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There was a blue flame coming from his stomach.
About four inch slit in his stomach.
And it was making noise like a blowhorn-- bzzz.
NARRATOR: Did this fireman witness
a case of spontaneous human combustion?
For more than 40 years, this American physician
has been trying to discover the truth about his mother's death.
How was Mary Reeser reduced to ashes?
This log cabin remained unsinged while inside, a retired fireman
was consumed by flames.
Was George Mott also a case of spontaneous human combustion?
Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke,
author of 2001 and inventor of the communication satellite.
Now in retreat in Sri Lanka, he ponders the riddles
of this and other worlds.
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[FIRE ALARM]
ARTHUR C. CLARKE: There's one mystery
I'm asked about more than any other--
spontaneous human combustion.
Fires, of course, are all too common
but occasionally brigades, like this one
near my home in Colombo, are called out to deal with cases
which baffle even the experts.
Apparently, for no reason, people have
suddenly burst into flames.
Their bodies are almost totally consumed, yet amazingly,
their surroundings are barely singed.
When I first investigated spontaneous human combustion,
the explanations seemed even more fantastic than the facts.
However, new evidence has now emerged
so I'm returning, rather reluctantly, to this most
gruesome of mysteries.
ROBERT POLK: And it still is a mystery.
We talk about the case today, just like we did 20
years ago when I first started.
And even in 1951, when the incident occurred.
A great deal of speculation, a great deal of conjecture.
Everybody has an angle, but nobody has the answer.
NARRATOR: The bizarre death of this man's mother
has kept Florida talking for 40 years.
In the bedroom of her wooden bungalow,
on that fateful summer night in 1951,
Mary Reeser kissed her son Richard goodbye.
To the young physician, everything seemed normal.
RICHARD REESER: At 8 o'clock, I remember the landlady
who called me and said that there
had been a terrible accident.
She didn't go into details, and that I was to come right down.
And across the way, when we came down,
there where painters painting the house across the street.
And they were totally unaware that anything
that happened in the apartment.
I was prevented from going in the room by, I believe,
the fire chief, who said that I shouldn't see what is inside.
So I didn't go in.
Of course, I later saw what it was,
what the picture was from photographs and descriptions.
My recollection is that I entered the apartment
at the fire scene with a hand-pump, which
is a small tank of water that is maneuverable by hand
for interior extinguishment.
And noticing a pile of debris in the center of the room,
I started to squirt it and was stopped
immediately by other people who had preceded me into the room.
It turns out that it was not just
debris, but part of a corpse, of the lady who had been burned
to death, unbeknownst to me.
It was just her foot and a shoe, was all that I
recall seeing ever there.
It was an incredible, unexplainable thing to me then
and is still now.
RICHARD REESER: She was consumed almost completely.
Just what remained was a heel of her left foot,
and just a piece of the skull.
Plus a little ash remains of her body.
Everything had been consumed.
The room was covered with a, sort of a smoky, oily ash
up to the level of about four feet.
Completely around, but that was it.
The bed that had been turned down
was undisturbed and ready, as if it were ready to be slept in.
And the clock that was nearby had stopped running
at about 4:20 in the morning.
I believe Ms. Reeser was known to be a smoker,
so there was some speculation that possibly she
dozed off or dropped a cigarette on her clothing, which
initially started the fire, but that
still doesn't speak to how this total consumption occurred.
We have had many, many cases where people have
fallen asleep smoking, burn their clothes,
in fact burned themselves.
And unfortunately succumbed to the fire,
but never anything like this.
I believe there probably was some type
of external ignition source.
Now what that was, I couldn't begin to speculate.
But I think, in my mind, what happened,
Ms. Reeser's body began to burn, much like when we cook food,
and you can essentially cook food down to nothing
by applying the proper amounts of heat
over the proper period of time.
Unusual as that may seem, I think
the human body in this case actually became a fuel for fire
as opposed to just the recipient of heat related injury.
The possibility of it being spontaneous combustion
arose, and was written.
Even all kinds of theories were brought
out, such as even lightening that came to an open window.
But there was nothing concrete.
And the fire people here had no explanation for it.
No one had any explanation.
And in looking back, I just think that no one ever
knows how a person of her size and weight,
I'm judging she weighed about 170 pounds,
could be totally consumed by a fire that only
involved a portion of her room.
The chair, which was, of course, completely burned.
All that was left were some springs that were found
near the ashes of her body.
NARRATOR: Like Richard Reeser, this man, Jack Stacey,
is still gripped by a fire from the past.
On this spot in Lambeth, South London
stood Auckland street, the scene of the strangest sight
of his 30 years as a fireman.
The memory has brought him back to search the records
at the fire brigades museum.
JACK STACEY: We got the call at about 20 past 5 in the morning,
and when we arrived two or three minutes down the embankment,
there were about half a dozen office
cleaners outside this building.
And they were pointing to the first floor and said,
we think there's a fire in there.
And sure enough there was a flickering blue flame coming
from the upstairs window.
When we got up the ladder to the, onto the first floor,
there was a body, a man's body, laying on the stairs.
And there was a blue flame coming from his stomach,
about a four inch slit in his stomach,
and it was making noise like a blowhorn-- bzzz.
And it was about eight inches long.
That was the first thing we saw.
A man came up the ladder with a hose reel,
and we actually put the hose reel inside the man's body,
he was burning from the inside out.
It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen at a fire.
I think this is why I remember it so vividly.
I'd seen bodies in fires before, but you always, we've
always been able to say this happened or that happened,
or we know how this started.
But this one, I'm afraid we didn't know,
and we still don't know.
And the cause of the fire is still unknown.
The official cause of death by the coroner
was in relation of fire fumes, suffocation
due to inhalation of fire fumes.
I have my doubts about that.
I think it is one of these human spontaneous combustion
mysteries which we'll never solve at the moment.
The moment the fire started, the evidence was destroyed.
Fireman are used to things igniting spontaneously.
For example, haystacks can generate enough heat
by fermentation to catch fire.
And I've even heard of a case in Britain of a laundry, which
was razed to the ground when a pile of very dirty washing
apparently went up in smoke on its own accord.
But people spontaneously combusting
is quite another matter.
In earlier centuries, that old scapegoat, alcohol,
was blamed by investigators and popular novelists.
NARRATOR: The idea of spontaneous human combustion
fascinated the Victorians.
In Bleak House, Charles Dickens chose it to dispose
of a troublesome character.
Popular belief linked the phenomenon
with excessive drinking; and improving texts
warn drunks that they run the risk of spontaneous combustion.
Serious research was scarce.
One sober report from Dr. Mackenzie Booth in Aberdeen,
Scotland, couldn't explain how a soldier was found burned up
in a hay loft, yet straw inches away
was untouched by the flames.
Despite increasingly lurid reports,
science stood back until the 1960s.
NARRATOR: Professor David Gee, then a young pathologist,
was called in to investigate the mysterious death
of an old person.
She had fallen in the grate and been
reduced to a pile of ashes.
She had burned almost completely;
only a fragment of flesh and bone remained.
Professor Gee wanted to discover how this could have happened.
He published an account of his audacious experiment.
I thought if I made a model that, in one sense,
reproduced a body, by using a glass test tube which would
provide a sort of central firmness
and then wrapping it around with some human fat,
and then putting round that a number of layers of cloth,
perhaps five or six layers to reproduce
several different layers of clothing.
And ignited one end of it with a gas Bunsen burner.
It then burnt with a rather smoky flame,
and it took about 3/4 of an hour to burn
down about six inches of model.
And what was left was a very blackened,
charred remains that looked very similar to the body
that I'd been examining.
But it was like a candle, only instead
of having, as candles do, a wick down the middle with the wax
on the outside, this was really a candle
of the wick on the outside and the combustible
material on the inside.
NARRATOR: Today, Dr. Sivaloganathan
leaves his local butchers with a bag full of pork.
It's the material he needs to carry on experimenting
where Professor Gee left off.
The question Dr. Siva wants to solve
is why do the victim's surroundings
not burn as they do?
I've taken some pork, with a little muscle and some fat.
I've rolled it in, into a cylinder,
and then covered with a cloth.
Now the idea being that the rolled up piece of meat
would represent a human body and the cloth would then
represent the clothing on it.
When the fat melts, it would then soak into the cloth,
and then that would continue to burn exactly like a candle,
excepting in this case, the wick is on the outside of the fat as
opposed to being in the middle.
The bodies are found burned and almost ashed,
with very little burning in the surroundings.
And perhaps a little bit of the leg
is left behind, with almost a fairly well
marked line of demarcation.
We want to know why the rest of the surroundings
didn't go up in flames.
We want to know why this progressive burning occurred.
And this gives you, as a fairly good working model,
as to how this whole process occurs.
The slowness of the process, the lack of violence of the flames,
proves to us that this is quite a feasible explanation
for this phenomenon.
I think essentially we will find that when the bodies burn
in this sort of situation, it is only
the melted fat that's burning.
And therefore the melted fat most likely
will continue to burn just about the same sort of level.
So the flames are not splurting out all over the place.
It is fairly well localized to a few inches around the body.
That's what's happened.
That's the skewer that I'm keeping
in order to keep it stiff.
I don't think there's anything miraculous about it at all.
I think it's perfectly logically explainable.
So this experiment just shows that it is possible.
I haven't really done a complete body,
but this is the principle by which
this whole phenomenon occurs.
NARRATOR: From the British Medical Journal
comes a further clue in a report on a stomach operation
by Jonathan Earnshaw.
He was using electrical cutting equipment.
DR. JONATHAN EARNSHAW: And when I opened the stomach
with the electrocautery device, there was an explosion,
and the gaseous contents of his stomach
ignited and splattered stomach contents all over the ceiling
light and on those who were surrounding
the operating tables.
It was all rather frightening at the time.
And there was a blue flame, and a sort of thump.
And in fact, the flame lasted for a second or two,
and then stopped.
As you can imagine, it's a pretty frightening sort
of thing to happen to you when a patient
expires on the operating table.
And there was a stunned silence initially.
And we then checked, we checked the patient,
we checked all his vital signs, and we checked
the inside of the stomach.
And in fact, because the gases had been coming out
of the stomach under pressure when they'd ignited,
fortunately there was no damage to the patient,
and we carried on with the operation
and the patient did very well afterwards.
But when we published the paper in the British Medical Journal,
I then got a whole sheaf of letters
from other doctors, particularly elderly doctors,
who'd seen this occurrence on several occasions in the past.
And there are some lovely letters here
from surgeons and GPs, from a soldier
who was under my care in 1941 who was rude enough to belch
whilst lighting a cigarette and the resulting
flashing explosion seriously disturbed his comrades.
So obviously it's like a lot of things in medicine,
we were only rediscovering what people
have known about in the past.
Organisms can proliferate and produce methane,
which is obviously flammable.
If you then ignite it with a spark like I did,
then that's not spontaneous combustion,
that's ordinary combustion.
NARRATOR: John Heymer developed his own theory
about spontaneous human combustion,
while he was scenes of crime officer
with Gwent police in Wales.
Two deaths, only three weeks and 15 miles apart, inspired him.
JOHN HEYMER: It was the coincidence of the two cases
that got me really going.
You have the same pile of ashes, the burning was the same
and the burn line went straight across from one
leg to the other.
That's what got me interested and started me on actually
investigating the other cases.
NARRATOR: In the first case in January 1980 at Ebbw Vale,
Sergeant Terry Russell was called
to a house where a 73-year-old man had died in a fire.
TERRY RUSSELL: My immediate thought
on seeing the deceased was that this was not an ordinary death.
There was no external damage, there were no windows broken.
We entered the living room of the premises.
It was a sight that will never, ever really leave me.
I found it totally fascinating, although to the relatives
it must have been really devastating and gruesome.
Well, see here is a sketch I made just after the event
actually, which shows the lack of damage
to other materials in the room.
This was the remains of a 73-year-old man
who'd been reduced to ash on the floor of his living room.
The pair of glasses were lying on the edge of the grate,
totally undamaged and perfectly clean.
The fire was out in the grate, the dead coals tidy.
I had heard the term spontaneous human combustion,
but never really given it much thought.
Having seen the sight that I saw on that day,
I now believe that this kind of thing is a possibility,
and there's certainly some questions which
haven't been answered to my satisfaction in relation
to that death.
NARRATOR: The next case, only 27 days later,
came at Newport, the county town.
This time, an old woman had died.
Inspector Colin Durham investigated.
COLIN DURHAM: There was a report of a fatality
as a result of a fire at a house here in Corporation Road.
And this poor old lady, she was reduced
to ashes, except for two lower parts of both legs.
And, well this was amazing to me,
to see a body in such a condition.
The most abnormal thing about it was, that there was
nothing in the room damaged.
There's no doubt that it was a case
of a human body catching fire, and it was called
spontaneous human combustion.
I have no doubt at all.
But I eventually started thinking about it,
and the difficulty was that your body's laden with water,
the average 10 stone body contains 10 gallons of water,
being reduced to ashes in circumstances
where normal combustible material ceased to burn,
now that is an impossibility.
But it happened.
I realized that the water must be the source of the fuel.
NARRATOR: John Heymer believes that by some as yet unknown
alchemy, water in the body can be
split into oxygen and hydrogen to concoct
a highly flammable mixture.
Now, hydrogen burning in oxygen burns with a fierce blue flame
and will cut through steel.
And steel melts at 1,500 degrees Centigrade.
Now that sort of flame could indeed reduce a corpse to ashes
without releasing enough oxygen to sustain
burning elsewhere in a room.
And will also explain the lack of water.
Now, I have no belief in spontaneous human combustion
as a paranormal or supernatural event.
It is an entirely natural event, the mechanism of which
we do not yet understand.
The scientists' rather stomach churning experiments
show that most of these cases do have a rational explanation.
There's usually some source of ignition
near the victim, perhaps a cigarette or
a faulty electrical appliance.
Yet some cases still seem to defy
explanation and leave me with a creepy and very unscientific
feeling.
If there's anything more to SHC, I simply don't want to know.
NARRATOR: In Ticonderoga in New York,
the men of the volunteer fire brigade
are still baffled by the untimely death
of one of their number.
George Mott was a non-smoker, famously cautious about fire.
Yet he burned to nothing in his log cabin in the woods in 1986.
Kendall Mott used to get a call from his father every day.
When the phone didn't ring, Kendall went to check on him.
The door handle was warm when I grabbed the door handle.
It was unlocked, so I knew right then I could,
I opened the door, I could tell it wasn't-- all
inside the house was black.
Of course there's no lights because electricity was out,
it was burnt out.
So, I left, I knew something, you know, had happened
but you couldn't see anything.
So I went and called the state troopers,
and Dick La Vallee came down.
DICK LA VALLE: The first room that we walked into
was nothing too much out of the ordinary, other
than I couldn't help but notice as I looked around
that the walls were slightly brownish colored,
it appeared that the place had been subjected to intense heat.
KENDALL MOTT: The TV was melted, you know, the guns on the wall
were all charred, the refrigerator was all black.
Everything was black, it was just like it'd really been hot,
but hadn't quite burnt.
In the bedroom itself, there was a single bed with a dresser
adjacent to it, as I remember.
And a mattress had been burned through,
and the floor, which was wooden structure, below the bed,
was burned through.
And there were some fragments of bones and possibly a skull
as I remember, lying on the floor beneath the bed.
He hadn't smoked for quite awhile,
and there was a sign on the door that
said "no smoking in the house".
Because he lost the use of one of his lungs a long time ago.
All the signs indicated that there
had been an extreme amount of heat,
but nothing caused anything to ignite.
And the only thing that had burned was George Mott's body.
There was the theory of spontaneous combustion theory
that possibly the body may have ignited itself
for whatever reason, and consumed
itself through extreme heat.
Other than that, putting that aside,
I don't think that there's too many
other plausible explanations for it, that I can think of.
Well he was a fireman for quite a while;
he was pretty picky as to leaving things around.
I don't know, I don't think it was a fire,
I just think it was like they said, spontaneous combustion,
I don't see any other answer for it.
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