Spontaneous Human Combustion - Could You Burst Into Flames? | Random Thursday

when I was a kid I had some pretty irrational fears I was afraid of ghosts and convinced that my house was on it I was afraid of demons and goblins like you do I was afraid of satanic cults which were apparently all the rage in the 80s I just knew it was gonna get whatever those kids had on the Jerry Lewis telethon I thought I was a werewolf for a brief period of time kinda came true and I was terrified beyond words a spontaneous human combustion who would have known mom and dad that giving your impressionable young child all the time life mysteries the unknown books would lead him to Sunday work that he was kind of burst into flames it would have known spontaneous human combustion is the phenomena of a human body catching fire for no given reason and with no ignition source it's thought the spontaneous human combustion actually begins from the inside out there's something inside of you that burns throughout your body which is a horrifying thought that there's some you know force inside of you that's just you know trying to get out that will take over your every being kind of like a werewolf if you google images for spontaneous human combustion you get things like this very grisly images of bodies that have been completely turned to ash but some of the interesting things about spontaneous human combustion or the cases that have been considered that is that the fire is localized it doesn't it doesn't spread throughout the whole house it doesn't burn the house down in these particular cases anyway and there doesn't seem to be any source of ignition also it's not uncommon to see feet and legs that are still around and have not been affected by the rest of the fire it's almost like the torso itself is what burns this phenomena has been described for hundreds of years now one of the first recorded instances of it was in 1468 it was a night in Poland named polina's porcius and the story was that he was at a party or a gathering at dinner or whatever and he drank two ladies they called it two ladies of wine and then vomited fire yo that wine was fire in 1731 a member of Italy's royal family cornelia de bandy actually was found in her room as a smoldering pile of ash right next to her bed the bed was untouched the sheets were on and the rest of the room was okay but there was this oily residue covering all of the surfaces and the window and everything which is something that you're gonna hear more about many believe that maybe she was struck by lightning that came in through the window in the Victorian day spontaneous human combustion was associated with alcoholism although it's thought that that association may have come from people in the temperance movement to try to discourage people from drinking in fact Charles Dickens in his book Bleak House killed off a character this way when you get into the 20th century you find some of the most famous cases of human combustion mariri sir is one of the most famous she was a 67 year old lady who was found again her legs were kept untouched but the rest of her was just this smoldering pile of ashes George Mott was a 58 year old retired firefighter who ironically was completely consumed by flames in his bed he had recently had surgery and there was an oxygen tank right next to his bed he was a former smoker but they think that he may have been smoking that night when this happened Helen Conway was an elderly and infirm woman who was babysitting her granddaughter and she was apparently so immobile that she had to use a bell to get her daughter her granddaughter to go upstairs to do things for her probably not the best person to be babysitting but apparently a neighbor saw a fire in the upstairs and ran in and the granddaughter had no idea this was going on but they went up there and they found that this this woman was completely burned alive in her chair now most of these things are reported they were people that were found after the fact so it's just kind of a pile of ashes and people are trying to figure out what happened to them but there are cases where there were witnesses where people actually saw this happen in fact one of the most recent ones the most recent reported spontaneous human combustion case was in London a seventy year old man named John Nolan who was from Ireland was in London he was just walking down the street witnesses reported him just suddenly bursting into flames and he survived long enough to get to the hospital but he did die at the hospital another fairly famous case was a woman named Jeannie Safin she was 61 years old but she was mentally challenged and had the capacity of an eight-year-old apparently she was sitting right next to her father when she caught fire in the kitchen and they were able to get her to the hospital and she slipped into a coma she did die a couple of days later so are you starting to notice a pattern here most of these cases feature elderly people with mobility issues most of them are smokers often these people are overweight and have other health issues and these often occur near a source of a flame like a fireplace or a candle George Monck for example he hadn't smoked in years so his family insisted that he wasn't smoking and yet right on top of his oxygen tank was some matches why else would he have matches there we still don't know there wasn't any other reason for him to have matches in that room in the case of Helen Conway not only was she a smoker but she was apparently such a careless smoker that firefighters reported seeing cigarette burns on furniture all around the house it's almost like a person passed out or had a heart attack while they were smoking and just caught fire couldn't be something as mundane as that could it one of the mysteries that people who follow spontaneous human combustion always go back to is that the human body is notoriously hard to incinerate crematoriums have to put a lot of effort into cremating a body and even then there's often a lot of bone particles that are left over that they have to actually grind down so that it can be the size of Ash so is it possible for a cigarette or a small ember to actually turn a human body into ash when it's that hard for a crematorium to do it well actually yeah it is thanks to the wick effect the wick effect also known as the candle effect basically describes the burning of the human body just like a candle in a candle you have a wick which is basically like the tinder for the flame surrounded by a fuel source which is the wax well the human body would be the exact opposite of that it's actually the fuel source which is the the fat in our bodies of body fat inside of a wick the clothing on the outside and as anybody who's grill hamburger patties on a grill can tell you when that oil when that fat catches fire it definitely takes off this has been shown time and time again in fact the Mythbusters did one with a dead pig that showed that the wick effect is a real thing and it really can just completely incinerate a body and this explains a lot of things when you look at photos from spontaneous human combustion cases it burns very slowly but it burns very thoroughly so it just sits there in that one place for a long time and just completely consumes the body it takes a while but it works and the heat from the fire Rises which is why the hands and the body and the face and everything that all gets consumed by the flame but the legs which are below the heat source usually survive this also explains why often objects in the room that are higher up will be melted while things down at the floor level like feet and shoes survive just fine and it's this oil in this body fat that burns gets put up into the air as particulate matter and lands on the walls which is why in many of these cases they talk about oily residue covering the room that's pretty horrifying but also another mystery about why the whole room doesn't catch fire while the whole building doesn't catch fire well if you're in an enclosed room that fire is gonna quickly use up all the oxygen so the only feel for that fire going forward past that point is the body itself so it's only gonna burn in that one little spot and it's not gonna spread everywhere if you walked in while this was happening chances are it would you know kind of have a backdraft effect and light the entire room on fire because oxygen was introduced into it but since there's no oxygen the only fuel source is the fat in the body and then once the fire consumes all of that fuel source the fat in the body it it goes out and that's what you're left with now of course some people are not content with such mundane explanation so there's all kinds of other theories out there as to what could be causing this there's a guy named Larry Arnold who wrote a book called ablaze all about spontaneous human combustion that he theorized that there's a subatomic particle called a pirate Ron that could be causing this no proof of that whatsoever and Michael Harrison who wrote a book on spontaneous human combustion called fire from heaven believes that it's associated with poltergeists because yeah there's a great website that I found I'm linking to it down the description below it's called anomaly infocom that will actually lists every single case of spontaneous human combustion in chronological order all the way down to 2017 this last one and something that you noticed pretty quickly is that there were a lot of them back in the 70s in the 80s that were reported and then not so many symptoms gunned down a lot in the last 30 years in fact only four have been reported since 1990 and three of those four occurred in the a time when people are likely to light fireplaces you know it's also gun way down in the last 30 years smoking it's amazing how people tend to burst into flames when they're around flames another thing to consider is the type of materials that were used in clothing and furniture in the 20th century in the in the 40s and 50s polyester was really big polyester is hugely flammable not just on clothes but on furniture but also on furniture they often used foam that was petroleum-based which is incredibly flammable that's why they don't use it anymore but something that you might notice in the 70s and 80s the type of people that would still be wearing polyester and have 30 40 year-old furniture would be elderly people the type of people who might be smoking and fall asleep or have a heart attack you know that firemen the visit your third-grade class and told you not to like have oily rags laying around yeah these old people were basically oily rags so in most cases of spontaneous human combustion it can be explained just that simply it's not spontaneous at all this makes sense obviously but I think there's something innate in us that we want to have some kind of otherworldly supernatural paranormal explanation for things it's just something in us that needs that but luckily spontaneous human combustion is not one of those paranormal things that we need to worry about but werewolves thank you guys so much for watching I hope you enjoyed that fun topic I've got links down in the description to all kinds of more information about it if you're curious also check out the answers with Joe branded shirts I'm really proud of these I think they turned out really well answers with dough.com sized shirts go get something please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here check out some of my other stuff you might like those too and if you like those to subscribe you'll be the first to see them every Monday and Tuesday every Monday and Thursday I know what I do all right you guys go out there have an eye-opening week don't smoke in a chair and I will see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 960,679

Rating: 4.9146543 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, spontaneous human combustion, joe scott, paranormal, charles dickens, george mott, Mary Reeser, time life books, mysteries of the unknown, unexplained mysteries

Id: mzG9VJswULc

Length: 10min 37sec (637 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 07 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Gerry1of1]

Spontaneous human combustion doesn't exist. It's been thoroughly and debunked