In November 2009, police found the remains of a woman in a Florida trailer park. The body of the deceased was badly burned. Everything looked like murder, if not for the fact that clothes and surrounding objects were not damaged by fire. After all, the killer could not burn the victim, and then clothe it? Apparently, there was such a phenomenon as pyrogenism - the spontaneous combustion of a person.
Increasingly
It turns out that such incidents have been known for a long time, but written evidence of them appeared only in the 17th century. According to the magazine "Discovery", over the past decade, such cases of spontaneous combustion have almost doubled.
In November 2009, in the Spanish city of Palencia, police arrived on call to find the burnt corpse of a 57-year-old landlord. His wife said that in the evening, her husband, as usual, studied some financial documents, sitting in the living room.
Along the way, he commented on their wife. Suddenly he jumped up, cried out in pain and began to shake his hands, from which blue flames oozed. The arriving doctors pronounced death from spontaneous combustion.
In the summer of 2007, a young man, a resident of Minsk, became a victim of spontaneous combustion while smoking in the stairwell. He was found by a neighbor who looked out of the apartment at the smell of smoke. She called an ambulance, but the guy died of burns on the way to the hospital.
A year later, in St. Petersburg, residents of one of the houses felt the smell of burning coming from the apartment of a pensioner neighbor. Since the owner did not respond to the doorbells, they called the firefighters. They broke down the door and found the body of a pensioner, which was almost completely burned down, but there were no traces of fire or even soot in the apartment.
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Feet don't burn
Pyrogenic fire is so powerful that even bones are burned from its effects. But even in the ovens of crematoria at a temperature of about 1000 degrees, they do not always become ash! With spontaneous combustion, the upper body gets the most, and the legs almost always remain intact.
In 2005, an incident occurred in London that would have become curious if it were not so tragic. One of the residents of the city, Gertrude Daikin, called the fire department with the message that a fire was raging in Luciano Pavarotti's apartment.
Several fire brigades went to the aid of the public's favorite. Arriving at the scene, the firefighters did not find a fire in the indicated apartment. But in the armchair there was a handful of still smoldering ash, and next to it lay the left male leg and the right hand.
Gertrude assured that these were the remains of her favorite opera singer. Of course, she personally did not know him, but she often heard him singing behind the wall. Indeed, there were many posters and posters in the apartment depicting Pavarotti. And almost all live recordings.
I couldn't hide it in a sack. It is good that, before publishing the sad news, someone thought to call the master in Italy. It turned out that everything is all right with him, he is alive and well. A certain Michael Richard Clark III, who successfully imitates the singer at concerts, burned down in the apartment.
Well-worn fire engineers were shocked by what they saw and could not find an explanation for this. They said that it was as if a shell had exploded inside the victim, without damaging anything around. Since this case was not the only one in their practice, they had to believe in pyrogenesis without even understanding its essence.
In the meantime, it was necessary to find an answer to at least one question: why in some cases the hands and feet of the victims remain intact? British scientists conducted an experiment. They took a well-fed piglet and tried to burn it on low heat for 5 hours. The bones were the last to be burned, and the fat helped in this, which increases the intensity of the flame. The conclusion was the following: the fat content in the limbs is less than in the whole body, therefore they do not burn.
Why are we burning?
No one knows exactly why pyrogenism occurs. But there are quite a few assumptions about this. There is a certain pattern of its occurrence. For example, this happens most often in cars, that is, in an enclosed space.
In addition, according to statistics, the victims of spontaneous combustion are mostly elderly people. There is an assumption that with age, certain processes occur in the body that serve as a detonator for pyrogeny. Many of those who burned out from the strange fire took alcohol for a long time, and in large quantities. Perhaps, in this case, the ethanol accumulated in the body became the impetus for the fire.
Another reason is called clothing made of synthetic materials, which accumulates static electricity, and this, in turn, can give a spark.
The most realistic hypothesis for spontaneous combustion is the metabolic factor. Some experts believe that destructive fire is formed due to flammable biological compounds that are obtained as a result of an unknown metabolism in the human digestive tract.
In their opinion, the explosive mixture consists of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, methane in the intestines and currents that run through the body from time to time. Under certain conditions, they meet and launch a big explosion. Subzero air temperature can become such conditions, when everything in the body is compressed. By the way, the majority (60%) of cases of spontaneous combustion occur in January.
Recently, Japanese Harugi Ito proposed his version of pyrogeny. He believes that this process is due to a change in the flow of time. That is, atoms inside the body slow down their course, which means that physical processes proceed more slowly. And from the outside, that is, on the skin, nothing changes. Under such conditions, the human body does not have time to give off heat, and it burns from the inside.
Anatoly Stekhin, a specialist at the Research Institute of Human Ecology and Environmental Hygiene, also proposed an interesting hypothesis. He believes that a person is three-quarters water, and its free radicals are capable of taking energy, solar or biological. Under some conditions, this energy in the form of streams of quanta comes out.
“This is cold plasma combustion. With it, the external body temperature does not exceed 36 degrees, and the internal temperature reaches 2000 degrees! Almost twice as high as in a crematorium oven! This is exactly the case when everything burns out, even the limbs.
However, despite the variety of hypotheses, the scientific world does not consider spontaneous human combustion worthy of attention. And this is with the testimony of those who managed to survive!
Stay alive
There are times when pyrogenesis leaves its victims alive. Simply because there was someone nearby who could help. In the fall of 1985, a certain Debbie Clark, returning home from work, began to undress in the hallway. At that very moment, the girl felt severe pain in her chest and saw that blue flames appeared from under her clothes.
She screamed, her mother came running to her cry, who, fortunately, was at home. Grabbing Debbie, she carried her into the bathtub filled with water. This is the only reason why the victim did not suffer, except that there were traces of burns on his chest. Strange that this fire did not harm her mother.
In January 1991, a fire also spared its victim in Yorkshire. To the spouses. Stubbins was visiting an elderly relative. At some point, the hosts left the house, and when they returned, they saw their guest lying on the floor next to an overturned bucket of water.
The Stubbins thought it was a stroke and called an ambulance. The doctors immediately realized that the cause of the fainting was not an attack, but terrible burns on the man's body under his clothes, which, by the way, was not damaged at all. The victim himself, waking up in the hospital, did not remember anything.
Worldwide
Pyrogenic researchers have their own incident statistics. And in it a special date is April 7, 1958. On this day, spontaneous fires of people occurred simultaneously in different places of the planet. An Irish fisherman saw a boat washed ashore by the current. It contained human remains in the form of a handful of ashes and several bones.
A lightning strike was excluded in this case, since the weather was sunny and calm. On the same day, British police found a car with the same remains in a ditch, and in the Netherlands a young man was burned to death in his car. In both cases, the gas tanks were full and no electrical wiring was found.