if you're a people on fire enthusiast, jeez, low wheeze, man. I mean, we had the witch trials going on. We have dudes blowing up in their beds. Yeah. It was not a good time to walk around thinking, I definitely won't catch on fire.

No, definitely not. And this is a good place to pause and point out that in the 1600s, the science of combustion wasn't understood very well. Again, this is another little side street, but I think it's very interesting. Farmers knew in the 1600s that hay could spontaneously combust under the right circumstances, but no one knew why. And we do now, and it's really counterintuitive, because wet hay is actually the most susceptible to spontaneous combustion, because the moisture in wet hay encourages live plant and mold growth deep inside the pile. And so both plant and mold respiration generate heat. So over a long enough time, in the center of a large wet hay pile, the heat is generated, the heat rises, the moisture decreases, and a flame can ignite.

Oh my gosh, so it's like you get some wet hay and you've built nature's furnace, essentially.

Yeah, so now stuff a scarecrow, feed a cow, do whatever you do, but don't leave your wet hay sitting around unattended.

Wet hay is the devil's workshop.

It really is, quite literally. Literally. So in 1667, in an attempt to explain combustion, not just of hay, but combustion in general, a man named Johann Joachim Becker put forth an explanation for what causes combustion.

No matter what that explanation is at this time period, like, I can prove this scientifically, whew, that has to be the last words you ever say, because that person would then be deemed a witch immediately, and then set ablaze.

This guy coined.

He coined the term, I swear to God, I'm not a witch.

No, he invented a basic element that he named phlogiston. P-H-L-O-G-I-S-T-O-N. He believed that phlogiston was released when an object burned, and the more phlogiston in the object.

Stop saying phlogiston.

The faster and more fierce the final combustion would be. He also believed that the purpose of respiration of breathing, the reason that living beings breathe, was to exhale out the phlogiston that builds up within their bodies. So logically, there would be medical conditions that allowed phlogiston to build up within a body, leading to a combustion.

Does he think that people are dragons?

No, well, I mean.

And that if we hold our breath long enough, we're just gonna explode?

I mean, I don't think he thought that people could breathe fire, but he did believe that there was this element that could build up and cause something to burst into flames, which makes me think of another merch item that we should make. That's like one of those, don't talk to me until I've had my coffee shirts, but it says, don't talk to me until I've exhaled my phlogiston.

Oh my gosh. Every idea you have, which are, by the way, always spectacular, they are always so intricately for no one.

For no one. But it would make me laugh so much.

Do you wanna own a shirt that you'll have to explain every day of your life? Well, come to the Scared All The Time merch shop and we'll hook you up.

We will. We'll high five you when we start having live shows.

Or we'll get to episode 30 and be like, we don't even get your shirt anymore. We don't even remember saying that.

We've forgotten. We've forgotten. It wasn't until the mid 1700s when research around spontaneous human combustion started to solidify around the mysterious death of the Countess de Bondi of Cezanne, Italy.

It always takes like a rich person before anything's done.

Yeah. Well, interestingly, I left this out because the episode is starting to get a little long, but this is actually the first of two Countesses who died from spontaneous human combustion. I don't remember the details of the other one, but I was like, that's fucking weird. Two Countesses. But I guess maybe there were a lot of, Countess just meant you were rich basically. Sure. Anyway, so the Countess de Bondi of Cezanne, Italy, she died around April 4th, 1731, and her remains were found on the floor of her room, halfway between her bed and the window. All that was left of her was a pile of ashes, two undamaged lower legs, or I guess another way to say that would be both of her legs, and a calcinated section of her skull lying on the ground between the legs. So this is sort of like a locked room murder mystery of the mid 1700s. As the official report stated, four feet distance from the bed, there was a heap of ashes, two legs untouched from the foot to the knee with their stockings on. Between them was the lady's head, whose brains half of the back part of the skull and the whole chin were burnt to ashes, among which was found three fingers blackened. All the rest was ashes, which had this peculiar quality that they left in the hand when taken up, a stinking moisture.

Also, the stockings survived? What did that do for the stocking maker? Because you know how Stanley Cup got really fucking popular because it survived a car fire or whatever? I can't even imagine what Stanley stockings, like, hey, we're the ones that, when your Countess explodes, you can trust Stanley Stockings to survive.

True, I didn't know that about the Stanley Cups. I didn't realize that's when they got popular.

Yes, no, so prior to the ridiculous craze that is Stanley Cups, this woman's car lit on fire, I don't know if it is spontaneously combusted or not, but it lit on fire and the Stanley Cup survived fully unscathed and the Stanley Company, I believe, bought her a new car. It was like a goodwill advertising thing. And that was kind of my first time I'd heard of that company and then, you know, not long after, I feel like it was just in the news all the time.

Yeah, maybe they set her car on fire. They set it up as a publicity stunt.

It's a false flag.

Yeah, it's a false flag. False cup. So in the Countess' room, there were candles, but they were unlit and there was an oil lamp, but it was empty. There were no witnesses to the death, but because she was royalty, there was no way this was going uninvestigated. So a bunch of people inspected the scene and one of them, the Reverend Giuseppe Bianchini of Verona, Italy, published a book regarding what he found. Based on the position the remains were found in, Bianchini theorized that the fire had started somewhere in the Countess' lower abdomen. Make a note of that, because that's going to come back later. And burned so fiercely that her body was reduced to ashes as she was still standing. He deduced that as the flames consumed, or after the flames consumed her, her skull fell straight down through the space her body had previously occupied to land between the undamaged remains of her lower legs, which I got to say sounds a lot like what would happen to like Daffy Duck.

Yes. The head realizes after the fact that there's no body there, it looks down and falls.

Yeah. Bianchini's theory was that the initial ignition was somehow caused by the effluvia, gases and waste igniting within the Countess' stomach and intestines. This could have been assisted, he theorized, by vapors from an alcohol bath that the Countess apparently may have taken the night previous. She would take these when she was feeling ill.

I think all these alcohol baths are making you feel ill. I don't know.

Well, yeah, don't submerge.

Oh man, I gotta hit this peroxide bath real quick.

Yeah.

Jeez, lady. Just go back to the blood of the poor to help with your skin.

In any case, the arguments for spontaneous combustion that Bianchini put forward became the classic criteria for proving, quote proving, an abnormal internal source for certain fire deaths. So again, this is the 1700s and these criteria really held up for like 200 years.

So this is basically like in law, like this is now precedent.

Kind of, yeah. He theorized that these were the criteria. So you would be looking at a spontaneous human combustion if one, a flame from any candle, lamp or cooking fire could not possibly consume a human body to the great extent that is seen in these cases, especially the reduction of bones to ashes that under normal circumstances, other objects in the area of the body should have also caught fire, but the flames seem to have unnaturally confined themselves to just their human victims. That most commonly in these cases, the torsos are destroyed, but outer limbs are not. This is just opposite to damage caused by normal fire deaths in which limbs are typically destroyed before the torso is. Four, that the common presence of undamaged limbs is likely due to a fire that starts within the torso area and runs out of fuel before reaching the tips of the extremities, which is kind of three as well. So three and four are kind of the same. And he also felt that these fires must occur and spread extremely fast because victims of it never appear to resist it. So the death and the burning must have been near instantaneous in short of violent and spontaneous combustion. A few years later in 1744, a man named Paul Rowley or Raleigh, R-O-L-L-I, officially coined the term spontaneous human combustion in his article, Philosophical Transactions. Rowley described spontaneous human combustion as, a process in which a human body allegedly catches fire as a result of heat generated by internal chemical activity, but without evidence of an external source of ignition. So, even he is hedging his bets there with allegedly. This guy was a fellow of London's Royal Society, which is the, I think the world's oldest continuously operating scientific academy. So he was a legit guy. Like, you know, he wanted to be taken seriously. You know, he also, this is the guy that I was saying earlier, he's the one who dug up the case of John Hitchell from the 1600s. So the literature for spontaneous human combustion started building on itself relatively quickly.

And that would make sense that he would even know about that if he's part of the oldest standing, I don't know, smart guys club. So they probably have like a rad library of cool shit that every hundred years they need to be like, well, none of this is relevant anymore. Let's put that back in the basement. We can't just use bloodletting for every problem. So he's well read and he's like, I know two things. A fire can start in your body, and that women can't be part of the smart guy club.

And yeah, and so they've named me head scientist.

So now I'm head, I ran on that platform and now I'm head scientist, yeah.

Yeah. It's also interesting to note, I think, that we're talking about, in the present day, I think spontaneous human combustion, for reasons that we'll get into, has sort of like a supernatural tinge to it. But at the time, part of the reason that this was being taken seriously was because combustion and spontaneous combustions, whether it was hay or people, was something that scientists were studying. They didn't know how these things worked. So it wasn't, to bring this up, wasn't like a crazy thing. It was like, oh, well, yeah, this does seem to happen, so let's figure out why.

But it's very difficult to figure out why. It's also difficult to replicate that, if not for science reasons, at least for moral reasons.

Yeah, well, I mean, look, I guess I didn't really get too much into this in the research, but when I was researching what it feels like to be burned alive, there's hundreds and hundreds, and I'm sure thousands of unreported, but hundreds of reported cases of, or not even cases, but documented executions of people being burned alive, and whether it's at the stake or whatever. So it's not like people being burned wasn't a thing that society-

No, we established the entirety of the 1600s was burnings every week.

Yeah, just burning people. So, but that's part of what made these cases stand out because they knew that when you burned people at the stake, you'd have to burn the bodies four or five times to reduce them to this level of ash.

Oh, 100%. My dad, he's got another plumber that retired, older guy, but he got bored of retirement. So we started working at a crematorium, and he's, I don't know how the two, maybe he did the pipe fixtures for whatever gas goes into the furnace. I'm not sure how he had an inn over there or what the help wanted sign was, but he went working over there, and I just remember him telling my dad, yeah, when you get your ashes, it's like maybe 60% you and probably some other people. But more importantly, the thing that came out of that, which made me not laugh, what I thought was interesting, the first part made me laugh. Second thing that made me, I was interested in, is he was like, oh, and femurs and the bigger bones, those just get tossed in a bag. Even at the heat we're doing this, like a lot of that shit's not turning to ash. So the fact that an entire torso is missing is like crazy amount of heat, I imagine.

Yeah, yeah. So just as quickly as Bianchini brought his list of criteria forth, another guy in 1800, so just a little bit later, like 50 years, I guess.

Oh my God, that's so much time later.

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, how many people in the mid 1700s and 1800s are writing reports on spontaneous human combustion? So it's not in the scheme of things, it's not very long, but whatever, this guy pointed the finger like we talked about earlier, squarely at alcohol as the likely culprit in spontaneous human combustion. So it's 1800, this guy's name, again, I apologize to everybody for the pronunciations on this show, but Pierre Ami Lyre? Pierre Ami? I'm gonna call him Pierre Ami.

Give us a spelling.

P-I-E.

So traditional Pierre.

Traditional Pierre, dash, lowercase A-I-M-I, space L-A-I-R.

Okay, so we now know people can make their own pronunciations.

So this guy, Pierre Ami Lyre, published his study of strange fire deaths entitled, again, not much left to the imagination here, On the Combustion of the Human Body Produced by the Long and Immoderate Use of Spirituous Liquors. So essentially, drugs who die by burning to death. Pierre Ami was convinced that these deaths were caused by alcohol, and he hoped that by publishing his study, he might convince people to stop drinking so much. But my feeling is, buddy, it's the 1800s. Good fucking luck with that. Because what else are you going to do? Work at a shirt factory and get crushed by heavy machinery and not drink?

Or catch on fire like a very famous shirt coat.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. This guy's study was a little, his sample size was small. He studied 15 cases of combustion deaths, and from those 15 cases came up with eight definitive criteria for preternatural combustibility. One, all victims had made immoderate use of spiritualist liquors. Two, it only happens to women. Oh boy. Three, all were far advanced in age. Four, all were lit by outside sources of fire. Five, in most cases, some extremities were left behind unburned. Six, water sometimes boosted the fire rather than extinguished it. Seven, the fires mostly confined their damage to the victims. And eight, the fires reduced bodies to ashes and a stinking penetrating soot, which is something Bianchini noted, or I don't know if it was Bianchini who actually was quoted as saying, but when the Countess died, there was the stinking ash that was left behind afterwards.

So these guys basically saying like, look, we got these booze soaked old ladies who are a Tinder box waiting for an outside source flame. So like the lamp lighter is like, good evening you'll drunk, oh no.

Yeah, and this guy, I mean, some controversial claims here. He later admitted that several of the cases that he looked at, several of the, again, 15 cases did not fit his own criteria, but for whatever reason, and I couldn't quite figure out like, maybe this was published somewhere popular or whatever, but him backing off of it was mostly ignored and pretty soon his list was being treated as unquestionably correct by the people who believed in the scourge of spontaneous human combustion.

Well, as I joked about earlier, these houses of science, these clubs definitely didn't have women as members. So they probably sat back and were like, you know what? Anything that says that men will be safe from whatever this is, we're gonna go ahead and say it's fine.

Yeah.

So we can keep drinking, we can keep doing whatever, we can keep lighting ourselves on fire, but like here at the Gentleman Science Committee, the only fire in our bellies is enthusiasm for science.

I'm surprised they didn't have a theory that like if you got knocked up outside of wedlock, that the baby would turn into flames in like six weeks or something.

Yeah, through sinning, you've made a devil baby. You know, the devil, it's realm, it's domain, it's fire.

It bursts out of your torso. And that's what happens.

So now before we move on, have you ever drank one of my favorite things, Buckfast?

No.

Have you ever been to Ireland or Scotland?

No.

It is.

I've also never drank another one of your favorite things, Mad Dog 50-50.

Oh, it's Mad Dog 2020.

Mad Dog 2020.

And it's interesting you bring that up because Buckfast is kind of like the bum wine of Ireland, Scotland, maybe England.

Nice.

It's like a 15% alcohol caffeinated fermented wine that's like two bones. And it's the best. And you can't bring it to America with you because since they banned Four Loko here, like you can't have caffeinated alcohol. So it's illegal to bring it back to the States, but it rules. And I remember our buddy, his mother-in-law, he's like, oh, if you're going to the store, grab some Bucky or whatever. And she's like, I, what? I would never be seen purchasing that.

Isn't it two things I was gonna say, we're looking for sponsors. So unfortunately, if you can't import to the States, I guess, nevermind. But isn't it crazy how quickly they banned Four Loko? Like out of all the things our government can't seem to do, they did manage to like in four weeks be like, no, you can't buy the caffeinated booze.

Yeah, they did pretty quickly and swiftly remove that, which yeah, at a speed that was uncharacteristic to the government. And also I don't remember many people being like, in my cold dead hands, you'll take my Four Loko, which is often the case with most things they try and ban.

Well now, yeah.

And the reason I even bring up Bucky is, it's from like the 1880s or something. It was founded, it was started. I don't know how many people read the label. I think I tried. And I wanna say the label. It said something about like, monks have been making this since the 1800s. I'm like, yo, these monks must have been off party, bro. These monks must have been crazy.

Well, monks, I mean, yeah, monks brew, monks do all kinds of stuff with alcohol.

Buckfast Tonic Wine is a caffeinated alcoholic drink originally made by monks at Buckfast Abbey in England. Buckfast has become notorious for its association with drinkers who are prone to committing antisocial behavior. A diet of four bottles a day has been described in a Scottish court as not conducive to a long life, and the glass bottle has been blamed for providing drunkards with a weapon. Ed really loves how early this information is highlighted in the Wikipedia page.

I feel like we gotta slam some Buc-E's and get this train back on the tracks here.

Hell yeah, dude.

So yeah, pretty soon, Pierre's list was being treated as unquestionably correct by people who believed in the scourge of spontaneous human combustion. While there's debate over his findings, many of them do fit pretty well into another theory of the case that was actually presented as early as 1783. This idea, and I couldn't find a source for who first presented it, but it's well represented in the literature, is known as the candle effect. The idea is that under the right circumstances, a person's own body fats are enough to feed a fire consuming them with their clothes acting as a wick for the flame.

That's not a bad idea, right? Because it's like people, like they light whale blubber on fire. They make some sort of flammable shit from it.

Right, that's how a wick works. It draws the oils up through the wick and that's what keeps the flame alight.

That's why we gotta get square, dude, because we don't wanna blow up. We gotta hit the gym.

I don't think a shredded person has ever spontaneously combusted unless they were lifting so much that their muscles exploded.

We should also probably tell the audience, just let them know, when we say square, we mean get in shape.

I think we've said that.

I don't know if we've ever explained it, though.

Well, if you wanna explain it, it's because you thought that Zac Efron's head looks super square in iron claw and so that's now our term for getting in shape is to get square like Zac Efron.

There you go, quick and simple, back to the story.

So yes, in this event, the combustion isn't spontaneous. The fire would still initially be produced by a spark from something in the environment that lands on a person's clothes and then theoretically, as the cloth burns, it could soak up body fats from the tissues burning the body first and the clothing second. And if this is true, it could explain the selective nature, the seemingly like supernaturally selective nature of fires in these strange deaths because the major parts of the bodies consumed would generally be the parts covered by clothing that could absorb liquid fat. Most of these fats would be in the victim's torso, the very part most commonly reduced to ash. The problem some people have with this theory is that it still doesn't seem possible that such a fire would ever be hot enough to break down a body, certainly not hot enough to essentially cremate people on the spot.

I can't wait to see their YouTube loose change-esque documentary about this.

Yeah, this type of fire would also burn slowly, meaning that anyone, even a blind drunk, would have a reasonable chance of putting themselves out. But then, how to explain the death of Alexander Morrison in 1888?

From his famous book, On The Burning of Alex Morrison or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, on the slow and heat-induced burning death of one Alexander Morrison. He was an old soldier and he was found incinerated in a hayloft, there's hay again, in Aberdeen, Scotland.

What year?

1888.

Oh, shit, dude, Scotland, 88?

1888.

Yeah, he could have been drinking Bucky.

He could have been drinking Bucky. But here's the thing, though, that makes this feel mysterious, coming off of the WIC theory. Despite being literally converted to ash, the features of his calm, sleeping face were still clearly visible.

What, in the ash?

Yeah, I think, I mean, there's no photos of this because it's 1888, but the way it sounds to me is that he basically, like it looked like the Shroud of Turin or something.

Okay, that is so much better than what I thought. I thought some, I don't know, local Rapscallion found the ashes first and then just put their finger in and made a happy face in the pile of ash and then left.

Well, I mean, look, one of the things I like to do on this show when I research it, when I tell you about this stuff, is I like to think about the chain of reporting or the chain of facts. So like, you know, I'm reading something that says, despite being literally converted to ash, the features of his calm sleeping face was still clearly visible. But yes, it does make you wonder like, to who? Who felt it was this? Who felt it was visible? Maybe it was just like some guy drew a smiley face and somebody was like, look, you could still see a face in there. I mean, who knows? But it's an eerie detail that I love and it does make it seem like, okay, so this guy must have burned fucking fast as hell if he still looked like he was asleep in the ashes. So the investigating physician, Dr. Jay McKenzie Booth, took a look into some earlier deaths that were like this and reached the conclusion that in almost all cases, the victim had not resisted the fire that consumed them. The difference is for Dr. Jay McKenzie, people had previously interpreted this to mean that the fires burned so fast and so hot as to kill their victims almost instantly. Dr. Booth interpreted it to mean that the victims were dead before their bodies began to burn.

Interesting and kind of smart.

Yeah, so I don't know if they knew about carbon monoxide poisoning at this point, but they certainly knew you could die from smoke inhalation. So Booth figured, I think quite reasonably, is that the hay caught fire possibly spontaneously while Morrison slept and then this guy never woke up because he just suffocated, and then the fire took its sweet time destroying his remains. Which I think is probably an explanation for a good number of what would appear to be spontaneous deaths. It was just that the person either was poisoned by carbon monoxide or smoke inhalation and then just laid there.

But this is the kind of disruptive thinking that will never get him into the Gentleman Science Club.

I thought you were gonna say this is the kind of disruptive thinking they would never get from a woman.

No. Or they were like, hey, you second-guessing our report, that's a feminine quality, just so you know.

We've already solved this. It's fire babies. It's devil fire babies.

This guy, by every known standard, he shouldn't even have caught fire. Don't bring this to me.

So for much of the next hundred years or so, spontaneous human combustion was kind of considered solved and basically forgotten about. Between this theory about people dying in their sleep and then being burned and the wick theory, it was kind of done and dusted.

Oh, no pun intended.

Yeah, yeah, no pun intended. Charles Dickens, for his fourth appearance on this show, actually came under fire.

No pun intended.

No pun intended for spreading misinformation because he used spontaneous human combustion to kill a villainous drunk in a novel called Bleak House, and critics were like, what are you doing? You're gonna whip the readers into a frenzy about spontaneous human combustion.

And isn't that, I think, arguably, number one on most people's lists of 10 best Dickens works. I think Bleak House is pretty regularly up there.

It's up there, yeah.

I never read it, so I don't know the circumstances in which it was used.

Yeah, I've never read it either, but essentially, from what I read about it, there's a villainous type character who's also a sloppy drunk, and he's found, I don't think Dickens used the term spontaneous human combustion, but the crime scene, as described, is very reminiscent of spontaneous human combustion. And some of his critics were like, how dare you? So, other than that, though, the subject seems to have kind of disappeared until 1932, when your friend of mine, Mr. Charles Fort, got involved.

Like Fortian?

Yeah.

Yeah, like when people refer to things as Fortian, that's what they're referring to?

Yeah, most of the people listening to this probably know who Charles Fort is, but quickly for the unaware, he was a chronicler and investigator of all things strange and weird, from premonitions to frogs falling from the sky. These sorts of stories became known as Fortian phenomena, named after the man himself. So, 1932 was the year he published a book called Wild Talents, which was his fourth collection of phenomenon that he had clipped from local and international newspapers. And in this book, Fort presents a couple cases of bizarre fire deaths with really puzzling details. Cases such as that of Wilhelmina Dewar, found burned to death in 1908 on an unburned bed. Cases such as the case of Nora Lake, who was found burned to death in unburned clothes in 1930. And the case of Lillian Green, found in 1916 on a scorched floor with burned body and clothing but no source of fire. She survived the initial fire, but later died in the hospital without ever explaining what happened to her.

No, that's a bummer.

So Fort's promotion of these cases took what had really long been considered a strange but ultimately scientific mystery. And this is where it started to mix in with the realm of the paranormal and the supernatural because it kind of trickled from Fort's books into those sort of mid-century like UFO, fate magazine, it all kind of got blended together and became more of this supernatural thing again. And it also didn't help that by the mid 20th century, we would see the reporting of some of the most bizarre and well-documented cases of spontaneous human combustion in history. So first is Mary Reeser.

I don't like that it's still ladies. It's still ladies. Like the every Fort example you gave and now this, it's like they're coming for these old drunk ladies.

For now, for now. This is one of the two gold standard kind of modern. If you've heard of spontaneous human combustion or you've seen photos or you've seen an episode of Unsolved Mysteries or something, this and the next case are probably one of the ones that you've heard.

They always come up. These are the golden girls?

No, the gold standards.

Thank you for being a flame.

And one of them is a male. We should sing more on this shit.

Well, I did. Well, are they both women, the gold standards?

No, that's what I'm saying. One of them is a man.

Okay, well, either way, I would still say this is one of the golden girls and then I'm gonna sing, thank you for being a flame.

Yeah, there we go. So Mary's body was discovered by her landlord in St. Petersburg, Florida. She was sitting in a chair in the middle of her apartment or what was left of her was sitting in a chair. All that remained was part of her left foot still wearing a slipper, her backbone and her skull. Now, supposedly her skull had been shrunk to the size of a teacup due to the intense heat that engulfed her as she died.

I'm not trying to laugh, but damn, if you see a full-size spine with a baby little skull on top, that is kind of hilarious.

That fact is heavily debated as to whether or not that was reported correctly because part of the reason this case is famous is because Mary Reeser became known as the Cinder Lady after photos of the crime scene were published in the newspaper. And her death also stumped local investigators. They didn't have a spontaneous human combustion department.

Is that why they posted it in the newspaper? Because they were like, listen, we're at a loss. We're gonna just show you some gnarly shit on the front page. Please phone in KL5666 or whatever, if you know what the fuck I'm looking at here.

It was reported as a strange case. And I think in the original story, there were quotes from the police, not saying that they were stumped, but that it was a strange case. But eventually they were so stumped that the St. Petersburg Chief of Police sent a shoe box of evidence, I assume including her tiny head.

And her one surviving shoe.

Yeah, he sent a shoe box of evidence to J. Edgar Hoover to ask for the FBI's help investigating this death. Now, the FBI eventually ascribed Mary's death to the wick theory or the candle theory that she was a known smoker. They theorized that she fell asleep in her chair or the lit cigarette, maybe a little booze. And that was it for Mary Reeser. But the story took on a life of its own because since local authorities couldn't solve the case or they had trouble solving it, once the FBI came forward and said, oh, we know what it is, it was this wick theory, a lot of people didn't trust the FBI. They thought it was some sort of coverup. Like the FBI knew what really killed her and they were feeding this story as like a line of bullshit to satisfy people that it was this wick theory.

This is their swamp gas situation.

Yeah, now I think anyone who's listened this far to the episode is probably scanning and going like, yeah, no, that makes sense. It very likely could have been the wick theory. But if you're just some average Joe in St. Petersburg, Florida in the early 1950s, you've never heard of the wick theory. You've probably never heard of spontaneous human combustion. You just know it's a weird thing that all of a sudden the FBI is like, yeah, don't worry about it. You know a candle, that's what happened. It was like that.

I will say this is kind of interesting time period. The early 1950s, we have a huge portion of our population who fought in World War II and potentially currently fighting the Korean War at this time.

Yeah.

I don't know. It's just a lot of people who saw human carnage firsthand. And it is interesting that it's like, oh, this stumps us. But also maybe there is someone who's like, oh, I saw a shrunken head and a blown up body. It's when a mortar hits you through a wall in south of France or whatever. Like part of the, we don't believe you might come from, we all were just in a war and a half.

What you're suggesting is that anyone who would have been exposed to something like this would have been exposed to it in the context of a war with this sort of damage dealt by a weapon of war. And so somebody saying, oh yeah, this can also just happen if you catch fire would have scanned is like, well, no, this is what happens if you get hit by a mortar or you get lit on fire with a flamethrower.

Yeah, exactly. Like that's what I'm saying, which is like, it just happened to be an interesting time in history where people did see pretty graphic evidence of what the human body has endured. Yes. And probably are like, that doesn't pass the sniff test to all of us guys from this B-17 or whatever.

Right, right, right. So, and then that story kind of got picked up by the fate magazines of the world. And that's part of what propelled spontaneous human combustion both into the public arena and into the world of the supernatural. The other most famous mid-century case is that of Dr. John Irving Bentley. Now this one, if you've ever seen a photo of the aftermath of a spontaneous human combustion, it's probably from this case. There's a famous black and white photo of Dr. Bentley's foot still in his slipper, which I think is weird because that's also just like Mary Reeser. And his leg is burned away to ash about like halfway up his shin. So this photo is definitely something that people would have seen and associated with spontaneous human combustion.

But what you might not see is that the rest of his body can fit in your pocket. He had his arm had shrunk to the size of a GI Joe's. His spine was about the length of a number two pencil at this point.

But weirdly his dick was huge.

It is interesting.

His case is a little stranger than Mary's I think.

Cause he was a man, this should not have happened.

Yeah, obviously I'm stumped, Ed. I don't know about you, I'm stumped. This guy was also elderly. He was 92, he was retired. And on the morning of December 5th, 1966, a man named Don Gosnell let himself onto Dr. Bentley's property so that he could go read the electrical meters. This was normal cause Dr. Bentley had trouble getting around. So they'd agreed that this guy could just let himself into Dr. Bentley's house. As soon as Don Gosnell got into the basement to do his readings, he noticed a strange burnt smell. And he said there was also a blue type smoke hanging in the air. He looked down and discovered a small pile of ash at his feet on the floor of the basement, about 14 inches in diameter and five inches tall.

Happy face drawn into it.

Yeah, curious, Gosnell followed the weird smell upstairs to the doctor's bathroom. And when he entered the bathroom, he found Dr. Bentley's lower leg and foot still wearing that one slipper. Slipper was completely undamaged. Next to the foot was a huge pile of ash, as well as Dr. Bentley's walker with the rubber tips of the feet still intact. Below that was a two and a half by four foot hole that had burned through the wooden floorboards and allowed the ash to fall into the basement below.

Alien blooded.

Yeah, exactly. So as soon as he saw this, he screamed and ran down the street to the gas company where he would later give a quote to the newsletter Pursuit that what bothered me most was what I didn't find. E.g. almost all of the doctor's body was what spooked him. The first theory put forward was that Bentley had set himself on fire with his pipe that he was known to smoke, but his pipe was still on its stand by the bed in the next room. The coroner was stumped and recorded a verdict of death by asphyxiation and 90% burning of the body, although he would later correct this to, he felt it was more 99% burning of the body, but whatever. Now, interesting little tangent, I'd never heard of this newsletter, Pursuit, that got the quote from Gosnell, but we may hear about them more in the future because I dug a little deeper and actually found a good chunk of their archives online and it's super cool. So Pursuit was a journal published by the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, which was founded in 1965 by a well-known naturalist zoologist and most importantly, crypto zoologist, Dr. Ivan T. Sanderson. We could probably do a whole episode on Dr. Sanderson. He was an early kind of adventurer. He hunted the Yeti. He wrote books about lake monsters, really cool guy, but he had this newsletter that I never knew about, started publishing in May 67 and from what I found online, published at least through the 1980s and as of 2011, the complete archives exist as part of a collection in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They did investigations into all kinds of phenomenon and while they generally erred on the side of the supernatural and strange solutions, a lot of the articles they wrote on these investigations were really thorough. So somebody actually went and investigated Dr. Bentley's death afterwards and interviewed a lot of the people involved, interviewed the coroner, interviewed Gosnell and came to a conclusion that it's a little left of center. The article ends with a suggestion that Dr. Bentley's combustion may somehow have been tied to the changing magnetic fields of the earth. But, and this is why sources like these are so important and interesting, there are two details in this article that I noticed that I think offers some more prosaic evidence that I don't think was widely reported. That being that Dr. Bentley's burned bathrobe was found in the bathtub next to his body. And there were apparently the broken remains of a water pitcher in the toilet. So to me that reads as he was wearing his robe, it caught fire, he ran to the bathroom to try to like put it out with water from the toilet or something and then like tried to rip it off at some point, you know, threw it in the tub, but maybe he was already on fire. Like, I don't know, those two pieces seem to suggest there was some sort of fire with an attempt to put it out and that he certainly didn't go up in flames in five seconds.

Yeah, the evidence would suggest, yeah, like you would throw something on fire, like in a bathtub where it won't catch other things on fire.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I don't know how widely reported those facts ended up being because it seems like they were really only reported in this person who went to like reinvestigate the case. But anyway, interesting. And what isn't explained, you know, even if that explains maybe what happened after the fire started, it still doesn't explain how it burned the body so completely in this relatively uncontrolled, you know, it's not like he was in a vacuum chamber or something. He was in a bathroom of a house and it burned a small hole in the floor, but it didn't burn the house down. Apparently the bathtub was barely scuffed. You know, the rubber on his walker was unmelted. So it's like, it's still so bizarre.

It's almost like someone is opening a portal from another dimension inside people where they're just pouring lava into the portal.

Yeah.

It's like, it goes from a volcano into a person through a dimensional slip so no one ever sees. It's a perfect way to like cross dimensional assassination.

Yes, yes.

I should cut that. That makes me sound crazy.

No, I think that's great. Let's get schizo. Let's get schizo, dude. So yeah, it isn't explained. There's no explanation really for where the fire started. What also isn't explained and far between, but there are spontaneous human combustion events that have witnesses. And these are a little bit harder to explain. So one of them occurred in Hawaii, December, 1956, a partially paralyzed man, 78-year-old young sick Kim was sitting in his wheelchair reading his newspaper when flames began to emerge from his torso area. Now, the report I found claims that, they, the flames, were strange in nature as if they had a kind of intelligence moving in all directions and spreading out over his body within a matter of seconds. Now, I don't know who would have been around to witness that particular moment, but as soon as he started to scream, his neighbor, Virginia Cadet rushed over to see what was happening and she found Sick Kim engulfed in blue flames. So I don't know if maybe she described later that the flames were moving as if they had an intelligence.

And blue flames are one of the hotter flames.

Yes, and keep that in mind too. So Virginia Cadet ran to get help and returned, she said, less than 15 minutes later, which still seems like way too long. Like, did you walk to the fire department to submit like a handwritten note for help? Like, you could get that down to five minutes, I feel like. But when she got back to the apartment, Youngsick Kim was no longer Youngsick Kim. In his place was a pile of ash, and wouldn't you know it, his two unburned feet. No other part of the room was affected or even damaged by the intense blaze. I couldn't find mention of what happened to his wheelchair, but reports mentioned that investigators couldn't account for why the piles of clothes, books, and other flammable items all around where Sikkim burned had not gone up in flames. And so even if Virginia didn't witness the moment that this happened, I do find it interesting that as far as I can tell, the wick or the candle theory put forth by so many people as the scientific explanation for this would not account for an intensely hot blue flame.

Because the wick and candle in the, oh, it's using your body fat, and I don't know, alcohol soaked insides. It's always an explanation for how a fire starts. It is not an explanation for why a fire burns so hot that it is obliterating the host. And that's why I made that ridiculous loose change joke. Those fucking people who believe that like, oh, jet fuel doesn't burn that hot. 9-Eleven was an inside job. It's like, fuck off. But also, yeah, I mean, I guess I can see how people would focus on little tiny things like that. And I'm sure a contingent of those people existed around every one of these cases.

Yeah, well, here's what's interesting. The death of Young Sick Kim isn't the only spontaneous human combustion story I found with blue flames involved. There's another one. On the morning of September 13th, 1967, a little after 5 a.m. in Lambeth, South London, early morning commuters noticed a blue flame flickering inside an empty building. They called the fire department around 519 and less than five minutes later, so much better reaction time here.

Way better response time than whatever that lady was dealing with.

John Stacy of the Lambeth Fire Brigade arrived on the scene and he entered the building to find a local man and notably known alcoholic Robert Bailey burning to death due to a strange blue flame emanating from the stomach area of his torso. Stacy would recall, when we entered the building, Bailey was lying on the bottom of the stairs, half turned onto his left side, and his knees were drawn up as though he was trying to bend the pain from his stomach. Also, interestingly, sounds a little bit like he was entering pugilistic pose. There was about a four inch slit in his stomach and the flame was emanating from that like a blow torch. It was a blue flame.

That's crazy sounding.

Yeah, they tried to put Bailey out with multiple fire extinguishers, but it was too late. The man was dead. When they finally did get the flames under control, they found Robert Bailey's body in what I would describe as an insane position. His mouth was biting down on one of the mahogany stairs and it was biting down so hard that his jaw had to be forced open in order to remove the body.

What?

So that detail makes me think of the instant rigor mortis, like that and the curled up, nearly pugilistic, fetal pose, whatever. Like this doesn't seem like a drunk who fell asleep and caught fire. This does seem more like a guy who instantly burst into flames, like he was hit with a lava flow or something.

Yeah, because of the, you know, like tendons and stuff have constricted.

Yeah.

Well, this is only bearing credence or giving credence to my interdimensional lava murders.

Yeah, well, or the pyrokinetic X-Man murder theory.

True.

But yeah, I don't know. That one out of all of these, I think stumps me the most because again, there's a couple cases I left out where people claimed to have seen the moment that someone burst into flames. Most of them turned out to be either misremembering or they weren't really looking the moment someone burst into flames, their head turned a second later. I saw another one that I was like, oh, this might be the one with some really graphic pictures of a woman who burned to death at the street in Brazil. But then it turned out that the photos were actually of a body that had been ejected from a plane crash. So there weren't really many stories of people who saw the moment it happened. But this one is like, even though they weren't there the moment it happened, blue flames coming out of a guy's stomach in a position where it seems like he instantly shot into this instant rigor mortis. I don't know, very, very weird.

To me, it's the craziest imagery we've described in this, because the fact that it's like an isolated blowtorch, like, did you ever have any of those toys? We had like a nun that did this. Those toys that like, you would like turn a knob on the side and then like sparks would shoot out of its mouth as it kind of slowly walks forward.

Yes, but wait, wait, wait, wait. You had a toy of a nun that shot flames out of its mouth?

Yeah, I think it was called Nunzilla or something. I'll try and find it and put it on the internet, like put it on the show notes.

Bizarre.

We also had a little nun with boxing gloves that like punched. A lot of nun toys in our home.

My sister's kids have a stuffed animal rosary, so.

Well, that's different. Mine, stuffed animal, so it's like, is it huge?

Yeah.

Because the rosary's got a lot of beads.

Yeah, it's like a wreath-sized rosary.

Yeah, that would have to be, it would have to be, if it's stuffed.

Yeah, anyway, I've seen those toys, like, yeah, like a Godzilla or something, but I've never seen a nun.

So that's what I think of. That's like immediately where my mind thought of, but that coming out of someone's like belly instead of out of their toy mouth.

Yeah.

And then which exorcist was it that had the person light on fire in the hospital bed? I think it's.

I think that's Let The Right One In.

Oh, shit, well, Let The Right One In fucking rules, so I don't know why I was thinking exorcist, because I saw the Swedish one in theaters like multiple times, I've never seen the American one.

Yeah, it's incredible. Speaking of incredible movies with spontaneous human combustion imagery, I just rewatched Hereditary.

I've never seen it and I will never watch it, that sounds way too scary for me.

God, that movie's so fucking good.

I will never know.

All right, so the last case I wanna cover here is from 2010.

That's recent, that's way too recent.

It's very recent, and it's the death of a 76 year old, again, old Irish man named Michael Faherty, and I include it mostly because as far as I can tell, it's the only death in Ireland and maybe the world, in the modern era at least, officially on record attributed to spontaneous human combustion.

Like those words were used?

Yes. Weirdly, I could not find as many details about the investigation of this as I could some of these older cases, which kind of makes me feel like it was covered up.

Oh shit.

To some extent.

Did you see the paperwork? Does it say spontaneous human combustion? And if it does, Yes. Well, so who handed that in and had no one be like, you could have just said spontaneous combustion. And it's like, well, I don't want to get these mixed up with all of our animal combustion paperwork. Like, why the fuck did you have to clarify?

All I could really find on this case, and this was reported in major newspapers in Ireland, Fairety was found on the floor of his home with his head resting nearest to his fireplace. But according to news site Irish Central, the fire seemed to have been contained, and in addition to Fairety, the scorched areas included the floor directly below him and the ceiling above him. Forensics showed, now this I would love a little more explanation on, forensics showed that the fire in the fireplace was not the same as the kind that burned Fairety and that no accelerant had been used, no foul play was expected. So, okay, no foul play, no accelerant, sure. I don't know how you determined that the fire in the fireplace is not the same, quote, the same kind of fire. Like fire, I mean, I guess it's stupid to say it's all fire, but that seems like a leap.

I'm sure there's like, cause there's, you know, the fire department has investigators and fraud investigators and stuff. So I think there's probably some way to find out if it's a different type of fire, but yeah, I have no idea.

At a hearing in September 2011, the medical examiner, Dr. Ciaran McLaughlin said, this fire was thoroughly investigated and I'm left to the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion for which there is no adequate explanation. He added that he had never encountered such a case in his 25 years on the job. So I don't know. That's it officially on record, spontaneous human combustion, Ireland 2010.

Whatever McLaughlin's first name is, I'm sure you got it wrong because the Irish have the craziest.

Ciaran?

How was it spelled?

C-I-A-R-A-N.

Yeah, that can be anything. Like, what's that woman from Little Women that there's no one can pronounce her name?

Oh, Sersha.

Yeah.

It's Sersha. I know how to pronounce that, Sersha Ronan.

Yeah, because she's on talk shows every week. Try reading that and saying that.

This is either Dr. Sean McLaughlin or Dr. Ciaran McLaughlin.

Because everyone thought it was Cillian Murphy for years until everyone found out later it was Cillian Murphy because if you read it, you're like.

Oh, so maybe it's the medical examiner Dr. Ciaran McLaughlin.

Exactly, like you don't know Ireland's wild that way.

It is.

But if I were a betting man who regularly employed context clues, I'm going Ciaran. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say Ciaran.

So that's all I've got. Ed, where would you place spontaneous human combustion on the fear tier?

I mean, as a person who's, I have not lost nearly enough of the incendiary fat in my body to feel safe about it. I have pretty low, pretty low, I guess. But yeah, until we get square, I guess it's always gonna be in the back of my mind.

Yeah, I don't know. Like, here's the thing. If spontaneous human combustion as defined as just anyone could burst into flame at any time were real by that definition, I would put it pretty high because that's a very scary idea.

Yeah, but it's, because it's like, I'm not gonna rework my life around it in the sense that I take quick showers and I take quick showers not at all because of the drought in this state, but because we do live in one of the most active earthquake cities in the world, that I'm like, I don't want to be found naked in the rubble. So I spend as little time in showers because of that pretty off chance that like the next big one happens. So that is weirdly top of mind for me in a way that, you know, I'm not gonna rework my day and my schedule around like, oh, if it's inconvenient to burst into flames.

Sure, but I mean, just to throw this in there, isn't the bathroom where you want to be in the case of an earthquake?

No one knows. I feel like every week it's like be in a door jam or be under a table.

Yeah, I mean, maybe not nude.

No, no, I think all of it's better not nude. But yes, I do feel like it's conflicting information about like the best place to be during an earthquake.

Yeah. Anyway, I mean, I certainly, yeah, I guess I wouldn't reorganize my life around it. I do think, I would say I'm weirdly, after researching this, I think I'm less convinced that spontaneous human combustion is inexplicable, but I am more convinced that fire can act in ways that we have yet to understand.

Yeah, fire is crazy.

I mean, again, I'm not a physicist or a firefighter or anything, but I feel like if you have a medical examiner who investigated a case in 2010s and is like, I don't know how the fuck this guy caught fire, then clearly there's mysteries about fire or the way that fire burns that we haven't solved. So, you know, I don't know. There are insanely hot localized fires throughout history and that just made me think of like one of those ads on the internet, insanely hot fires in your area. And so the wick effect probably covers some of it, but I have a hard time believing that the wick effect can explain all of these stories, like that guy who had blue flames shooting out of his stomach. So I don't know. It's one of those, I guess I would put it pretty low in terms of the fear of it actually happening to me. I'd put it certainly below Hat Man, Eatin Alive, Plane Crashes. I'd put it somewhere on the tier with Poison Candy.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Probably.

Yeah, I guess that sounds right. That sounds like the right place for it.

Yeah, so that's it for this week. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Remember to like, follow, subscribe, join us on Facebook, find us on Instagram.

Tell your friends.

Tell your friends.

Tell your friends before they blow up.

Tell your friends before they blow up or tell your friends before you blow up because who knows?

Here's to hoping the show blows up before any of our listeners blow up.

Here's to hoping the show blows up before we do.

That's true.

We're the ones with the fat accelerants in our torsos, so.

Not for long, dude.

Not for long.

2024, you're getting square.

That's it, baby. Ed and I gotta go to the gym. We will see you next week.

Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity, Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew and Mr. Disclaimer is ****ing ****.

No part of the show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends production.

Good night.

We are in this together. Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===