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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Welcome back George Norry along with Larry Arnold. He's got

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Speaker 2: a background in mechanical and electrical engineering, took his curiosity

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Speaker 2: to new heights after he had a shift in consciousness

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Speaker 2: during his sophomore year of engineering at Lafayette College. He

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Speaker 2: focuses on pyrophenomena and has done submarine archaeology in the

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Speaker 2: Bermuda Triangle. And here he is on Coast to Coast

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Speaker 2: with his book Ablaze. The mysterious fires is spontaneous human combustion. Larry,

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Speaker 2: welcome back.

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Speaker 3: Thank you George. It's a delight and honor to begin

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Speaker 3: out twenty twenty five with you in the fine folks

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Speaker 3: at coast and with the coast family.

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Speaker 2: Roughner. You talk about spontaneous human combustion. These fires in

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Speaker 2: California are unbelievable.

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Speaker 3: Oh they are horrific. When Tom booked us for tonight,

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Speaker 3: those fearsome, horrific fires now devouring property and people on

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Speaker 3: LA had not yet begun. Our emotional heart goes out

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Speaker 3: to our fellow citizens in and around, including of course

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Speaker 3: members of your staff. So the next two hours is

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Speaker 3: going to be kind of delicate topic to discuss because

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Speaker 3: SAHC is a different kind of combustion, but it's no

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Speaker 3: less tragic and frightful. But unlike the large LA conflagrations

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Speaker 3: that will continue to occur, we believe SHC is itself

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Speaker 3: quite rare and fortunately very limited in scope and limited

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Speaker 3: usually to one person at one time.

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Speaker 2: Wellson, how did you get involved in spontaneous human combustion interest?

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Speaker 3: We got a paperback book when we're in eighth grade

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Speaker 3: and it had a chapter called Incredible Cremations. A book

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Speaker 3: was by Frank Edwards and it was called Stranger Than Science.

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Speaker 3: It had a lot of forty and subjects in it,

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Speaker 3: and it kind of just intrigued our interest. And as

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Speaker 3: you mentioned in New York, kind intro to us. When

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Speaker 3: we're in Lafayette doing engineering work, we had a shifting

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Speaker 3: consciousness that took us away from the mechanics of you know,

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Speaker 3: hardcore engineering type of work and into more esoteric things.

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Speaker 3: And we remembered reading this chapter in the eighth grade

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Speaker 3: about SHC. We thought, could that possibly possibly happen? None

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Speaker 3: of our teachers in high school, our professors in college,

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Speaker 3: if we boasted the subject to them, had never heard

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Speaker 3: of it and certainly had no explanation for it. So

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Speaker 3: we thought, well, maybe this author, Frank Edwards, just made

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Speaker 3: it up to fill a couple pages in a paperback

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Speaker 3: pulp novel. Decided to go down to the Library of

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Speaker 3: Congress in DC and looked for some microfilm for newspapers

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Speaker 3: in nineteen fifty one in Saint Pete, Florida that might

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Speaker 3: confirm or refute this chapter in Frank Edwards's book about

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Speaker 3: the Incredible Cremation of a lady named Mary Hardy Reeser.

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Speaker 3: And what we discovered was that in nineteen fifty one

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Speaker 3: somemer of that year, Mary Reser's death was front page

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Speaker 3: news and the Tampa Tribune in the Saint Pete Times,

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Speaker 3: because it was so bizarre and so strange, and we thought, well,

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Speaker 3: he didn't make up the story. It sounded like spontaneous

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Speaker 3: human combustion, as that subject is defined by history, which

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Speaker 3: is the almost complete burning of a human body in

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Speaker 3: an environment where there is no one readily identifiable external

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Speaker 3: source of ignition, and the body classically has burned almost

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Speaker 3: to powder, perhaps leaving a few extremities behind. Us say

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Speaker 3: that this pile of ash once was part of a

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Speaker 3: human being, and yet surrounding combustibles are largely on scathe

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Speaker 3: by heat and flame. Was Mary Reiser a one off

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Speaker 3: case that had a very weird set of circumstances that

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Speaker 3: would allow this unique type of fire to occur, or

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Speaker 3: might there be other cases? And that led us to

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Speaker 3: spend a couple more days at the Library of Congress

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Speaker 3: plowing through some books where eventually would go down to

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Speaker 3: the College of Physicians in Philadelphia and have cartloads of

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Speaker 3: old medical texts brought up to us to peruse. Some

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Speaker 3: books we are convinced and never been open since they

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Speaker 3: were published in the mid eighteen hundreds. And we found

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Speaker 3: a few more cases, and then in nineteen seventy five

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Speaker 3: we got tipped off to a case, also with Pennsylvania connections,

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Speaker 3: that happened in northern part of our home state here

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Speaker 3: in Pennsylvania, that occurred to a gentleman named doctor John

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Speaker 3: Irving Bentley. And when we delved into that spoke to

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Speaker 3: the first responders, and then got the photographs of this

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Speaker 3: remarkable fire scene, we knew that we were onto something

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Speaker 3: that medical science had dismissed as superstition or medieval silliness,

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Speaker 3: and that got us started What we thought was going

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Speaker 3: to be a few weeks or maybe just a weekend

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Speaker 3: project of research has evolved into a fifty year career

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Speaker 3: of studying and documenting and trying to figure out how

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Speaker 3: people can burn up so thoroughly and completely more completely

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Speaker 3: than a crematorium retort can achieve.

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Speaker 2: Truly bizarre. What does science say about this? Larry?

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Speaker 3: Science pretty much says this phenomenon does not occur. We

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Speaker 3: could rattle off a whole list of comments, naysayings, boncom

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Speaker 3: for the rest of this two hour program. Doctor lest Addamson,

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Speaker 3: who was a retired Cyoga County medical examiner in Ohio,

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Speaker 3: told us that he does not for a single second

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Speaker 3: by the overheated concept of spontaneous human commustion. Mainstream scientists, naysayers,

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Speaker 3: skeptics will deny that this phenomenon can occur. These the

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Speaker 3: bunkings of the subject go back to the early eighteen

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Speaker 3: hundreds and continue to this day. The problem is, at

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Speaker 3: least for us as a researcher of this topic, is

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Speaker 3: that they are either aren't familiar with the material and

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Speaker 3: the research and the evidence that supports the reality of SHC,

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Speaker 3: or they choose to lie about it. Misrepresent it, do

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Speaker 3: fraudulent experiments to convince themselves that this bizarre and yet

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Speaker 3: challengingly and fascinating phenomenon really does occur. It's much easier

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Speaker 3: for their mental belief structure to say that, Nope, doesn't happen.

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Speaker 3: We don't need to deal with this. All these people

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Speaker 3: burn up in their own body fat and of mystery,

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Speaker 3: there is no mystery. We reput that conclusion of theirs

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Speaker 3: evidence supports the reality of this phenomenon as bizarre and

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Speaker 3: frightening and strange as that it really is.

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Speaker 2: Larie, What is it about the human body that combusts

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Speaker 2: like that?

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Speaker 3: That's the big question, and we're still trying to find

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Speaker 3: the answer to that. Because the human body is about

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Speaker 3: seventy to seventy five percent water, it's easy to say

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Speaker 3: that it's impossible for the human body to self ignite.

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Speaker 3: There's just too much water there. What is most often

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Speaker 3: profered to explain away the phenomenon is what's called the

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Speaker 3: wick effect or the human candle, in which it is

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Speaker 3: suggested that the body is lit externally by a drop

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Speaker 3: cigarette or carelessly tossed match, or a number that leaves

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Speaker 3: out of a fireplace. For example, it's thetim's clothing and

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Speaker 3: begins to create a low temperature smoldering fire in the clothing,

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Speaker 3: and the heat of that low heat fire starts to

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Speaker 3: render body fat out of the victim's body, and the

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Speaker 3: body then starts to burn like basically an inverted candle,

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Speaker 3: And after several hours supposedly of a low temperature fire,

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Speaker 3: you end up with a pile of powder and perhaps

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Speaker 3: part of a leg or a few fingertips. That's the

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Speaker 3: explainer way. It doesn't work. We've tried that experiment many

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Speaker 3: times on our own in the early years of our research.

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Speaker 3: You know, we didn't want to be chasing something that

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Speaker 3: had a prosaic explanation. Back in the mid eighteen hundreds.

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Speaker 3: Around eighteen fifty, vo Livebig and another physician, Casper, both

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Speaker 3: tried to burn up bodies that were soaked in alcohol.

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Speaker 3: Could not achieve a result that any ways remotely resembled

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Speaker 3: what happened to Missus Reesa and Florida in nineteen fifty one,

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Speaker 3: or Doc Bentley in Pennsylvania nineteen sixty six, and scores

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Speaker 3: and scores of other cases like theirs. So in our view,

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Speaker 3: the mystery remains what is in the body that allows

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Speaker 3: this to happen. Is a mystery, is it? It can't

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Speaker 3: be the adipose tissue. It has to be something more exotic,

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Speaker 3: more esoteric than that.

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Speaker 2: Big time, big time. It's bizarre, isn't it.

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Speaker 3: It is bizarre. That's a word that comes up repeatedly

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Speaker 3: at our research. In fact, I think since we last talked,

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Speaker 3: we went down and did some additional research in the

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Speaker 3: Mary Resar case in Saint Pete. Went to the fire

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Speaker 3: archives there and managed to meet with the son of

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Speaker 3: the one of the two firemen in nineteen fifty one

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Speaker 3: who shoveled up Mary Reesar's remains. That would be Buddy

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Speaker 3: Stanish's son, and he told us that his father, Buddy,

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Speaker 3: was a man of few words, but the one word

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Speaker 3: that he consistently and frequently used when he would talk

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Speaker 3: about the Resa fire scene was bizarre. The other firefighter

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Speaker 3: who also shoveld up who remains was Nelson Ador. We

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Speaker 3: also had the opportunity to interview him many years ago,

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Speaker 3: and he concluded that Mary Reeser had died by quote

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Speaker 3: unquote spontaneous human combustion. This is an assessment from a

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Speaker 3: professional firefighter. We don't get many of those, but for

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Speaker 3: the ones who are actually at these fire scenes and

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Speaker 3: they're not looking at them from a distance while sitting

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Speaker 3: in an armchair pontificating about how the world really works.

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Speaker 3: Talk to the people who are at the scene, the

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Speaker 3: first responders is we have again and again and again,

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Speaker 3: and what they would tell us is that these cases

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Speaker 3: are beyond anything that they have been trained to encounter

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Speaker 3: in their fire service careers. That they are truly bizarre, baffling,

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Speaker 3: and best explained as spontaneous human combustioners. We prefer to

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Speaker 3: use the term now sudden human cremation.

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Speaker 2: I like what's happening across California right now, southern California.

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Speaker 2: We're not talking about human bodies that have died in fires.

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Speaker 2: These are people who are combusting in very normal conditions.

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Speaker 3: Right, precisely, right, George, Yes, we have well. Mary Reeser,

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Speaker 3: for example, in nineteen fifty one, was sitting in a

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Speaker 3: chair in her in a rented apartment in Saint Pete, Florida,

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Speaker 3: last seen alive and apparently good health, at nine PM

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Speaker 3: on the evening of July one, nineteen fifty one. The

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Speaker 3: following morning, about eight o'clock, a telegram was to be

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Speaker 3: livered to her apartment her lane. Lady Pansy Carpenter attempted

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Speaker 3: to open Mary's apartment door, found the knob hot to

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Speaker 3: the touch. She screamed. Two painters rushed across the street,

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Speaker 3: broke the door down, rushed in and wore a gast

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Speaker 3: to find what was the previous evening, a one hundred

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Speaker 3: and seventy five one and eighty pound woman sitting in

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Speaker 3: a chair next to a small end table was now

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Speaker 3: a pile of passioned rubble chair springs. The table had

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Speaker 3: been consumed, as said Mary's body, save for one foot

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Speaker 3: and a satin slippers, still intact, pieces of calcine vertebrae,

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Speaker 3: and what was said at that time to be a

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Speaker 3: shrunken head. Very minimal fire damage above the chair, some

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Speaker 3: melted plastics, but nothing that you would expect to find

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Speaker 3: in a domestic fire scene that rivaled, and indeed exceeded,

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Speaker 3: what comes out of a crematorium retort. Crematorium retort well

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Speaker 3: bernicadeve at about twenty two hundred degrees fahrenheit for sixty

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Speaker 3: to eighty minutes, and then the temperature of the retort

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Speaker 3: is lowered to seventeen to eighteen hundred degrees for another

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Speaker 3: hour and a half to two and a half hours.

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Speaker 3: What comes out of a crematorium retort is not just ash,

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Speaker 3: but bone fragment. Bone fragment that has then put in

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Speaker 3: a device called a cumulator fancy name for a bone

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Speaker 3: crusher that mechanically grinds the bone fragments into the powder

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Speaker 3: that is eventually put into an urn and given to

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Speaker 3: the next of kin by the funeral home director. Structure fires,

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Speaker 3: on the other hand, rarely exceed temperatures of sevenventeen hundred

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Speaker 3: degrees fahrenheit. So we have this immediate challenge of figuring

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Speaker 3: out how can a body burn itself more completely than

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Speaker 3: can be normally accomplished in a crematoriums retort and yet

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Speaker 3: not find surrounding easily combustible materials like newspapers, bedlinens. In

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Speaker 3: some cases, even garments of the victim remain intact.

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Speaker 2: Does it happen from inside out or outside.

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Speaker 3: In interesting question. By definition, it should happen from the

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Speaker 3: inside out. In one of the cases that we document

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Speaker 3: in our book, Ablaze and a chapter that has survivors

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Speaker 3: of partial spontaneous human combustion. We've talked about this case

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Speaker 3: with you before, George, that of Jack Angel, who's a

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Speaker 3: traveling salesman. In November of nineteen seventy four, went to

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Speaker 3: sleep in his motor home outside of Savannah, Georgia, awakened

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Speaker 3: to find that his right forearm had been charred black

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Speaker 3: while he slept in his motor home. He felt no pain,

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Speaker 3: got dressed, subsequently fainted in the Ramada Inn where he

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Speaker 3: had parked his vehicle. Regained consciousness to find himself in

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Speaker 3: the Savannah Memorial Hospital, shown by a team of medical

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Speaker 3: practitioners marveling about how this patient of theirs had burned

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Speaker 3: himself as he had. We had the medical records of

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Speaker 3: Jack's treatment. The medical burned medically. The burns were diagnosed

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Speaker 3: as quote unquote internal in origin. So whatever caused his

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Speaker 3: forearm to burn black, charred to the bone, and produced

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Speaker 3: other electrical type burn injuries in his chest, in his

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Speaker 3: spinal column, on his back, and in his growing area

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Speaker 3: cannot be attributed, as some have attempted to say, to

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Speaker 3: scolding water from a water leak in his motor home.

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Speaker 2: Larry, When these things occur, how many roughly happen every

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Speaker 2: year in the United States, for example.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, as we said at the beginning of our chat, tonight.

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Speaker 3: This is blessedly a very rare phenomenon. We have many

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Speaker 3: years in which we do not have any cases that

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Speaker 3: fit the definition of sudden human cremation. At one time

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Speaker 3: there was apparent cyclical nature to the phenomenon. We have

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Speaker 3: a clump of cases from eighteen seventy one eighteen seventy two,

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Speaker 3: another clump in two thousand and four, I'm sorry, nineteen

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Speaker 3: oh four, nineteen oh five, then a clump in nineteen

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Speaker 3: thirty eight. It looked like we were dealing with a

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Speaker 3: cyclical phenomenon with a thirty three year periodicity that hasn't

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Speaker 3: followed into the twenty first century. So we may have

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Speaker 3: a few cases in nineteen thirty eight, and we'll go

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Speaker 3: for a long period of time with no cases in

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Speaker 3: our data bank. The most recent case that we mistake

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Speaker 3: our research and reputation on happened in twenty thirteen February

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Speaker 3: eight tena that year in eastern Oklahoma, classic characteristics of

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Speaker 3: sudden human cremation there. Given this long break between two

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Speaker 3: thousand and thirteen and twenty twenty five, we're anticipating probably

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Speaker 3: somewhere in the world, we should be getting a new

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Speaker 3: classic case to investigate rather soon.

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Speaker 2: Is there any similarity between what these people eat or

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Speaker 2: drink before this happens.

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Speaker 3: We wish we had the data to provide an answer

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Speaker 3: to that question, George. It's one that has intrigued us.

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Speaker 3: We're looking, obviously for common factors. Is there something in

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Speaker 3: their lifestyle, in their medical history and their health, in

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Speaker 3: their mental outlook, their disposition, anything that could help us

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Speaker 3: understand what is the nature of the forces that come

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Speaker 3: together to create these remarkable human incinerations. We've not found one.

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Speaker 3: It's very difficult. At least, it has been very difficult

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Speaker 3: for us to get that kind of information because we

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Speaker 3: have to talk to the next of kin, and some

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Speaker 3: of them are not particularly willing to discuss something as

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Speaker 3: bizarres as they see with someone like ourself. In the

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Speaker 3: case of doctor Bentley, the ninety two year old physician

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Speaker 3: who incinerated himself in northern Pennsylvania back in nineteen sixty six,

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Speaker 3: we were told by his caregivers that he spent the

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Speaker 3: last few years of his life living on a diet

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Speaker 3: solely of shredded wheat and coffee. That surely can be

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Speaker 3: said for everybody, but maybe there's a hint there for

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Speaker 3: someone listening to the show tonight that says, Oh, that

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Speaker 3: makes sense to me in our tail area. Why it does.

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Speaker 3: Doctor Bentley is probably now the best known case of

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Speaker 3: classic sudden human cremation, based on the photographs that have

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Speaker 3: appeared in print or a d photograph that has appeared

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Speaker 3: in print and in the media over the years since

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Speaker 3: we discovered his case back in nineteen seventy five. This

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Speaker 3: is the case where doctor Bentley burned himself through a

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Speaker 3: hole in the floor in his bathroom on the morning

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Speaker 3: of December five, nineteen sixty six, leaving behind a head

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Speaker 3: resting on water pipes below. The floor had so badly

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Speaker 3: burned that the first responders, some of them thought there

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Speaker 3: was no head there. Other than that the only part

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Speaker 3: of its anatomy left intact was the lower half of

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Speaker 3: one leg, lying tangential to the hole, through which the

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Speaker 3: rest of his one hundred and eighty pound body. I

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Speaker 3: think it was burned through the floor, almost through a

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Speaker 3: nine inch oak beam, and ended up on the earthen

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Speaker 3: floor in the basement below the bathroom as a pile

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Speaker 3: of ash about five inches in height fourteen inches in diameter.

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Speaker 2: We're talking with Larry Arnold about the phenomena of spontaneous

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Speaker 2: human combustion. It is not to be confused with the

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Speaker 2: tragedy that is happening in southern California right now. That's

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Speaker 2: a different real issue all by itself. This other phenomena

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Speaker 2: has been happening how long, Larry.

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Speaker 3: The first case we have found in the medical literature

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Speaker 3: that suggests spontaneous human combustion or sudden human cremation is

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Speaker 3: from the fourteen or fifteen hundreds. But we have looked

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Speaker 3: at the subject in terms of going back into into

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Speaker 3: ancient history Roman period, Greek period, Nordic periods of time,

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Speaker 3: and we found accounts in literature back in that era

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Speaker 3: that suggests very strongly to us that this is a

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Speaker 3: phenomenon that has been occurring and plaguing mankind for thousands

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Speaker 3: of years.

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Speaker 1: Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at

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