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Welcome to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians.

Thank you, as always so much for tuning in.

We didn't start the fire, but we're happy to talk about it.

It was always burning.

It was always yes, yes, And shout out to everybody who is going to listen to that song right after this, and shout out to anyone who can do all of the lyrics without pause or a slip.

So topical, it's also kind of it's very at the end of the world as we know it, cadence wise, you know.

And what's that band?

A Little fallout does a modernized version of that song with like updated lyrics.

That done not you know, the hugest Fallout Boy fan, but I thought it was clever and.

It plays a big role in an episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia's latest season where they tried to do a modern version we didn't start the Fire, and then they learned that Fallout Boy already did it, and they allude to apparently decades long beef they've had with Fallout Boy, but it's the first time they mentioned it in the show.

Speaking shows, this is our super producer, mister Max Williams.

Whoa whoa whoa who.

That is none other than the one and only mister Noel Brown.

I am Ben Bullen.

I don't know why I paused there for a second, and I gotta tell you, guys, at the risk of sounding like an arsonist.

Oh year, fire is pretty cool, I know what.

Unequivocally, it's pretty cool.

Fromethean even right.

It's a big deal.

It is the great Creator and the great destroyer.

It's pretty cool and pretty terrifying.

And this is a bit of a This is a nice episode of ridiculous history for anybody who's a fan of our sister podcast stuff they don't want you to know.

If you, like us, grew up reading time life books like The Mysteries of the Universe and so on, you probably at some point learned of the controversial concept of spontaneous human combustion or SHC.

It's the idea that, due to some unknown factors or variables, at any point, a human being can catch on fire internally, just for.

No good reason, sort of self destruct.

This is definitely a bit of red meat for paranormal enthusiasts.

As you mentioned, the kind of stuff we talk about and stuff they don't want you to know.

Surely, Ben, there, I've been rewatching The X Files lately.

It's got to be a spontaneous human combustion episode of the X Files.

Oh or there are things related to SHC the X Files for sure.

Yeah you yelled it.

Oh yeah, it was an episode called fire.

There is, and I think there's an episode about maybe more than one about someone who can start fires, like another one called soft Light.

I think there are more than one spontaneous team.

There's a whole section of on spontaneous human combustion on the X Files fandom wiki.

So there you go.

Nice.

Yeah, and you know, shout out to Chris Carter.

When you've got to put out an episode every week, sometimes you return to similar wells.

Brother.

Let me tell you, I think I've been watching season seven because I've been enjoying Pluribus so much that I wanted to go back and watch some of Vince Gilligan's X Files episodes.

And I think he started writing a little later in the series.

But yeah, and while some of those episodes that he wrote are great, there are some real stinkers later in the XI.

There's one where Molder speaking of stuff that I want you to know, gets trapped in the Devil's Triangle and transported back in time on like the Queen Anne.

And it is some scenery chewing bad British accents in that episode, I'll tell you what.

And then yeah, I put that with the the humorous episodes some of the there's a Christmas episode I'm thinking of as well, or with the a lot of the technology episodes did in age super duper well?

No, And to your point, make that many episodes in the season back in the day when a season was like thirty something episodes, You're gonna reuse some topics and there's gonna be some misses.

Yeah, you know what I mean.

Even Stephen King asked to write about similar things at some point.

Guy has several novels about a haunted bicycle.

So here we go.

What is a with spontaneous human combustion?

Is there any proof or confirmation of cases of SHC?

And what does science have to say?

Science does have something to say about it.

The National Library of Medicine rights on their website from the journal article Spontaneous human Combustion in the light of the twenty first century, the term spontaneous human combustion refers to a situation when a human body is found with significant portions of the middle part of the body reduced to ash, much less damage to the head and extremities, and minimal damage to the direct surroundings of the body.

Typically, no observable source of ignition is found in the vicinity of the victim, and a bad smelling oily substance is noted.

Yeah, and this will be familiar to all of our fellow nerds in the crowd.

The idea has been around for quite some time and it's still controversial.

I compare it almost to the idea of the mellified man, which is an episode for another day.

But it's into means someone with honey basically.

So it came and went throughout history, but it really had its big pop culture moment thanks to Charles Dickens, the guy who wrote a Christmas Carol and Bleak House and a bunch of other stuff.

He mentioned spontaneous human combustion in his eighteen fifty three novel Bleak House.

There's a case of human combustion in the story.

That really gripped his audience and in the public's perception, this was amazing writing.

They were like this guy spits hot fire about fire.

Yeah, for sure, there's quite a reaction, you know, from the public, from his readers.

Like you said, it was just such an outlandish idea.

So considering that just ten years before that he was writing about Ebenezer Scrooge being visited by ghosts bleak house, you know, created an even more extreme response.

One of the characters described is an old, sleazy alcoholic and his name is mister Crook, and he ultimately meets his end as a pile of ash on the floor and noted in the text, a dark greasy coating on the walls and ceilings could be found.

Yeah, okay, so let's put on our investigative hats here because Deerstalker's right.

Yeah, let's surelock it.

So we know that heavy consumption of alcohol appears to be a common trend in a lot of human combustion stories.

And also the note about a dark greasy coating or an oily substance in the vicinity, that's something that we see reported in other cases.

Now, is that dark greasy coating thing?

Is it something that Dickens made up and then laid informed a bunch of other people's stories and tall tales it's tough to parts that game of telephone.

But we know the public said, Okay, this is amazing, but that can't happen in real life.

Charlie, you've got a bridge too far.

You've crossed a rubicad of realism.

But he defends it pretty aggressively, doesn't He.

Very much does?

He doesn't say, well, everyone's a critic.

He says, Hey, you guys don't know how much work I do making my little novels.

All right, I did a lot of research.

Here are dozens upon dozens of famous cases of spontaneous human combustion, and I have receipts.

I have doctors from those times who said this stuff was real.

You know, speaking of the X Files.

If I'm not mistaken, there is a television mini series adaptation, I believe from the BBC of Bleak How, starring Jillian Anderson, Agent Scully herself.

It is a little unusual, though, right, to include something like this as just like a basic plot point, right, It just seems like there were other you know, it's an interest.

It must have been a pet subject for him.

He just must have found it fascinating and thought it was worth including.

Because I don't know the plot of bleak House right off the top, is it like a mystery, like no one could figure out what happened to the old Kook or Krook, mister.

Crook right, Crookick A bit on the nose there, Charlie.

Well, here's why I think the X Files mentions that we brought in here, Here's why I think they're so apropos because bleak House, while it's considered a novel now, it was a lot more like X Files or Lost when Charles Dickens was first writing it.

It was published as a twenty episode serial from eighteen fifty two to eighteen fifty three.

So our guy is writing in segments and publishing those segments.

So, like Chris Carter or Vince Gilligan, he's got to put out an episode every you know, at a certain cadence.

And so maybe he just starts thinking out of the box due to necessity.

Right, Maybe he's like he's getting to the death scene for Crook and he's like, all right, I've done this, I did this, I gotta do I gotta do something.

Oh what about spontaneous human combustion?

Or maybe and this happens to us all the time.

Maybe he just got super obsessed with the subject and was trying to shoehorn it into his job.

Yeah, that's my theory too, ben I do want to read a little bit of his introduction to the character of mister Crook, where he kind of plants the seed of his untimely demise.

He describes him as being old, short, cadaverous, and withered, and his breath as issuing invisible smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within.

Okay, okay, so he had this in mind.

Here's what he said to his critics.

By the way, when people were questioning the veracity of the Death Seat, he said, I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.

Now that sounds a little bit complicated, a little bit round about in circuitous for us in the modern day, but he is essentially saying, you guys are wrong.

This happens.

I know about this, and get this, folks.

He is not the only author to use spontaneous human combustion as a plot device.

Yeah, we've got Herman Melville as well as Nicholas Gogul both who use SHC to end the lives of some characters in their books, respectively, Redburn and Dead Souls.

We've got more modern pop culture examples, of course, and characters like Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch from The Fantastic Four, Flame On and all of that, as well as Stephen King's son Joe Hill, who mimics the horrifying supernatural fate of SHC in his novel The Fireman.

Yeah, The Fireman's a great book.

In this book, without spoiling too much, there's a horrific plague.

It's a virus called dragon scale, and if you get too stressed out and you have this virus, you erupt in flames and you die.

We don't want to give you too much more of the plot.

It's definitely worth the read.

It's a page turner for sure.

Also, I want to shout out Joe Hill's most recent novel, an absolute epic called King Sorrow.

I was able to get it before it officially released and just devoured the thing.

It's like it's nine hundred something pages long.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

But I think people who enjoy create creative horror stories like this, I think you'll you'll really dig it.

It's a page turner.

As well, is it?

It?

Like for some reason, I'm picturing King Sorrow as being some sort of big, bad, supernatural figure.

Oh dude, yeah, it's similar to it.

Stephen King's novel The main bad guy and this is also not a spoiler, is an extra dimensional dragon.

Yeah, like like Pennywise was an extra dimensional spider.

I'm not trying to poop poopy Joe Hill cribbing from his dad a little bit.

If you're gonna steal, steal from the best, and if that happens to be your dad, so be it.

I think Joe Hill's very is good, and he's getting good in his own right for sure, as I think you would agree.

Oh yeah, and if you like graphic novels, get into Lock and Key.

Well that's the one that's what got me into him.

I think that came out maybe before he was as known as a novelist.

Yeah, yeah, and then he was publishing short stories in novellas.

But yeah, I remember back in one of our older offices, you and I were actually trading editions of Lock and Key back and forth.

It's just gosh, I think I may still have some of yours.

Ben I need to do a cleaning of my graphic novel piles and I'll report back.

Okay, we'll stay tuned.

Now, we know that everything we mentioned so far these are works of fiction, and Charles Dickens is popping back at people and claiming that the fiction is informed by the facts.

But when we get to the facts of what we call SHC, or spontaneous human combustion, we see over two hundred alleged cases in the past three centuries.

So it would be a very rare thing to occur, but it seems like a lot of people have been convinced it is indeed a real thing that could happen.

Right, So, over the past three hundred years there have been more than two hundred reported cases of alleged SHC.

If you want to look back even further, back to medieval times, you know, the historical period, not the theme restaurant.

We find that allegedly the first account of SHC was reported by Polonas Vorstius, and from that point on, each case of SHC has shared some of the following characteristics, some of which we've already described.

Originally described in the medical book Medical Jurisprudence from eighteen twenty three.

That was revisited when cited by la Perry in nineteen thirty eight in a British Medical Journal article This is how that goes.

Victims were chronic alcoholics, which tracks for our character in Dickens's novel, usually elderly females.

Body had burned spontaneously, hands and feet usually fell off.

Fire caused little damage to surrounding areas.

The combustion of the body left a residue of greasy and fetid ash, as well as a horrid odor.

Yeah, and doubtlessly Charles Dickens read this in an informed bleak house, or it's one of the things that informed it.

We also know that, just as a as a note in the interest of objectivity, we know that forensic science and medicine was nowhere near where it is today.

So it's quite possible that there were cases that appeared to be shc that just got confused because we didn't have the technology or know how to really investigate them.

But it looks like a lot of very smart people were saying, hey, something is happening.

Let's go to some of the popular cases, the ones that will stand out to anybody familiar with this and We're also going to give a special shout out to a hometown case for our research associate Dylan for sure.

Starting off with the aforementioned Polonus Vorstius, we'll call this patient zero right from fourteen seventy.

His case is popularly known for its sixteen forty one mentioned in Danish physician Thomas Bartholin's book Historarium Historiarium Anato mcarum Rariorum Again I'm potter coated right now, a collection of strange medical phenomenon and Vorstias was an Italian knight who lived in Milan, Italy in fourteen seventy.

Yeah, and despite not fitting the profile of being an elderly female, he did drink a lot of wine.

Reportedly, Okay, he has a wild night cracking the veno and as he is still consuming wine like this is a party till Dodd's situation.

Apparently, he gets a strong, fiery paid in his chest that he starts coffee just really like hacking it up.

As his coffee escalates, he starts vomiting flames.

His whole body burst into fire.

Wow, I was about to say sick.

Now, It's that's scary, but it's pretty cool it's pretty metal breathing fire.

Yeah, man, I think we maybe are saying the quiet part out loud.

Here is the implication that these people are just like so booze soaked, that like a single spark might just set their entire bodies ablaze.

It seems to be, you know, based on the information we have now, it seems to that there is at least some kind of alleged relation flammability.

Yeah, alcohol consumption and flammability.

I mean, we see it again if we go a little bit forward in time to Nicole Millet from seventeen twenty five.

This was reported by a French author, Jonas DuPont in his book from seventeen sixty three, did Incindius boris umani Spontaneous?

A collection of cases and studies about the whole book is about spontaneous human combustion.

Yes, I expect to patrona.

I'm sorry, I'm still so potter brained.

Her case is told through the eyes of her husband, who's a Parisian innkeeper who was startled from his slumber by the smell of smoke, at which time he rushed to the source, only to find his wife a blaze.

Well not even a blaze.

I think she'd already.

You know, it's like what happens in Skyrim when you get blasted by a wizard and you just end up like a little pile of ash.

And again we see another factor that's common to a lot of these ledged cases.

She's on a straw palette, straw floor bed.

But it has not caught on fire.

It's not even singed.

It's unscathed the fact, despite the fact that straw is incredibly flammable when it's dry.

All that was left of her body was her skull, along with a scattering of bones from her back and lower legs.

And again, according to DuPont, the this victim was also a heavy drinker.

At first, the authorities go to her husband and say, okay, man, you murdered your wife.

Clearly.

He was initially put on trial and found guilty of murder, but later was acquitted when he appealed using the SAHC argument, and was backed up by the testimony of one doctor Claude Nicholas Lecat This is amazing name, who was a surgeon who had been staying at the end that very night and was able to corroborate some of the more unusual features of the case.

Yeah, and also able to speak from his own area of expertise.

You know, I am a man of medicine.

This can happen.

So we know that there are hundreds and hundreds of alleged cases of this, so we can't do all of them, but we're going to give you one more that is crucial to hour Pal Research Associate Dylan.

It is the case of doctor Irving Bentley that occurred in counter Sport, Pennsylvania in nineteen sixty six, So we're moving way forward to time.

That's right.

Doctor Bentley was a family doctor, a family gugp serving the counter Sport area that's cou d Ersprt from nineteen twenty five to nineteen fifty three.

After he retired, he just kind of lived to chill, a little small town, quaint existence in his two story ranch Rambler.

That's not true, that's sank Hill's house, but it was a two story home in North Main Street area of town.

He had kind of a verbal agreement with the North penn Gas Company that allowed them to enter his property and check on his gas meter, which was located in the basement.

Because it was inside, so they can just walk up to the sands, and so this is where we see employee of the North Pen Gas Company, guy named Don Gosnell.

It's December fifth, nineteen sixty six, and Don Gosnell, who's done this many times before.

He lets himself into the Good Doctor's home and it's nine am, and he's just gonna go straight down to the basement and check the meter.

But as he gets closer to the basement, he is overwhelmed by a stench.

He describes it as a sickly sweetish smell.

So he follows his nose and he sees his Skyrim style pile of ashes, and above the pile there's a large hole in the sea weed and it's literally still smoking.

They are glowing numbers rimming it.

I'm not trying to make light of this dude's untimely demise, but it is a little funny to picture just the smoking pile of ash and like dude's charred walker and like a leg joint and a foot still slippered right exactly and he had apparently I guess, burned through the floor of the master bathroom.

And so he calls out for doctor Bentley and he's trying to say, hey, is everything okay, he got a weird basement situation, and that's when he discovers Bentley in his master bathroom over the basement with just a few remains as we described there.

I believe there was also a bit of burned bathrobe.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everybody involved with this case, because of course don gets to the authorities too sweet.

Everybody involved with this case is thinking, how can a fire get hot enough to burn Doctor Bentley but not scathe his walker.

We do know that he was, like so many people back then, a fan of tobacco, a bit of a tobacconist.

He was a frequent smoker.

We don't know too too much about his alcohol consumption.

We know the county deputy coroner got there.

We know the local fire department was on the scene.

The mortician was summoned, and eventually the deputy coroner had to make some official statement, that is Deputy Corner John Deck, and we've got a direct quote from him.

We do indeed looks like Doc Bentley was smoking his pipe.

The pipe toppled over and spilled over the tobacco, and in the meantime he fell asleep.

When he woke up, he was on fire.

Because some of the flannel night shirt pieces show on the floor as he went to the bathroom.

I don't know about that.

That sounds that's a little jumping.

I mean, it's not particularly thorough sounding.

It just seems, Yeah, accidental death is the ultimate verdict or the ultimate conclusion of the authorities.

But it's also a very vague conclusion, and it doesn't really explain that the pattern of burning.

I just think a moulder would say tisk disc to this.

Okay, right, ever heard of the knife ghost.

That's one of my favorite molder likes.

Oh man, No, that's good, Ben.

We're about to talk about something called the Wick effect.

But I was just thinking, surely there must speaking of our deerstalker hats and literature be a mention as a plot point in Sherlock Holmes of Spontaneous human combustion, And there absolutely is.

In a story called the Singular Problem of the Extinguished Wicks, a spinster has found dead in her apartment, strangely burned, with nothing else affected.

But what seems a simple case has made more complex when her younger sister has later found dead in the apartment, also burned.

So two cases of shc or something.

Else Yeah, and we again like, this is clearly an obsession and a lot of fiction, especially in years past, But we have to ask what science to say about it.

If you go to the scientific community at large and you ask them, hey, how do we explain something as out there and as frankly scary as spontaneous human combustion, You're most likely going to hear about something called the Wick effect.

The best way to think about it through grulish analogy is that your body is like a candle, and your body has fat in it.

The fat acts as a flammable substance, and the oils from your body can be absorbed into your clothing, and it can be found in your hair, and maybe, if the conditions are right, a source as small as the lit cherry of a cigarette could set the candle on fire.

And then they say, well, think about it this way, if we continue our grulish candle comparison, maybe this theory explains why fire of this sort can seem so contained, restricted just to the individual's body and the stuff they're wearing, without really damaging the rest of the room.

Yeah.

A guy named Brian J.

Ford, who is a biologist and author, had this to say, in support of the argument, when a person is ill, they sometimes naturally produce traces of acetone in the body, and acetone is highly flammable.

I experimented with scale model humans using pig flesh that had been marinated in acetone.

They burn like incendiary bombs.

Alcoholism can cause people to produce acetone, so can many diseases.

My conclusion is that an unwell individual produces high levels of acetone which accumulate in the fatty tissues and can be ignited, perhaps by a static spark or a cigarette.

I mean, it sounds good.

I think we can all agree.

However, there are some additional follow up questions, right like when somebody is smoking a cigarette, how does that hit the flammable stuff?

Like, how does that trigger the issue?

Because usually the city I'm assuming theme from within, Yeah, it'll be outside of the body.

So are these people just super hardcore gangsters and just putting the cigarette out on their tongue.

Like a like they swallow it, but the saliva, you know, it seems like would put it out before it, you know, got any more meaningful?

M hmm.

Yeah.

And this these are natural, valid questions, asking good faith, and with these in mind, it shouldn't surprise any of us that there are other schools of thought.

There are scientists who oppose the Wick effect theory, and uh, they point out something that is pretty obvious to medical authorities.

The human body has to get to a very high temperature to be reduced to just ash.

That's the kicker, right, We're talking three thousand degrees fahrenheights.

To put that into perspective, you know, the process of cremating a human body happen when the temperatures reach between fourteen hundred and eighteen hundred degrees.

That is like vaporizing.

You know, the kinds of temperatures that will you know, reduce bone to ash.

So this notion of the Wick effect doesn't really take that into account.

And also the whole secondary kicker of how does that fire stay contained within?

Right?

Yeah, because there are many unfortunate and tragic cases of total loss structural damage to homes and buildings that start from fires that are pretty small but still spread to consume the entire domicile.

So at this point we don't have the answer.

We want to know what you think.

Hop on over to our show page on Facebook Ridiculous Historians and tell us your take on spontaneous human combustion.

Is this phenomenon alleged though it may be, Is it something that really happenpons or is it possible that somehow civilization got too excited about the concept and got everything wrong in all of these cases?

That seems kind of unlikely.

It does, It does seem pretty unlikely, and the fact that medical science still doesn't quite have a consensus on this so many years later, I don't know, it does seem relatively improbable.

It also seems endlessly fascinating.

Folks.

Thank you so much for joining us.

We can't wait to hear your thoughts over on Ridiculous Histories.

Thanks for super producer mister Max Williams, our research associate Dylan and who else.

Are oh man, Well, plenty of people, But I just wanted to say, you're feeling spontaneous, why don't you head on over to Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice and write something nice.

It makes us feel good and helps people discover the show.

Huge thanks to Alex Williams, who composed our theme.

Max Williams, superproducer extraordinaire Jonathan Strickle, the quiztor.

You know what you did?

A.

J.

Mohamas Jacobs the Puzzler, and.

Of course I'm not thinking the quiztor, but I am thinking.

We're both thinking doctor Rachel Big Spinach Lance, as well as our pals, the rude dudes over a ridiculous crime.

If you dig us, you'll dig them like a grieve.

I'm kidding.

It's ninety nine percent murder free tack line that we're very happy with, very indeed.

Oh jeez, Happy holidays, I guess right, No is it Thanksgiving?

Ish times?

Like holiday season?

Holiday season?

You'll have a fun time with your fam or you know, with your friends.

Friends.

Givings are great.

We'll see you next time, folks.

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