Spontaneous Human Combustion

Spontaneous Human Combustion

Paranormal proponents and popular articles are quick to attribute certain

dramatic fire-death characteristics to an unknown or bizarre power source,

but in all such deaths documented in forensic literature, there has been

no need to resort to bizarre interpretations to account for the observed

facts.

Forensic scientists very rarely, if ever, mention the (alleged) phenomenon

of spontaneous human combustion (SHC). After reading an article on the

subject in BILD, Germany's most famous tabloid newspaper (circulation four

million daily), I started to wonder about this.

I first contacted the chief of our local police department, who is

responsible for fire accidents, arson, and other fire-related incidents.

After a few minutes of conversation, he recalled having heard about cases

of spontaneous combustion, although' he had never been an eyewitness to

any such cases. He later sent me an article (Feuer unbekannten Ursprungs

c. 1990), which was a collection of case reports of alleged spontaneous

combustion cases. The cases had received worldwide coverage in newspapers

and magazines, and the article seems to be one of the major sources of

information for Germans interested in the phenomenon. Further research led

me to several accounts of SHC in the popular press (e.g., an account by a

physicist in a German rock magazine [Czerny 1996]), novels (e.g., Charles

Dickens's novel Bleak House, thought to have been inspired by the death of

countess Cornelia Bandi in 1731), early reports (Hunefeld 1830), and

magazines such as the Fortean Times (e.g., Simmons 1996; Arnold 1996) and

The X Factor (e.g., Burning question 1996). From such sources, it is

obvious that a significant percentage of the ...

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