Fortean Times

SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION (by popular request)

The following is one of many stories of spontaneous combustion in my strange book of mysteries. This one stood out to me for its relative recency and mention of contemporary organizations like the FBI. Warning: It gets pretty gory starting from "The firemen arrived..."

The individual was a real person with surviving family. I will strive on my end to keep comments respectful, and ask others to do the same.

That we still have so-called “paranormal” deaths simply reveals to me certain limits of our understanding. Before telescopes, we couldn’t understand the stars as we do now. Hopefully someday, we’ll have better tools to make sense of fatalities like hers.

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The 1951 death of Mrs. Mary Reeser of St. Petersburg, Florida, who was found reduced to ashes in a practically undamaged apartment, was a landmark case of spontaneous combustion because it was the first instance where every possible tool of modern scientific investigation was used to determine the cause of this mysterious phenomenon. Yet despite the efforts of the FBI, fire officials, arson experts, and pathologists, a year after the incident Detective Cass Burgess of the St. Petersburg police commented as follows:

“Our investigation has turned up nothing that could be singled out as proving, beyond a doubt, what actually happened. The case is still open. We are still as far from establishing any logical cause for the death as we were when we first entered Mrs. Reeser’s apartment.”

Police Chief J.R. Reichert added:

“As far as logical explanations go, this is one of those things that just couldn’t have happened, but it did. The case is not closed and may never be to the satisfaction of all concerned.”

And Dr. Wilton M. Krogman, a physical anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine and a world-renowned expert on the effects of fire on the human body, finally gave up trying to understand what had happened. Dr. Krogman said:

“I regard it as the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. As I review it, the short hairs on my neck bristle with vague fear. Were I living in the Middle Ages, I’d mutter something about black magic.”

Here are the details of the case: Mrs. Mary Hardy Reeser, an agreeable, motherly widow of 67, was living in St. Petersburg, Florida, to be near her son, Dr. Richard Reeser. On the evening of July 1, 1951, she had remained in her son’s home with one of her grandchildren while the rest of the family went to the beach. When they returned, they found that Mrs. Reeser had already left for her own apartment. The younger Mrs. Reeser drove to her mother-in-law’s to see if everything was all right.

According to her testimony, there was nothing in Mrs. Mary Reeser’s appearance or demeanor to cause any alarm. Dr. Reeser visited his mother later that evening. She was mildly depressed over the fact that she had not heard from two friends who were supposed to rent an apartment for her in anticipation of a return trip to Columbia, Pennsylvania, formerly her hometown. His mother told him that she wished to retire early and would take two sleeping pills to ensure a good night’s rest. Dr. Reeser left at about 8:30 p.m. and returned to his home.

The last person to see Mrs. Reeser alive was her landlady, Mrs. Pansy M. Carpenter, who lived in another apartment in the four-unit building (the two units between them were unoccupied). Mrs. Carpenter saw Mrs. Reeser briefly at about 9 p.m. She was wearing her nightgown, a housecoat, and black satin slippers and was lounging in a comfortable chair smoking a cigarette. The bed covers had been turned back. Mrs. Reeser’s last night was a typical summer night in Florida: the sky was overcast with occasional flashes of heat lightning in the distance.

When Mrs. Carpenter woke up Monday morning at 5 a.m., she noticed a slight odor of smoke but was not alarmed, since she attributed the smell to a water pump in the garage that had been overheating lately. She got up, turned off the pump, and settled back into bed. When she got up an hour later to collect her newspaper outside, she no longer smelled any smoke.

At 8 a.m., a telegram arrived for Mrs. Reeser. Mrs. Carpenter signed the receipt and went to her tenant’s apartment to bring her the telegram. The doorknob, when she placed her hand on it, was hot. Alarmed, she stepped back and shouted for help. Two painters working across the street ran over. One of them opened the door; as he entered, he felt a blast of hot air. Thinking of rescuing Mrs. Reeser, he frantically looked around but saw no signs of her. The bed was empty. There was some smoke, but the only fire was a small flame on a wooden beam over a partition separating the living room and kitchenette.

The firemen arrived, put out the small flame with a hand pump, and tore away part of the partition. When Assistant Fire Chief S.O. Griffith began his inspection of the premises, he could not believe his eyes. In the middle of the floor there was a charred area roughly four feet in diameter, inside which he found a number of blackened chair springs and the ghastly remains of a human body, consisting of a charred liver attached to a piece of the spine, a shrunken skull, one foot still wearing a black satin slipper, and a small pile of ashes.

Coroner Edward T. Silk arrived to examine the body and survey the apartment. Although deeply puzzled, he decided that the death was accidental and authorized the removal of the remains. The scooped-up ashes, the tiny shrunken head, and the slipper-encased foot were taken by ambulance to a local hospital.

The ensuing investigation included police and fire officials as well as arson experts. The facts that confronted them seemed inexplicable considering the great heat necessary to account for Mrs. Reeser’s incineration, and the lack of damage to surrounding furniture. The chair and body were completely destroyed, but the end table next to it was only scorched. The apartment had suffered some peculiar effects:

- The ceiling, draperies, and walls, from a point exactly four feet above the floor, were coated with smelly, oily soot. Below this four-foot mark, there was none.

- The wall paint adjacent to the chair was faintly browned, but the carpet where the chair had rested was not even burned through.

- A wall mirror 10 feet away had cracked, probably from heat.

- On a dressing table 12 feet away, two pink wax candles had puddled, but their wicks lay undamaged in their holders.

- Plastic wall outlets above the four-foot heat mark were melted, but the fuses were not blown and the current was on.

- An electric clock plugged into one of the fused fixtures had stopped at precisely 4:20 a.m. but ran perfectly when plugged into a different outlet.

- Newspapers on a nearby table and draperies and linens on the bed—all flammable—were untouched.

- No one saw smoke or burning during the early morning hours, and there were no embers or flames when they opened the door.

Faced with such a mystery, the St. Petersburg authorities called in the FBI. Laboratory findings showed that Mrs. Reeser’s estimated weight of 175 pounds had been reduced to less than 10 pounds, including the foot and shrunken head. The final report concluded that no known chemical agents or accelerants had been involved in starting the fire and ended by stating that the case was “unusual and improbable.”

A top arson specialist of the National Board of Underwriters was also stumped. “I can only say,” he admitted, “the victim died from fire…”

Finally, the aforementioned Dr. Krogman, an authority on different kinds of burns, was asked to help clarify the mystery. After checking the findings of the other authorities, he began eliminating possibilities. He considered lightning as a cause, but an engineer who specialized in the effects of lightning on the human body flatly dismissed such a conjecture. Besides, lightning was not reported in the immediate neighborhood at the time of the accident.

Another possibility was that the sedatives taken by Mrs. Reeser had made her so drowsy that she did not notice a fire set to her nightgown or chair by the cigarette she was smoking. However, neither the gown nor the chair was particularly flammable, and there was no physical evidence that these items had caused the blaze.

Dr. Krogman had burned cadavers with gasoline, oil, and all kinds of other agents. He has examined bones encased in flesh or stripped, both in outdoor pyres and modern crematorium equipment. He has demonstrated conclusively that it takes enormous heat to consume a body—and only over 3,000°F would bone become volatile enough to lose its shape and leave only ash.

“These are very great heats,” he said, “that would scar, char, scorch or otherwise mar or affect everything within a considerable radius… The remaining slippered left foot was a case in itself. It was established that Mrs. Reeser was in the habit of stretching out her left leg because of physical discomfort in that limb. The foot was left unburned, apparently because it was outside the mysterious four-foot radius of incineration.

Eventually, Dr. Krogman admitted defeat. He reported to Chief Reichert:

“I have posed the problem to myself again and again of why Mrs. Reeser could have been so thoroughly destroyed, even to the bones, and yet leave nearby objects materially unaffected. I always end up rejecting it in theory but facing it in apparent fact.”

Nor could he understand the shrunken condition of Mrs. Reeser’s skull:

“…the head is not left complete in ordinary burning cases. Certainly it does not shrivel or symmetrically reduce to a much smaller size. In presence of heat sufficient to destroy soft tissues, the skull would literally explode in many pieces… I have never known any exception to this rule. Never have I seen a skull so shrunken or a body so completely consumed by heat.”

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i love this stuff

mystery is still out there! take that, SCIENCE!

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