Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
Speaker 1: from house Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark. Chuck. That doesn't count because I was shifting.
Speaker 1: Well do your cheek thing then, too, Chuck. Hey, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Chuck. Brian is
Speaker 1: staring dully forward. You have the dull stare of the
Speaker 1: dairy count, not the eye of the tiger, Chuck. Right.
Speaker 1: This is in tribute to the lobotomy episode. Would I
Speaker 1: just give you a verbal lobotomy? You did? You don't
Speaker 1: want to know what we're talking about? Yeah, bad things, hey, Chuck.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, I was in the cub Scouts. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: cub Scouts. I never made it a boy scout. I
Speaker 1: don't even Yeah, I definitely didn't. Um and I you
Speaker 1: would think that that would have helped shape me as
Speaker 1: as a young man, right, yeah, you would be wrong. Okay,
Speaker 1: I can tell you one thing that shaped me more
Speaker 1: than cub Scouts ever did. And it was a single picture,
Speaker 1: a photograph, and all it was was a leg And
Speaker 1: there was a sock and a slipper attached to it,
Speaker 1: black and white. And the thing about this leg is
Speaker 1: it wasn't severed. The end of it was charred. And
Speaker 1: it turns out that this leg belonged to a guy
Speaker 1: named Dr Irving J. Bentley, and the photo was taking
Speaker 1: a nineteen sixty six in his Pennsylvania home. And what
Speaker 1: happened to Dr Bentley was that he spontaneously combusted. And
Speaker 1: I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever
Speaker 1: heard of in my entire young life. You really remember
Speaker 1: seeing that? Oh yeah? And actually, strangely enough, I was
Speaker 1: at a nursing home woods and I saw in real
Speaker 1: life something that startled me because it looked just like it.
Speaker 1: It was a prosthetic leg and it was just dumped
Speaker 1: on this gurney that also had like a TV bedpants.
Speaker 1: It was apparently like a mobile storage closet right out
Speaker 1: in the hallway. But there was a prosthetic leg that
Speaker 1: went from the knee to the foot and it had like, um,
Speaker 1: knee high pantyhose on it and a shoe. Still, I'm like,
Speaker 1: all these people are gonna die soon. Can we maybe
Speaker 1: keep this out of their line of sight? Right? But yeah,
Speaker 1: so I saw that, I immediately thought of Dr Bentley's leg.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so I used to just think spontaneous human
Speaker 1: combustion is the coolest thing ever. It is pretty remarkable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's talk about it. Why not. That's a great idea.
Speaker 1: And I feel bad because someone requested this last week
Speaker 1: and I don't have the name. I apologize to whoever
Speaker 1: is out there. This is for you, Becky, Becky, this
Speaker 1: is for you. No, binky, that's right. So yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a listener request. Have you noticed the uncomfortable pauses
Speaker 1: have been increasing in frequency lately? It's because you're wearing
Speaker 1: sunglasses and its weird. No, it's not just today. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't like the shades. It's just off putting because
Speaker 1: I can't see your beautiful browns, your dream boat. Chuck,
Speaker 1: So chuck, Let's get back to spontaneous human combustion. Um.
Speaker 1: The earliest written account of it occurs in sixteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: and such anatomist Thomas Bartolin wrote of a woman in
Speaker 1: Paris who quote went up in ashes and smoke right right,
Speaker 1: which is normal enough. The weird thing is is this woman,
Speaker 1: you know, as I imagine, was normal for the era
Speaker 1: was sleeping on a straw mattress, and a straw mattress
Speaker 1: didn't go up, just the woman did. That was the
Speaker 1: first clue that something was odd, something amiss. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then the couple of years later there was a guy
Speaker 1: who he was French. His name was Jonas DuPont, and
Speaker 1: he apparently there were enough stories of spontaneous human combustion
Speaker 1: that he put a collection of them together called d
Speaker 1: Incentdus corporus humany spontaneous Latin dead language, not a dead language, no,
Speaker 1: trust me, listener. Mail came in and scolded us for
Speaker 1: saying it was a deadline. It's just a phrase, sure
Speaker 1: that it's dead. Yeah, it's a figure speech. Yes. So um,
Speaker 1: apparently this has been around for a while. Yeah, at
Speaker 1: least since the seventeenth century, and it's only happened, uh,
Speaker 1: a couple of hundred times. They think between two and
Speaker 1: three d two people burning up inexplicably a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred times. That's pretty significant. I mean, that leads a
Speaker 1: lot of credence to it, your opinion, you know. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about spontaneous human combustion, and it's actually differentiated
Speaker 1: from just spontaneous combustion because you stick the human in there,
Speaker 1: it means a person is burning up. Yeah. Other things
Speaker 1: can spontaneously combusts, I know, like a bucket of oily
Speaker 1: rags or yeah, hay bales have been known to combust,
Speaker 1: which is weird because we know how a bucket of
Speaker 1: oily rags can combustum the as as the oxygen interacts
Speaker 1: with the oily rags, it can actually raise the temperature
Speaker 1: to the ignition point and then there you go. Or
Speaker 1: a kid goes behind and throws a match in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of those two. You know, we used to believe
Speaker 1: that field mice were born from leftover grain. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so maybe oily rags don't really combust spontaneously. It is
Speaker 1: just little kids. I never thought about it. Yeah, uh
Speaker 1: so let's let's talk about this, Josh. We have. The
Speaker 1: deal is is your extremities remain intact. That's one of
Speaker 1: the tail tail giveaway. Sometimes I thought it was all
Speaker 1: the time. No, it's most of the time, yeah, but
Speaker 1: not always. So what we're saying is by that, we
Speaker 1: mean that the torso and the head are usually burned through,
Speaker 1: and then there's usually a foot or a leg or
Speaker 1: an arm or completely Yeah exactly, um. Another characteristic is
Speaker 1: that the surroundings, the immediately surroundings are often left untouched,
Speaker 1: or they have strange burn marks to them, not your
Speaker 1: typical burn marks, or you know, the room doesn't catch
Speaker 1: on fire for some reason, a sweet smoky smell and
Speaker 1: a greasy residue. Greasy residue, imagine licking a greasy residue
Speaker 1: off of a piece of furniture in a room or
Speaker 1: someone spontaneously combusted. Yeah, that would be gross, so unnecessary.
Speaker 1: So uh. And then a lot of times the um,
Speaker 1: like you said, the limbs are left untouched. It's very
Speaker 1: rarely um in cases of spontaneous human combustion. Does do
Speaker 1: the victims survived? But they have? Yeah, this is freaky.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's just burned spots forming on somebody's where somebody
Speaker 1: will start smoking. Yeah, imagine smoking, just smoking, that's no no,
Speaker 1: and there's no flames whatsoever. You're just smoking, or all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you're you're burning. Um. So so those
Speaker 1: are very very rare, but they have been documented before, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that'd be so bizarre. So what's up
Speaker 1: next about it? Well? I guess some theories on why
Speaker 1: it happens, well, first, let's point out why this is
Speaker 1: weird if it's not obvious enough. But the combustion. For
Speaker 1: combustion to take place, you need intense heat, you need
Speaker 1: a flammable substance. We're not too terribly flammable. We'll burn
Speaker 1: right if somebody does is gasoline on us and throws
Speaker 1: a match. Um, but that's about that. So that's why
Speaker 1: spontaneous human combustion, scientifically speaking, is so weird, right, um?
Speaker 1: And what what's what's the earliest explanation you came across
Speaker 1: for how spontaneous human combustion works? The earliest explanation are
Speaker 1: you talking about the Dickens Charles Dickens, Well, he reflected
Speaker 1: a widely held belief at the time. Right in his
Speaker 1: novel Bleak House, he had a character that he killed
Speaker 1: off by spontaneous human combustion, which I thought was kind
Speaker 1: of funny, or not funny, but kind of cool. Um.
Speaker 1: The character's name was Kruke and he was an alcoholic.
Speaker 1: So at the time they positive a theory that maybe
Speaker 1: excessive amount amounts of alcohol, which as we all know,
Speaker 1: is flammable in the body, caused us. Yeah. Um, apparently
Speaker 1: one theory is that methane builds up in the intestine,
Speaker 1: which is flammable. Methane flamable, definitely, it's very flammable, and
Speaker 1: it's a terrible greenhouse gass. Did you know that? I did? Um?
Speaker 1: And then some sort of enzyme that acts as a
Speaker 1: catalyst in cellular processes and builds up heat as a
Speaker 1: byproduct ignites this methane in kaboom. But there's a problem.
Speaker 1: There's a big problem with it. Yeah, most of the
Speaker 1: victims when they spontaneously combine us, they have more damage
Speaker 1: to the outside of the body than in internal organs.
Speaker 1: So that kind of flies in the face of that theory. Definitely,
Speaker 1: So we poo poo that one. That one static electricity, Yeah,
Speaker 1: go ahead, I guess. I mean that's pretty much it.
Speaker 1: You get static electricity build up on the outside your
Speaker 1: body again, kaboom, right. Or magnetic force a geomagnetic magnetic
Speaker 1: force exerted on the body is another one kind of
Speaker 1: along those lines. Again, these are entirely possible. There's another
Speaker 1: one that's possibly a little less credible, posited by Larry Arnold,
Speaker 1: who is a an expert, an investigator, a self proclaimed expert. Well,
Speaker 1: whatever I mean, are in all now some people are vetted. Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: well he also wrote a book called Blaze, and it's
Speaker 1: like an account, an amazing account of spontaneous human combustion
Speaker 1: stories which I gotta tell you I would have eaten
Speaker 1: alive at age eight. Um. But yeah, so he he
Speaker 1: has his own hypothesis, and it's that there's a subpotomic
Speaker 1: particle called pyra ton, all right, uh, and that when
Speaker 1: it interacts with cells in a certain way, it can
Speaker 1: create an explosion. The big problem with this is a
Speaker 1: miniature explosion, we should point out, Okay, not some huge
Speaker 1: depending on how much methane is built up in your intestine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you know what I'm saying. Um, the big problem
Speaker 1: with is that this particle is theoretical. It hasn't been
Speaker 1: proven to exist. Yeah he made it up, or made
Speaker 1: up the name at least. Yeah. Pyroton, good name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it means fire ton. You know what I like? What
Speaker 1: I like? The wick theory. This one makes the most
Speaker 1: sense to me. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, so the wick theory. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know how a candle works, Josh, I do, Chuck?
Speaker 1: Would you like me to explain that, no, I will.
Speaker 1: A candle has a wick, which everyone knows, and that
Speaker 1: wick is surrounded by wax, which is made of flammable acids,
Speaker 1: fatty acids, or it can be petroleum like paraffin wax.
Speaker 1: Right or my wife candles are soy oh on um,
Speaker 1: love your Mama dot com? Are they available for failing
Speaker 1: Love your Mama dot com? Indeed? Uh? So the wax
Speaker 1: ignites the wick and it keeps the wick burning. And
Speaker 1: so a lot of people, a lot of scientists were
Speaker 1: scientists actually come in and say they think that folks
Speaker 1: may like drop a cigarette and then that cigarette catches
Speaker 1: their clothes on fire, the wick which is the wick,
Speaker 1: and uh then what the fats of the body start
Speaker 1: to melt, ignite and melt, which they are flammable. We
Speaker 1: said earlier that we're not. We're not generally flammable. We
Speaker 1: will burn, and what's burning most readily is our fat.
Speaker 1: But that kind of creates like a contained slow burn,
Speaker 1: and that it surrounds like say, your your pajamas are
Speaker 1: on fire, It surrounds it and it continues. It allows
Speaker 1: the wick to continue to burn very slowly. Right, but
Speaker 1: what about extremities chuck wire, people's limbs left intact. Well,
Speaker 1: my thought would be that the limbs don't have as
Speaker 1: much fat going on that That actually is pretty good explanation.
Speaker 1: What I read was that, um, it has to do
Speaker 1: with the temperature gradient. Okay, that they simply don't contain
Speaker 1: as much heat. Like you know how your arms get
Speaker 1: colder than say your torso, so like if you hold
Speaker 1: the matchupside out, what's what's at the bottom of something
Speaker 1: that's burning is usually cooler than what's at the top.
Speaker 1: That's why would light a match. You're supposed to hold
Speaker 1: it up right, If you hold it upside down, a
Speaker 1: lot of times you'll go out because there's simply just
Speaker 1: not enough heat to sustain a flame. Right, So, the
Speaker 1: the idea with the wick effect is that eventually this
Speaker 1: the the flames, the candle, the human candle, I'll put
Speaker 1: that's something to see. Um, the human candle eventually gets
Speaker 1: to a point in the body where there's not enough
Speaker 1: heat to sustain the flames. And if so, fact though,
Speaker 1: you have just somebody's foot sitting there. Right. Did you
Speaker 1: see the graphic and the article. I didn't. I saw
Speaker 1: like the print out of it. I haven't gone through
Speaker 1: and looked at the flesh. And it's pretty cool. There's
Speaker 1: like little three stages you can click on. It shows
Speaker 1: the body burning and then the body torso you know,
Speaker 1: decompose it, and then at the very end you're left
Speaker 1: with limbs laying on there. Awesome, I'm checking out. Is
Speaker 1: it as cool as the face transplant illustration? Negative? Not
Speaker 1: ere close, But it's good. So that's what science says,
Speaker 1: and that's what I say to I think that makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. It does, and drop the smoke
Speaker 1: on your chest, and that's what happened. And that's supported
Speaker 1: actually by a lot of revelations of people who have
Speaker 1: been who have spontaneously combusted that they were in fact smokers, um,
Speaker 1: and they probably caught themselves on fire and in this
Speaker 1: really strange series of events they turned into human candles, right.
Speaker 1: And then some people, at least some people they've decided
Speaker 1: after the fact, we're pretty hardcore alcoholics, so they may
Speaker 1: have been passed out and a stupor. And then some
Speaker 1: people were infirm and they couldn't get out of bed
Speaker 1: in a normal state and so they were kind of
Speaker 1: trapped there. So these things come out after the fact
Speaker 1: that kind of makes scientists think, well, it's really not
Speaker 1: spontaneous combustion. Someone dropped a cigarette and they were passed
Speaker 1: out drunk, and so they burned. I think the point
Speaker 1: is is that if you're a caregiver to an firm individual,
Speaker 1: if you light a cigarette and stick it in their mouth,
Speaker 1: stick around to make sure that you put it out
Speaker 1: once they're done with it, because it can end up
Speaker 1: really bad for him. What's weird to me is that
Speaker 1: nothing else burns in the house. Well, that's that wick effect,
Speaker 1: that's the fact protecting the actual burning. It's burning inside
Speaker 1: it's it still seems like it wouldn't be so hard
Speaker 1: for a bed sheet to up. That is it is odd.
Speaker 1: I agree with you. And that's what makes it so
Speaker 1: cool is that it's so you know, unexplained. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: I think, um yeah yeah. And it seems like it
Speaker 1: will probably always be unexplained because there's no way to
Speaker 1: replicate it in a laboratory, not at all, and they
Speaker 1: after so that's all they can do. Yeah, So, Chuck,
Speaker 1: let's talk about some real life, amazing, uh incidents of
Speaker 1: spontaneous human combustion. Man, do you hear the eight year
Speaker 1: old me coming out too? But that's not unusual? Uh?
Speaker 1: Ight set the set the scene for us Chuck warm Night.
Speaker 1: Twenty two year old woman named Phillis Nuka was leaving
Speaker 1: a dance hall at in England and chelmps for England,
Speaker 1: and she was going down the staircase of the hall
Speaker 1: in her dress just caught on fire out of nowhere
Speaker 1: for no reason and she ran to the back of
Speaker 1: the ballroom and collapsed on fire, which that was quite
Speaker 1: a sight too at the dance and people rushed to
Speaker 1: her aid, but it was too late and she died
Speaker 1: in the hospital. And you know, there were theories that
Speaker 1: it combusted, but then some other people said, now it
Speaker 1: was probably just a cigarette that someone dropped. So that
Speaker 1: one's actually the weakest one I've heard. Well, that's because
Speaker 1: I saved the pearls for you. Let me. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got the biggest pearls since she started. And there's
Speaker 1: three of them, all right, go ahead, and this one,
Speaker 1: this one was pretty Now I think you should do
Speaker 1: the last one. UM. The this case Mary Research, sixties
Speaker 1: seven year old widow who in nineteen fifty one was
Speaker 1: discovered in her house in St. Petersburg, Florida, um her
Speaker 1: front door was actually hot and a neighbor broke it
Speaker 1: down and found that um Mary was sitting in her
Speaker 1: easy chair. There was a black circle around her, I
Speaker 1: imagine a charred circle. Um, and her head had been
Speaker 1: burned down to the size of a teacup. That's pretty good.
Speaker 1: That was about all that was left except for her
Speaker 1: backbone and part of her left foot. That was it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and apparently her easy chair was still at least enough
Speaker 1: intact for her to be sitting up and it to
Speaker 1: be erect, so didn't burn completely up. No, that reminded
Speaker 1: me of Beetlejuice. Yeah, visually when I read it, that's
Speaker 1: the first thing I thought of. Yeah, the Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a great scene. Yeah. So yeah, And actually the coroner,
Speaker 1: uh Dr Wilton Krogman Um he wrote about the incident
Speaker 1: in his notes apparently that where I living in the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, i'd mutter something about black magic because it
Speaker 1: was just so curious interesting. I thought that was probably
Speaker 1: the coolest thing of coroner has ever written. Yeah. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: so chuck take it home, baby, knock it out of
Speaker 1: the park. Yeah, I'm just a mirror eleven year old
Speaker 1: rug rat in Atlanta, Georgia. Josh's what are you like?
Speaker 1: Four six six? So you're already caused in trouble. A
Speaker 1: mentally handicapped woman named jean Lucille Jeanie seven was sitting
Speaker 1: with her eighty two year old father in northern London,
Speaker 1: and according to her dad, he saw a flash of
Speaker 1: light out of the corner of his eye and he
Speaker 1: turned to his daughter and saw that her upper body
Speaker 1: was enveloped in flames out of nowhere. So he and
Speaker 1: his son in law, Donald Carroll, managed to put out
Speaker 1: the fire, but she died of third degree burns. Tell
Speaker 1: them what what he said later of the incident. This
Speaker 1: is the best part, he said. Quote the flames were
Speaker 1: coming from her mouth like a dragon, and they were
Speaker 1: making a roaring noise. I know that is crazy. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine seeing your daughter the flames roaring out of
Speaker 1: her mouth because I don't have a daughter, that would
Speaker 1: be really weird. Yeah, it would be. It would be
Speaker 1: a little disconcerting, especially since some people suspected that it's
Speaker 1: possible in ember from his pipe set her daughter on
Speaker 1: fire right and led to flames coming out of her
Speaker 1: mouth and making a roaring sound. You know, the TV
Speaker 1: show Fringe actually covered spontaneous human combustion recently, just like
Speaker 1: House did. Alien Han syndrome recently. But they were both
Speaker 1: kind of sensationalized, so it was how so well they
Speaker 1: just it wasn't really sciency. It was you know, it's
Speaker 1: for TV, so but they tried science can be boring,
Speaker 1: Chuck Sure, yeah, yeah, Well thank you to our friends
Speaker 1: at the Fox Network for taking science, exploiting it and
Speaker 1: making it much more interesting. And let's see, I guess
Speaker 1: that's what the listener mail time it is, so Josh,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna call this amusing fan mail. Okay, I
Speaker 1: got a couple of light ones for like the sound
Speaker 1: of this. I remember a couple of weeks ago when
Speaker 1: I said, yeah, I'm gonna plug it like and I
Speaker 1: couldn't think of a plug analogy. Nothing you could say,
Speaker 1: nothing I could say. We had a guy named Scott
Speaker 1: right in a Scott and his last name is something
Speaker 1: a Scott blank. He he wrote in and said he
Speaker 1: gave us a few suggestions. We're gonna plug it like
Speaker 1: a Dutch boy at a dike. We're gonna plug it
Speaker 1: like a B list celeb on Letterman. We're gonna plug
Speaker 1: it like an out of work plumber at a rest stop.
Speaker 1: We're gonna plug it like a hair Club for Men
Speaker 1: convention that was pretty good, or we're gonna plug it
Speaker 1: like the notorious b I g okay, which I don't
Speaker 1: get that one. I think that's a reference to shootings.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know. I wasn't a big Biggie fan,
Speaker 1: so maybe there's something now. And then this one comes
Speaker 1: from Katie and Wisconsin. Katie says, Hi, Chuck, Hi Josh,
Speaker 1: a longtime listener, first time writer. Love you love your podcast,
Speaker 1: but seriously, Wisconsin, she's took us the task. Yeah, uh no,
Speaker 1: the way you said Wisconsin the first time was just fine.
Speaker 1: Nobody here really says it like that. I'll try to
Speaker 1: explain how Askanni says it. We uh sounds like the
Speaker 1: start of whistle So with yeah scan the O sounds
Speaker 1: like oh and con Man not can Man. So with
Speaker 1: wiscon sin s I n like the Seven Deadly Sins
Speaker 1: sin uh so Wisconsin. So the way we're saying at
Speaker 1: the first time, Wisconsin, Wisconsin. Yeah right, So it's it's
Speaker 1: just Wisconsin and we you don't need to drag out
Speaker 1: the a like that. She said, that's just a bunch
Speaker 1: of bunk. And she said, I guess some French still
Speaker 1: spell it. Oh U, I sconsin so Wisconsin and she
Speaker 1: thinks that's neat and I do too, as do I.
Speaker 1: So Katie from Wisconsin, thank you for polling that out
Speaker 1: and we love you guys. And oh Claire yeah, and
Speaker 1: elsewhere you Claire nos so Claire, Oh that's right. So yeah.
Speaker 1: If you have any amazing facts about Wisconsin or any
Speaker 1: other place on the planet, or if you just want
Speaker 1: to say hi or whatever, you can send us an
Speaker 1: email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
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