SHC: The Case Of Mrs Mary Reeser

Sharon · #1 ● 12-12-2012, 04:10 PM

At 8:00 A.M. on Monday, July 2, 1951, a telegraph boy woke landlady Mrs. Carpenter. The telegraph was for Mrs. Mary Reeser, so Mrs. Carpenter signed for it. When she went to deliver the missive to her tenant, there was no answer. She checked Mary’s door to find it was hot. Thinking the apartment had caught fire and Mrs. Reeser might be trapped inside, Mrs. Carpenter solicited the help of two painters to break the door down.

When the door was forced open, the three were hit with a blast of sweltering air. A thick, greasy residue coated the walls. As they approached the armchair, the neighbor discovered what appeared to be the charred remains of Mrs. Mary Reeser. The rest of the room, however, showed little evidence of an actual fire in the apartment.

The only portion of the apartment that was burned was the small corner in which sat the remains of Mary Reeser’s easy chair… and of Mary Reeser herself. Of the chair, only charred coil springs remained. Of Mrs. Reeser, there was little more; and these remains baffled the firemen, police, and pathologists that examined them.

Mrs. Reeser’s 170 pounds had been reduced to less than ten pounds of charred material. Only her left foot remained intact, still wearing a slipper, burnt off at the ankle but otherwise undamaged. Also found were her liver, now fused to a lump of vertebrae, and, stranger still, her skull… shrunk to the size of a baseball by the intense heat.

The remainder of the apartment showed all the signs of heat damage; from about the four foot level on up, the walls were covered with a greasy soot, a mirror had cracked, plastic switchws (sic) and a plastic tumbler in the bathroom had melted, as had two candles on a dresser, which left behind their unburned wicks and a pink pool of wax.

Below the four foot level, the only damage was the small circular burn area encompassing the remains of Mrs. Reeser and her chair, and a plastic electric wall outlet that had melted, stopping her clock at 4:20 a.m.

The FBI’s report corroborates the scene in their report of the incident as well. Their report also includes lab results– “no signs of oxidizing chemicals, petroleum hydrocarbons, or other substances used to initiate or accelerate combustion. Part of a cigarette lighter was found in the rubble. The FBI Laboratory was contacted by the police department to examine evidence.”

The official police report cited a smoldering cigarette as the cause of death. The cigarette allegedly ignited Mrs. Reeser’s highly flammable rayon-acetate nightgown and burnt the sleeping woman to ash. According to the FBI report, there was no evidence of any accelerants or chemicals being used to start the fire.

But how could she have burned so completely without incinerating much of anything else in the room?

Mrs. Reeser’s story is just one of many examples of a phenomina called spontaneous human combustion (SHC)– where a human has been found cremated with no evidence of fire except in the immediate vicinity of the deceased.

Her lower limbs are in the bottom center of the image, quite tricky to make out

http://4girlsandaghost.wordpress.com...c-wick-effect/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontan...man_combustion
http://hauntedearthghostvideos.blogs...d-case-of.html