One winter evening, a woman was entering her apartment building when she noticed something burning in the bushes. It was a small fire. A few flames flickered like birthday candles on the branches of a two-foot high bush. The woman thought it was garbage and went over to take a closer look. But to her horror she saw the body of a man. Well, it looked like a man, it definitely had a human shape. The body was curled up in a fetus-position and burnt as black as charcoal, and all the clothes were incinerated, except what was left of his pants and shoes, blackened and baked.
When the police arrived, the officer went through his singed pockets to find identification. There was nothing. No fingerprints; maybe dental records would tell us who he was. He was unknown. We couldn’t find any witnesses, except for the woman who discovered his body. I was driving the sergeant, and when we drove away and left the sector car to wait for the detectives and the ambulance, I thought: How could somebody be set on fire in the middle of a suburban street, at 5 PM in the evening, two blocks away from a busy subway station, with rush hour pedestrian traffic walking up & down the street, and yet, not one person noticed a human torch jumping up and down, frailing his arms, screaming, in the middle of the street?
I never did find out who was the burnt-to-a-crisp man. Or, if somebody set him on fire. Or, whether or not he did it to himself. Or, if this was a case of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC). That mystery would be left for the detectives to solve
Spontaneous Human Combustion is a strange phenomenon. It’s never been proven as a natural occurrence, but many theories have tried to explain SHC’s existence and how it may occur. The two most common explanations for apparent SHC are the non-spontaneous “wick effect” fire, and the rare discharge called static flash fires. Although mathematically it can be shown the human body contains enough energy stored in the form of fat and other tissues to consume it completely, in normal circumstances bodies can’t sustain a flame on their own.
But still, stories of people suddenly bursting into flames have been told for the past 348 years. The first recorded case was in 1662 (However, I have also read the first reported case may also have been in 1763, when a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of Spontaneous Human Combustion cases) and since then over 200 cases have been documented.
