History & Photos About Spontaneous Human Combustion

[kik]

This topic may well have been touched upon in DR, I searched and found nothing, but I am at the very least sure we have all heard of the phenomenon.

This had baffled science for years, the apparent combustion of a human with heat so intense it burnt even bone.

Humans are not simply combustive material ready to catch fire at any given moment, no one person has ever witnessed SHC and for good reason.

The images below have taken a serious amount of time to reach the state they are in.

In all cases the victims of so called SHC are loners, people who live alone or have been somewhere of seclusion so no one has ever actually witnessed SHC.

The real cause is known as the "wick effect" this is the clothing (wick) catching fire, once hot the body excretes fat this fat in turn soaks into the material slowing the fire to a smolder, the heat is intense so hot it can and does burn bone to dust.

One event that took place in Britain had a woman suffer this phenomenon on the second story of her home, the meter man came to read her power meter and noticed a foul odor, he looked up and saw a hole burnt in the upper story floor, upon investigating he found only her legs intact and the rest of her was just ash.

Tests have been conducted on pigs and the exact same circumstances have arisen, bones burnt to dust, very little damage to surrounding areas of the corpse.

One has to surmise that some house fires are caused by SHC on the proviso that a breeze is present, this would cause the smolder to become a flame and raise the premises to the ground.

Usually the "wick effect" is caused by a smoker that either dies while smoking, drug affected people or in the case of image #1 a lady who fell and hit her head on the fireplace rendering her unconscious and setting fire to her hair which then traveled to the rest of her body, in every case the legs are almost always fully intact.

[dooshman]

I ate a Big Mac from McDonald's years ago, and spontaneously combusted when I got home. I survived it, though. Fortunately, a fire extinguisher was close by.

[felixhelix420]

I've seen these shots before, but I don't recall where. Somehow, they stuck in my head all these years!
Great post!!

[XZER0]

SHC has always intrigued me...excellent post!

[Karma]

Fascinating topic. I've seen these pics before. I used to have a fear of spontaneously combusting when I was a kid. The more I thought about it, the more I stressed, and the more I thought I would burst into flames at any time!

I wonder if it still happens nowadays, because we never hear about it if it does.

[kik]

It is a rare occurrence but does still happen, not as notorious now as the cause has been disclosed.

[Karma]

Originally Posted by kik

It is a rare occurrence but does still happen, not as notorious now as the cause has been disclosed.

kik, if the experiment with the pig is one that I watched a documentary on television about years ago, didn't that pig take hours and hours to burn, whereas the human combustions have happened in only minutes?!

I didn't think they had proven the wick effect, because the timings on the experiments didn't match up.

[moneyhands19]

nice post

[kik]

Originally Posted by Karma

kik, if the experiment with the pig is one that I watched a documentary on television about years ago, didn't that pig take hours and hours to burn, whereas the human combustions have happened in only minutes?!

I didn't think they had proven the wick effect, because the timings on the experiments didn't match up.

No person has ever witnessed SHC so a timeline has never been established, in each documented case they all have occurred over a period of at least 12 hours.

There are reports that people have seen others burst into flames (even a dance floor scenario) but it would appear that even on a packed dance floor there was only one witness.

The wick effect is the only plausible scientific answer.

[kik]

What Science Says
If spontaneous human combustion isn't real, then what really occurred in the many pictures that exist of the charred bodies? A possible explanation is the wick effect, which proposes that the body, when lit by a cigarette, smoldering ember or other heat source, acts much like an inside-out candle.

A candle is composed of a wick on the inside surrounded by a wax made of flammable fatty acids. The wax ignites the wick and keeps it burning. In the human body, the body fat acts as the flammable substance, and the victim's clothing or hair acts as the wick. As the fat melts from the heat, it soaks into the clothing and acts as a wax-like substance to keep the wick burning slowly. Scientists say this is why victims' bodies are destroyed yet their surroundings are barely burned.

And what about the images of a burned body with feet or hands left intact? The answer to that question may have something to do with the temperature gradient -- the idea that the top of a seated person is hotter than the bottom. This is basically the same phenomenon that occurs when you hold a match with the flame at the bottom. The flame will often go out without provocation because the bottom of the match is cooler than the top.

Finally, how does science account for the greasy stains left on walls and ceilings after a "spontaneous combustion"? They could simply be the residue that was produced when the victims' fatty tissue burned.

No one has ever conclusively proven or disproven the truth of spontaneous human combustion, but most scientists say that there are more likely explanations for the charred remains. Many of the so-called victims of spontaneous human combustion were smokers who were later discovered to have died by falling asleep with a lit cigarette, cigar or pipe. A number of them were believed to have been under the influence of alcohol or to have suffered from a movement-restricting disease that prevented them from moving quickly enough to escape the fire. Another possibility is that some of the fires and strange states of the victims' bodies were the result of a criminal act and subsequent cover-up.

I hope this helps clear up any questions, as stated not a single person has ever witnessed SHC and with literally hundreds of cases documented since 1680 one would assume someone had seen something....not the case.

There could be another explanation, but like I said this is the only plausible one I have ever read about.