This Day In History: Mary Reeser's body was found by the police almost totally cremated where she sat on this day in 1951. Many believe this to be a case of spontaneous human combustion. SHC is when a body catches fire as a result of heat generated by internal chemical activity, but without evidence of an external source of ignition. 200 cases have been reported over the past 300 years. Spontaneous Human Combustion is not accepted as a real phenomenon by all scientists and often regarded as an urban legend and a pseudo-scientific concept.
In an 1823 book "Medical Jurisprudence," L. A. Parry cited certain commonalities among recorded cases of spontaneous human combustion included the following characteristics:
1: the victims are chronic alcoholics;
2: they are usually elderly females;
3: the body has not burned spontaneously, but some lighted substance has come into contact with it;
4: the hands and feet usually fall off;
5: the fire has caused very little damage to combustible things in contact with the body;
6: the combustion of the body has left a residue of greasy and fetid ashes, very offensive in odour.
Reeser's remains, which were largely ashes, were found among the remains of a chair in which she had been sitting. Only part of her left foot (which was wearing a slipper) and her backbone remained, along with her skull. Plastic household objects at a distance from the seat of the fire were softened and had lost their shapes.
The FBI eventually declared that Reeser had been incinerated by the wick effect. As she was a known user of sleeping pills, they hypothesized that she had fallen unconscious while smoking and set fire to her nightclothes. "Once the body starts to burn," the FBI wrote in its report, "there is enough fat and other inflammable substances to permit varying amounts of destruction to take place. Sometimes this destruction by burning will proceed to a degree which results in almost complete combustion of the body."
However, while the wick effect theory was accepted by FBI, it sounds almost like Spontaneous Human Combustion. Also, the FBI's conclusion had one critic in Dr. Wilton M. Krogman, a professor of physical anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and an experienced fire researcher. He concluded, “I cannot conceive of such complete cremation without more burning of the apartment.”
In a book called "The Beautiful Forever Tales" published in 1869, it mentions SHC far back in history: "The phenomenon of fire originating spontaneously in the body of animals, has been observed and recorded by the ancients. Roman historians mention that during the office of the Consuls Gracchus and Juventius a flame issued from the mouth of a bull without doing the animal any injury. Here the luminous appearance was evidently a phosphoric emanation. Peter Borelli describes the vomiting of flame by a woman at the point of death; and Thomas Bartholus records several similar cases. Ezekiel De Castro records a case in which fire issued from one of the vertebrata of the patient, and scorched the eyes of the attendants; the patient in question was the physician Alexandrina Megetius. We learn from Krantius that this spontaneous combustion was occasionally epidemic: during the wars of Godfrey of Boulogne a disorder broke out in the territory of Nevers whereby the patients were consumed by invisible fire. The only remedy found effectual was to cut off the limbs where the burning began, with a view to prevent the conflagration from spreading to the rest of the body.
Thomas Bartholin mentions the case of a poor woman of Paris who perished from spontaneous combustion, no part of the body remaining but the skull and fingers. John Henry Cahausen describes the burning of a Polish gentleman by flames which issued from his throat, and John Christ Sturmius mentions several cases; among others, a nobleman of Courtant, in which the patients were destroyed by flames issuing from their stomachs. According to John De Viana the perspiration of the wife of Doctor Treilos, physician to the Cardinal de Boga, Archbishop of Toledo, was of such an inflammable nature, that when her shifts were saturated with the exudation, and exposed to a current of air they spontaneously ignited, and shot forth flames like grains of gunpowder. Peter Borelli relates the case of a peasant whose under-clothing took fire, whether laid up in a box or exposed to the air, and whether wet or dry, as if it were made of patent fuse. The most remarkable case of spontaneous combustion on record is undoubtedly that of the Countess Cornelia Zangari and Bandi, of Casena, the greater part of her body was reduced to ashes, the legs only remaining untouched. The case is minutely described by the Reverend Joseph Bianchini. Hardly less extraordinary was the case of Grace Pitt, who fell a victim to this combustible state of body at Ipswich, being found one morning by her daughter, 'appearing like a block of wood, burning with a glowing fire, without flame.'"
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