January 10, 2025 • 18 mins
George Noory and author Larry Arnold discuss spontaneous human combustion with unexplainable cases of bodies completely burning up, why there is no other damage in the area around the burned bodies, and if there are any common factors between the victims.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back George Norry along with Larry Arnold. He's got
a background in mechanical and electrical engineering, took his curiosity
to new heights after he had a shift in consciousness
during his sophomore year of engineering at Lafayette College. He
focuses on pyrophenomena and has done submarine archaeology in the
Bermuda Triangle. And here he is on Coast to Coast
(00:28):
with his book Ablaze. The mysterious fires is spontaneous human combustion. Larry,
welcome back.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Thank you George. It's a delight and honor to begin
out twenty twenty five with you in the fine folks
at coast and with the coast family.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Roughner. You talk about spontaneous human combustion. These fires in
California are unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Oh they are horrific. When Tom booked us for tonight,
those fearsome, horrific fires now devouring property and people on
LA had not yet begun. Our emotional heart goes out
to our fellow citizens in and around, including of course
members of your staff. So the next two hours is
going to be kind of delicate topic to discuss because
SAHC is a different kind of combustion, but it's no
(01:10):
less tragic and frightful. But unlike the large LA conflagrations
that will continue to occur, we believe SHC is itself
quite rare and fortunately very limited in scope and limited
usually to one person at one time.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Wellson, how did you get involved in spontaneous human combustion interest?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
We got a paperback book when we're in eighth grade
and it had a chapter called Incredible Cremations. A book
was by Frank Edwards and it was called Stranger Than Science.
It had a lot of forty and subjects in it,
and it kind of just intrigued our interest. And as
you mentioned in New York, kind intro to us. When
we're in Lafayette doing engineering work, we had a shifting
(01:50):
consciousness that took us away from the mechanics of you know,
hardcore engineering type of work and into more esoteric things.
And we remembered reading this chapter in the eighth grade
about SHC. We thought, could that possibly possibly happen? None
of our teachers in high school, our professors in college,
if we boasted the subject to them, had never heard
(02:12):
of it and certainly had no explanation for it. So
we thought, well, maybe this author, Frank Edwards, just made
it up to fill a couple pages in a paperback
pulp novel. Decided to go down to the Library of
Congress in DC and looked for some microfilm for newspapers
in nineteen fifty one in Saint Pete, Florida that might
(02:33):
confirm or refute this chapter in Frank Edwards's book about
the Incredible Cremation of a lady named Mary Hardy Reeser.
And what we discovered was that in nineteen fifty one
somemer of that year, Mary Reser's death was front page
news and the Tampa Tribune in the Saint Pete Times,
because it was so bizarre and so strange, and we thought, well,
(02:55):
he didn't make up the story. It sounded like spontaneous
human combustion, as that subject is defined by history, which
is the almost complete burning of a human body in
an environment where there is no one readily identifiable external
source of ignition, and the body classically has burned almost
(03:16):
to powder, perhaps leaving a few extremities behind. Us say
that this pile of ash once was part of a
human being, and yet surrounding combustibles are largely on scathe
by heat and flame. Was Mary Reiser a one off
case that had a very weird set of circumstances that
would allow this unique type of fire to occur, or
(03:37):
might there be other cases? And that led us to
spend a couple more days at the Library of Congress
plowing through some books where eventually would go down to
the College of Physicians in Philadelphia and have cartloads of
old medical texts brought up to us to peruse. Some
books we are convinced and never been open since they
were published in the mid eighteen hundreds. And we found
(03:58):
a few more cases, and then in nineteen seventy five
we got tipped off to a case, also with Pennsylvania connections,
that happened in northern part of our home state here
in Pennsylvania, that occurred to a gentleman named doctor John
Irving Bentley. And when we delved into that spoke to
the first responders, and then got the photographs of this
(04:18):
remarkable fire scene, we knew that we were onto something
that medical science had dismissed as superstition or medieval silliness,
and that got us started What we thought was going
to be a few weeks or maybe just a weekend
project of research has evolved into a fifty year career
of studying and documenting and trying to figure out how
(04:39):
people can burn up so thoroughly and completely more completely
than a crematorium retort can achieve.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Truly bizarre. What does science say about this? Larry?
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Science pretty much says this phenomenon does not occur. We
could rattle off a whole list of comments, naysayings, boncom
for the rest of this two hour program. Doctor lest Addamson,
who was a retired Cyoga County medical examiner in Ohio,
told us that he does not for a single second
by the overheated concept of spontaneous human commustion. Mainstream scientists, naysayers,
(05:19):
skeptics will deny that this phenomenon can occur. These the
bunkings of the subject go back to the early eighteen
hundreds and continue to this day. The problem is, at
least for us as a researcher of this topic, is
that they are either aren't familiar with the material and
the research and the evidence that supports the reality of SHC,
(05:44):
or they choose to lie about it. Misrepresent it, do
fraudulent experiments to convince themselves that this bizarre and yet
challengingly and fascinating phenomenon really does occur. It's much easier
for their mental belief structure to say that, Nope, doesn't happen.
(06:05):
We don't need to deal with this. All these people
burn up in their own body fat and of mystery,
there is no mystery. We reput that conclusion of theirs
evidence supports the reality of this phenomenon as bizarre and
frightening and strange as that it really is.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Larie, What is it about the human body that combusts
like that?
Speaker 3 (06:28):
That's the big question, and we're still trying to find
the answer to that. Because the human body is about
seventy to seventy five percent water, it's easy to say
that it's impossible for the human body to self ignite.
There's just too much water there. What is most often
profered to explain away the phenomenon is what's called the
wick effect or the human candle, in which it is
(06:49):
suggested that the body is lit externally by a drop
cigarette or carelessly tossed match, or a number that leaves
out of a fireplace. For example, it's thetim's clothing and
begins to create a low temperature smoldering fire in the clothing,
and the heat of that low heat fire starts to
(07:11):
render body fat out of the victim's body, and the
body then starts to burn like basically an inverted candle,
And after several hours supposedly of a low temperature fire,
you end up with a pile of powder and perhaps
part of a leg or a few fingertips. That's the
explainer way. It doesn't work. We've tried that experiment many
(07:31):
times on our own in the early years of our research.
You know, we didn't want to be chasing something that
had a prosaic explanation. Back in the mid eighteen hundreds.
Around eighteen fifty, vo Livebig and another physician, Casper, both
tried to burn up bodies that were soaked in alcohol.
Could not achieve a result that any ways remotely resembled
(07:54):
what happened to Missus Reesa and Florida in nineteen fifty one,
or Doc Bentley in Pennsylvania nineteen sixty six, and scores
and scores of other cases like theirs. So in our view,
the mystery remains what is in the body that allows
this to happen. Is a mystery, is it? It can't
be the adipose tissue. It has to be something more exotic,
more esoteric than that.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Big time, big time. It's bizarre, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
It is bizarre. That's a word that comes up repeatedly
at our research. In fact, I think since we last talked,
we went down and did some additional research in the
Mary Resar case in Saint Pete. Went to the fire
archives there and managed to meet with the son of
the one of the two firemen in nineteen fifty one
who shoveled up Mary Reesar's remains. That would be Buddy
(08:43):
Stanish's son, and he told us that his father, Buddy,
was a man of few words, but the one word
that he consistently and frequently used when he would talk
about the Resa fire scene was bizarre. The other firefighter
who also shoveld up who remains was Nelson Ador. We
also had the opportunity to interview him many years ago,
and he concluded that Mary Reeser had died by quote
(09:06):
unquote spontaneous human combustion. This is an assessment from a
professional firefighter. We don't get many of those, but for
the ones who are actually at these fire scenes and
they're not looking at them from a distance while sitting
in an armchair pontificating about how the world really works.
Talk to the people who are at the scene, the
first responders is we have again and again and again,
(09:29):
and what they would tell us is that these cases
are beyond anything that they have been trained to encounter
in their fire service careers. That they are truly bizarre, baffling,
and best explained as spontaneous human combustioners. We prefer to
use the term now sudden human cremation.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I like what's happening across California right now, southern California.
We're not talking about human bodies that have died in fires.
These are people who are combusting in very normal conditions.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Right, precisely, right, George, Yes, we have well. Mary Reeser,
for example, in nineteen fifty one, was sitting in a
chair in her in a rented apartment in Saint Pete, Florida,
last seen alive and apparently good health, at nine PM
on the evening of July one, nineteen fifty one. The
following morning, about eight o'clock, a telegram was to be
livered to her apartment her lane. Lady Pansy Carpenter attempted
(10:28):
to open Mary's apartment door, found the knob hot to
the touch. She screamed. Two painters rushed across the street,
broke the door down, rushed in and wore a gast
to find what was the previous evening, a one hundred
and seventy five one and eighty pound woman sitting in
a chair next to a small end table was now
(10:48):
a pile of passioned rubble chair springs. The table had
been consumed, as said Mary's body, save for one foot
and a satin slippers, still intact, pieces of calcine vertebrae,
and what was said at that time to be a
shrunken head. Very minimal fire damage above the chair, some
(11:09):
melted plastics, but nothing that you would expect to find
in a domestic fire scene that rivaled, and indeed exceeded,
what comes out of a crematorium retort. Crematorium retort well
bernicadeve at about twenty two hundred degrees fahrenheit for sixty
to eighty minutes, and then the temperature of the retort
is lowered to seventeen to eighteen hundred degrees for another
(11:32):
hour and a half to two and a half hours.
What comes out of a crematorium retort is not just ash,
but bone fragment. Bone fragment that has then put in
a device called a cumulator fancy name for a bone
crusher that mechanically grinds the bone fragments into the powder
that is eventually put into an urn and given to
the next of kin by the funeral home director. Structure fires,
(11:56):
on the other hand, rarely exceed temperatures of sevenventeen hundred
degrees fahrenheit. So we have this immediate challenge of figuring
out how can a body burn itself more completely than
can be normally accomplished in a crematoriums retort and yet
not find surrounding easily combustible materials like newspapers, bedlinens. In
(12:23):
some cases, even garments of the victim remain intact.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Does it happen from inside out or outside.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
In interesting question. By definition, it should happen from the
inside out. In one of the cases that we document
in our book, Ablaze and a chapter that has survivors
of partial spontaneous human combustion. We've talked about this case
with you before, George, that of Jack Angel, who's a
(12:51):
traveling salesman. In November of nineteen seventy four, went to
sleep in his motor home outside of Savannah, Georgia, awakened
to find that his right forearm had been charred black
while he slept in his motor home. He felt no pain,
got dressed, subsequently fainted in the Ramada Inn where he
had parked his vehicle. Regained consciousness to find himself in
(13:15):
the Savannah Memorial Hospital, shown by a team of medical
practitioners marveling about how this patient of theirs had burned
himself as he had. We had the medical records of
Jack's treatment. The medical burned medically. The burns were diagnosed
as quote unquote internal in origin. So whatever caused his
(13:36):
forearm to burn black, charred to the bone, and produced
other electrical type burn injuries in his chest, in his
spinal column, on his back, and in his growing area
cannot be attributed, as some have attempted to say, to
scolding water from a water leak in his motor home.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Larry, When these things occur, how many roughly happen every
year in the United States, for example.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yeah, as we said at the beginning of our chat, tonight.
This is blessedly a very rare phenomenon. We have many
years in which we do not have any cases that
fit the definition of sudden human cremation. At one time
there was apparent cyclical nature to the phenomenon. We have
a clump of cases from eighteen seventy one eighteen seventy two,
(14:29):
another clump in two thousand and four, I'm sorry, nineteen
oh four, nineteen oh five, then a clump in nineteen
thirty eight. It looked like we were dealing with a
cyclical phenomenon with a thirty three year periodicity that hasn't
followed into the twenty first century. So we may have
a few cases in nineteen thirty eight, and we'll go
(14:50):
for a long period of time with no cases in
our data bank. The most recent case that we mistake
our research and reputation on happened in twenty thirteen February
eight tena that year in eastern Oklahoma, classic characteristics of
sudden human cremation there. Given this long break between two
(15:12):
thousand and thirteen and twenty twenty five, we're anticipating probably
somewhere in the world, we should be getting a new
classic case to investigate rather soon.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Is there any similarity between what these people eat or
drink before this happens.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
We wish we had the data to provide an answer
to that question, George. It's one that has intrigued us.
We're looking, obviously for common factors. Is there something in
their lifestyle, in their medical history and their health, in
their mental outlook, their disposition, anything that could help us
understand what is the nature of the forces that come
(15:52):
together to create these remarkable human incinerations. We've not found one.
It's very difficult. At least, it has been very difficult
for us to get that kind of information because we
have to talk to the next of kin, and some
of them are not particularly willing to discuss something as
bizarres as they see with someone like ourself. In the
(16:17):
case of doctor Bentley, the ninety two year old physician
who incinerated himself in northern Pennsylvania back in nineteen sixty six,
we were told by his caregivers that he spent the
last few years of his life living on a diet
solely of shredded wheat and coffee. That surely can be
said for everybody, but maybe there's a hint there for
someone listening to the show tonight that says, Oh, that
(16:38):
makes sense to me in our tail area. Why it does.
Doctor Bentley is probably now the best known case of
classic sudden human cremation, based on the photographs that have
appeared in print or a d photograph that has appeared
in print and in the media over the years since
we discovered his case back in nineteen seventy five. This
(17:01):
is the case where doctor Bentley burned himself through a
hole in the floor in his bathroom on the morning
of December five, nineteen sixty six, leaving behind a head
resting on water pipes below. The floor had so badly
burned that the first responders, some of them thought there
was no head there. Other than that the only part
(17:22):
of its anatomy left intact was the lower half of
one leg, lying tangential to the hole, through which the
rest of his one hundred and eighty pound body. I
think it was burned through the floor, almost through a
nine inch oak beam, and ended up on the earthen
floor in the basement below the bathroom as a pile
of ash about five inches in height fourteen inches in diameter.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
We're talking with Larry Arnold about the phenomena of spontaneous
human combustion. It is not to be confused with the
tragedy that is happening in southern California right now. That's
a different real issue all by itself. This other phenomena
has been happening how long, Larry.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
The first case we have found in the medical literature
that suggests spontaneous human combustion or sudden human cremation is
from the fourteen or fifteen hundreds. But we have looked
at the subject in terms of going back into into
ancient history Roman period, Greek period, Nordic periods of time,
(18:28):
and we found accounts in literature back in that era
that suggests very strongly to us that this is a
phenomenon that has been occurring and plaguing mankind for thousands
of years.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back George Norry along with Larry Arnold. He's got
a background in mechanical and electrical engineering, took his curiosity
to new heights after he had a shift in consciousness
during his sophomore year of engineering at Lafayette College. He
focuses on pyrophenomena and has done submarine archaeology in the
Bermuda Triangle. And here he is on Coast to Coast
(00:28):
with his book Ablaze. The mysterious fires is spontaneous human combustion. Larry,
welcome back.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Thank you George. It's a delight and honor to begin
out twenty twenty five with you in the fine folks
at coast and with the coast family.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Roughner. You talk about spontaneous human combustion. These fires in
California are unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Oh they are horrific. When Tom booked us for tonight,
those fearsome, horrific fires now devouring property and people on
LA had not yet begun. Our emotional heart goes out
to our fellow citizens in and around, including of course
members of your staff. So the next two hours is
going to be kind of delicate topic to discuss because
SAHC is a different kind of combustion, but it's no
(01:10):
less tragic and frightful. But unlike the large LA conflagrations
that will continue to occur, we believe SHC is itself
quite rare and fortunately very limited in scope and limited
usually to one person at one time.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Wellson, how did you get involved in spontaneous human combustion interest?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
We got a paperback book when we're in eighth grade
and it had a chapter called Incredible Cremations. A book
was by Frank Edwards and it was called Stranger Than Science.
It had a lot of forty and subjects in it,
and it kind of just intrigued our interest. And as
you mentioned in New York, kind intro to us. When
we're in Lafayette doing engineering work, we had a shifting
(01:50):
consciousness that took us away from the mechanics of you know,
hardcore engineering type of work and into more esoteric things.
And we remembered reading this chapter in the eighth grade
about SHC. We thought, could that possibly possibly happen? None
of our teachers in high school, our professors in college,
if we boasted the subject to them, had never heard
(02:12):
of it and certainly had no explanation for it. So
we thought, well, maybe this author, Frank Edwards, just made
it up to fill a couple pages in a paperback
pulp novel. Decided to go down to the Library of
Congress in DC and looked for some microfilm for newspapers
in nineteen fifty one in Saint Pete, Florida that might
(02:33):
confirm or refute this chapter in Frank Edwards's book about
the Incredible Cremation of a lady named Mary Hardy Reeser.
And what we discovered was that in nineteen fifty one
somemer of that year, Mary Reser's death was front page
news and the Tampa Tribune in the Saint Pete Times,
because it was so bizarre and so strange, and we thought, well,
(02:55):
he didn't make up the story. It sounded like spontaneous
human combustion, as that subject is defined by history, which
is the almost complete burning of a human body in
an environment where there is no one readily identifiable external
source of ignition, and the body classically has burned almost
(03:16):
to powder, perhaps leaving a few extremities behind. Us say
that this pile of ash once was part of a
human being, and yet surrounding combustibles are largely on scathe
by heat and flame. Was Mary Reiser a one off
case that had a very weird set of circumstances that
would allow this unique type of fire to occur, or
(03:37):
might there be other cases? And that led us to
spend a couple more days at the Library of Congress
plowing through some books where eventually would go down to
the College of Physicians in Philadelphia and have cartloads of
old medical texts brought up to us to peruse. Some
books we are convinced and never been open since they
were published in the mid eighteen hundreds. And we found
(03:58):
a few more cases, and then in nineteen seventy five
we got tipped off to a case, also with Pennsylvania connections,
that happened in northern part of our home state here
in Pennsylvania, that occurred to a gentleman named doctor John
Irving Bentley. And when we delved into that spoke to
the first responders, and then got the photographs of this
(04:18):
remarkable fire scene, we knew that we were onto something
that medical science had dismissed as superstition or medieval silliness,
and that got us started What we thought was going
to be a few weeks or maybe just a weekend
project of research has evolved into a fifty year career
of studying and documenting and trying to figure out how
(04:39):
people can burn up so thoroughly and completely more completely
than a crematorium retort can achieve.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Truly bizarre. What does science say about this? Larry?
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Science pretty much says this phenomenon does not occur. We
could rattle off a whole list of comments, naysayings, boncom
for the rest of this two hour program. Doctor lest Addamson,
who was a retired Cyoga County medical examiner in Ohio,
told us that he does not for a single second
by the overheated concept of spontaneous human commustion. Mainstream scientists, naysayers,
(05:19):
skeptics will deny that this phenomenon can occur. These the
bunkings of the subject go back to the early eighteen
hundreds and continue to this day. The problem is, at
least for us as a researcher of this topic, is
that they are either aren't familiar with the material and
the research and the evidence that supports the reality of SHC,
(05:44):
or they choose to lie about it. Misrepresent it, do
fraudulent experiments to convince themselves that this bizarre and yet
challengingly and fascinating phenomenon really does occur. It's much easier
for their mental belief structure to say that, Nope, doesn't happen.
(06:05):
We don't need to deal with this. All these people
burn up in their own body fat and of mystery,
there is no mystery. We reput that conclusion of theirs
evidence supports the reality of this phenomenon as bizarre and
frightening and strange as that it really is.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Larie, What is it about the human body that combusts
like that?
Speaker 3 (06:28):
That's the big question, and we're still trying to find
the answer to that. Because the human body is about
seventy to seventy five percent water, it's easy to say
that it's impossible for the human body to self ignite.
There's just too much water there. What is most often
profered to explain away the phenomenon is what's called the
wick effect or the human candle, in which it is
(06:49):
suggested that the body is lit externally by a drop
cigarette or carelessly tossed match, or a number that leaves
out of a fireplace. For example, it's thetim's clothing and
begins to create a low temperature smoldering fire in the clothing,
and the heat of that low heat fire starts to
(07:11):
render body fat out of the victim's body, and the
body then starts to burn like basically an inverted candle,
And after several hours supposedly of a low temperature fire,
you end up with a pile of powder and perhaps
part of a leg or a few fingertips. That's the
explainer way. It doesn't work. We've tried that experiment many
(07:31):
times on our own in the early years of our research.
You know, we didn't want to be chasing something that
had a prosaic explanation. Back in the mid eighteen hundreds.
Around eighteen fifty, vo Livebig and another physician, Casper, both
tried to burn up bodies that were soaked in alcohol.
Could not achieve a result that any ways remotely resembled
(07:54):
what happened to Missus Reesa and Florida in nineteen fifty one,
or Doc Bentley in Pennsylvania nineteen sixty six, and scores
and scores of other cases like theirs. So in our view,
the mystery remains what is in the body that allows
this to happen. Is a mystery, is it? It can't
be the adipose tissue. It has to be something more exotic,
more esoteric than that.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Big time, big time. It's bizarre, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
It is bizarre. That's a word that comes up repeatedly
at our research. In fact, I think since we last talked,
we went down and did some additional research in the
Mary Resar case in Saint Pete. Went to the fire
archives there and managed to meet with the son of
the one of the two firemen in nineteen fifty one
who shoveled up Mary Reesar's remains. That would be Buddy
(08:43):
Stanish's son, and he told us that his father, Buddy,
was a man of few words, but the one word
that he consistently and frequently used when he would talk
about the Resa fire scene was bizarre. The other firefighter
who also shoveld up who remains was Nelson Ador. We
also had the opportunity to interview him many years ago,
and he concluded that Mary Reeser had died by quote
(09:06):
unquote spontaneous human combustion. This is an assessment from a
professional firefighter. We don't get many of those, but for
the ones who are actually at these fire scenes and
they're not looking at them from a distance while sitting
in an armchair pontificating about how the world really works.
Talk to the people who are at the scene, the
first responders is we have again and again and again,
(09:29):
and what they would tell us is that these cases
are beyond anything that they have been trained to encounter
in their fire service careers. That they are truly bizarre, baffling,
and best explained as spontaneous human combustioners. We prefer to
use the term now sudden human cremation.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I like what's happening across California right now, southern California.
We're not talking about human bodies that have died in fires.
These are people who are combusting in very normal conditions.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
Right, precisely, right, George, Yes, we have well. Mary Reeser,
for example, in nineteen fifty one, was sitting in a
chair in her in a rented apartment in Saint Pete, Florida,
last seen alive and apparently good health, at nine PM
on the evening of July one, nineteen fifty one. The
following morning, about eight o'clock, a telegram was to be
livered to her apartment her lane. Lady Pansy Carpenter attempted
(10:28):
to open Mary's apartment door, found the knob hot to
the touch. She screamed. Two painters rushed across the street,
broke the door down, rushed in and wore a gast
to find what was the previous evening, a one hundred
and seventy five one and eighty pound woman sitting in
a chair next to a small end table was now
(10:48):
a pile of passioned rubble chair springs. The table had
been consumed, as said Mary's body, save for one foot
and a satin slippers, still intact, pieces of calcine vertebrae,
and what was said at that time to be a
shrunken head. Very minimal fire damage above the chair, some
(11:09):
melted plastics, but nothing that you would expect to find
in a domestic fire scene that rivaled, and indeed exceeded,
what comes out of a crematorium retort. Crematorium retort well
bernicadeve at about twenty two hundred degrees fahrenheit for sixty
to eighty minutes, and then the temperature of the retort
is lowered to seventeen to eighteen hundred degrees for another
(11:32):
hour and a half to two and a half hours.
What comes out of a crematorium retort is not just ash,
but bone fragment. Bone fragment that has then put in
a device called a cumulator fancy name for a bone
crusher that mechanically grinds the bone fragments into the powder
that is eventually put into an urn and given to
the next of kin by the funeral home director. Structure fires,
(11:56):
on the other hand, rarely exceed temperatures of sevenventeen hundred
degrees fahrenheit. So we have this immediate challenge of figuring
out how can a body burn itself more completely than
can be normally accomplished in a crematoriums retort and yet
not find surrounding easily combustible materials like newspapers, bedlinens. In
(12:23):
some cases, even garments of the victim remain intact.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Does it happen from inside out or outside.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
In interesting question. By definition, it should happen from the
inside out. In one of the cases that we document
in our book, Ablaze and a chapter that has survivors
of partial spontaneous human combustion. We've talked about this case
with you before, George, that of Jack Angel, who's a
(12:51):
traveling salesman. In November of nineteen seventy four, went to
sleep in his motor home outside of Savannah, Georgia, awakened
to find that his right forearm had been charred black
while he slept in his motor home. He felt no pain,
got dressed, subsequently fainted in the Ramada Inn where he
had parked his vehicle. Regained consciousness to find himself in
(13:15):
the Savannah Memorial Hospital, shown by a team of medical
practitioners marveling about how this patient of theirs had burned
himself as he had. We had the medical records of
Jack's treatment. The medical burned medically. The burns were diagnosed
as quote unquote internal in origin. So whatever caused his
(13:36):
forearm to burn black, charred to the bone, and produced
other electrical type burn injuries in his chest, in his
spinal column, on his back, and in his growing area
cannot be attributed, as some have attempted to say, to
scolding water from a water leak in his motor home.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Larry, When these things occur, how many roughly happen every
year in the United States, for example.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Yeah, as we said at the beginning of our chat, tonight.
This is blessedly a very rare phenomenon. We have many
years in which we do not have any cases that
fit the definition of sudden human cremation. At one time
there was apparent cyclical nature to the phenomenon. We have
a clump of cases from eighteen seventy one eighteen seventy two,
(14:29):
another clump in two thousand and four, I'm sorry, nineteen
oh four, nineteen oh five, then a clump in nineteen
thirty eight. It looked like we were dealing with a
cyclical phenomenon with a thirty three year periodicity that hasn't
followed into the twenty first century. So we may have
a few cases in nineteen thirty eight, and we'll go
(14:50):
for a long period of time with no cases in
our data bank. The most recent case that we mistake
our research and reputation on happened in twenty thirteen February
eight tena that year in eastern Oklahoma, classic characteristics of
sudden human cremation there. Given this long break between two
(15:12):
thousand and thirteen and twenty twenty five, we're anticipating probably
somewhere in the world, we should be getting a new
classic case to investigate rather soon.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
Is there any similarity between what these people eat or
drink before this happens.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
We wish we had the data to provide an answer
to that question, George. It's one that has intrigued us.
We're looking, obviously for common factors. Is there something in
their lifestyle, in their medical history and their health, in
their mental outlook, their disposition, anything that could help us
understand what is the nature of the forces that come
(15:52):
together to create these remarkable human incinerations. We've not found one.
It's very difficult. At least, it has been very difficult
for us to get that kind of information because we
have to talk to the next of kin, and some
of them are not particularly willing to discuss something as
bizarres as they see with someone like ourself. In the
(16:17):
case of doctor Bentley, the ninety two year old physician
who incinerated himself in northern Pennsylvania back in nineteen sixty six,
we were told by his caregivers that he spent the
last few years of his life living on a diet
solely of shredded wheat and coffee. That surely can be
said for everybody, but maybe there's a hint there for
someone listening to the show tonight that says, Oh, that
(16:38):
makes sense to me in our tail area. Why it does.
Doctor Bentley is probably now the best known case of
classic sudden human cremation, based on the photographs that have
appeared in print or a d photograph that has appeared
in print and in the media over the years since
we discovered his case back in nineteen seventy five. This
(17:01):
is the case where doctor Bentley burned himself through a
hole in the floor in his bathroom on the morning
of December five, nineteen sixty six, leaving behind a head
resting on water pipes below. The floor had so badly
burned that the first responders, some of them thought there
was no head there. Other than that the only part
(17:22):
of its anatomy left intact was the lower half of
one leg, lying tangential to the hole, through which the
rest of his one hundred and eighty pound body. I
think it was burned through the floor, almost through a
nine inch oak beam, and ended up on the earthen
floor in the basement below the bathroom as a pile
of ash about five inches in height fourteen inches in diameter.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
We're talking with Larry Arnold about the phenomena of spontaneous
human combustion. It is not to be confused with the
tragedy that is happening in southern California right now. That's
a different real issue all by itself. This other phenomena
has been happening how long, Larry.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
The first case we have found in the medical literature
that suggests spontaneous human combustion or sudden human cremation is
from the fourteen or fifteen hundreds. But we have looked
at the subject in terms of going back into into
ancient history Roman period, Greek period, Nordic periods of time,
(18:28):
and we found accounts in literature back in that era
that suggests very strongly to us that this is a
phenomenon that has been occurring and plaguing mankind for thousands
of years.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
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