We’re not talking about lighting a cigarette at a petrol station or using flint stones to create sparks. We’re talking, “I was just sitting in my armchair in the living room/walking home/doing everyday things when I was suddenly aflame”.
An official term for this is Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC). The very first case that was made famous in public was a 67-year-old Mary Reeser, who was found burned to death in her house on 2 July 1951. The police was called when her landlady noticed that the house doorknob was unusually warm, as if the room contained behind it was on fire. When they entered Mary’s room, they found a blackened outline of her body on her armchair, her remains having been completely burned to ash except one leg. Incredibly, the detectives on the case found out that Mary’s temperature was around 1,930 °C, or 3,500 °F. Not even a household oven or gas stove can produce that much heat.
Another thing that puzzled everyone was that other than the body and the chair, everything else was intact and undamaged. This was unusual because a household fire - one with that much heat anyway - usually spread to nearby furniture and led to complete destruction of the house. She was estimated to have died at 2:26am based on the clock nearby that stopped working.
An 89-year-old Margaret Hogan, a widow living in a house on Prussia Street, Dublin, also became a victim on 28 March 1970. Plastic flowers on a table in the centre of the room had been reduced to liquid and a television with a melted screen sat about 3 metres from the armchair in which the ashen remains were found. This again indicated that a huge amount of heat had been produced by the woman. Otherwise, the surroundings were almost untouched. Her two feet, and both legs from below the knees, were undamaged (what a gruesome sight!). An inquest, held on 3 April 1970, recorded death by burning, with the cause of the fire listed as "unknown".
There have been numerous cases (about 200 or more) that have been reported, some from more recent years. On 17 September 2017, a 70-year-old John Nolan from County Mayo, Ireland, appeared to spontaneously burst into flames while walking in the street. Some passers-by tried to help and he was airlifted to the nearby hospital, but after suffering from severe third-degree burns on 65% of his body, he died the next day.
You know what disturbs me just a little bit? The fact that nobody knows why these happen. They were literally going about their daily lives, maybe worrying about bills or family gatherings or whatnot, when suddenly they succumbed to this mysterious spontaneous combustion!
One of the theories I came across as a Biochemist student is related to our cellular respiration process. You know, the whole “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” thing? Glucose and oxygen are used by it to produce ATP, with water and carbon dioxide as waste products. What’s little known is that this process is far from perfect - a considerable amount of energy ends up being lost in the form of heat.
Normally our body is very good at dealing with this lost heat in harmless ways. That’s why you and I are able to read this right now despite millions of cells producing heat at once. And why we are called “warm blooded animals”.
However, one theory is that as you get older, this heat-managing system begins to fail as with other things (eg the system that controls the electrical circuit of your heart, the system that controls production of proteins that can self-destruct your brain, the system that controls your blood glucose level, etc). The mitochondria are so efficient at producing energy, but not as good at containing the lost energy - as a result, the uncontrolled amount of heat can become too much for the body to handle. Leading to a spontaneous combustion of your own body.
The investigators note that the risk of spontaneously dying in a flame seems to be higher if alcohol is in your system and if the individual is a senior (as you can also see from the cases listed above), so the above theory seems to hold weight.
But imagine…having a night-out with your pals (to celebrate your golden anniversary or something) and coming home to rest, only to die in a blaze… It’s quite disturbing to me how life can literally end so spontaneously.