Legends about spontaneous combustion have come down to us from ancient times, but only from the beginning of the 18th century, when such cases began to be registered in official documents, including police reports, they began to be considered quite reliable.
In the old days, about cases of spontaneous combustion, they said that a person was burned by "devilish fire", Satan incinerated. People believed that the victim sold his soul to the prince of darkness, but then violated their secret agreement, for which retribution overtook her. Later, in the 17th century, a more rationalistic explanation appeared: allegedly, chronic alcoholics, whose bodies are soaked in alcohol and therefore flare up from an accidental spark, allegedly, become victims of spontaneous combustion, especially if the dead smoked.
Usually in the press you can find only a few cases of spontaneous combustion per year, but in 1938 the American journalist Frank Russell counted thirty-nine examples of deaths from unexplained spontaneous combustion.
Among the cases counted by Roussel included spontaneous combustion, which was witnessed by many people. Typical, for example, was the death of Miss Phyllis Newcome, an Englishwoman who turned into a flaming torch right at a dinner party at Chelmsford Hall, Essex, on August 27.
Miss Newcome, 22, was dancing with her fiancé, Henry McAlland, on the day of her death, when suddenly her dress caught fire. An unimaginable panic ensued, and when the flame was shot down, the poor girl was no longer saved. Eyewitnesses later described this incident as the most incredible, but on the assumption that the poor girl's dress caught fire from an accidentally thrown cigarette, they replied that they saw with their own eyes: it was not the girl's dress that caught fire, but herself.
Another example of sudden spontaneous combustion that happened to Mrs. Mary Carpenter. On July 29, she sailed on a motor ship. In front of her husband and the children, distraught with fear, Mrs. Carpenter suddenly caught fire and within just two minutes was burned to the bone. The wooden furniture in the cabin remained intact, the firefighters and policemen who were then called in could not understand how the tragedy had happened.
However, perhaps the most curious death occurred a few months earlier, on March 7th. On this day, at the same time, at a distance of many miles from each other, three men died at once. The first was Willien Ten Brook, an eighteen-year-old Dane who drove his car through the streets of the small town of Ubbergen. The second - a middle-aged Englishman - George Turner was driving a truck.
Promotional video:
The third victim of the inexplicable flames was the sailor John Greeley, who was aboard the steamship Ulrich, a merchant ship bound for Liverpool. The ship was seven hundred miles from its destination when an unnatural flame suddenly engulfed the helmsman, and as the researchers later found out, the position of the ship at that moment was equidistant from the places where spontaneous combustion of other victims occurred.
In other words, Greeley caught fire when the ship reached the highest point of a huge equilateral triangle. Why such a distance factor influences spontaneous combustion remains unclear. Surprisingly, all three victims at the time of the fire were doing the same thing - driving a vehicle.
And although Frank Russell argued that the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion exists, he never tried to use the data to investigate the causes of this phenomenon. Some time later, this gap was filled.
In 1975, the writer Livingston Gearhart compiled six tables showing how the solar periods of 1938 correlated with several examples of spontaneous combustion that Frank Russell wrote about in his work. Gearhart pointed out that changes in the planet's magnetic field can cause quite dramatic events, and periods of solar activity can contribute to the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion.
Although he could not fully prove this version, his analysis of the spontaneous combustion of 1938 may not be devoid of some sense. At the same time, even Livingstone Gearhart did not give a rational explanation why three people, hundreds of miles apart, suffered the same fate on March 7. According to the journalist, who was the first to discover the secret, "a galaxy of an inconceivable size pierced the Earth with a giant trident … three fingers of fire that ignite only flesh."