The phenomenon of pyrokinesis or spontaneous combustion is one of the mysterious anomalous phenomena. It belongs to the category of poltergeists. An explanation for this phenomenon has not yet been found, although there are several theories.
In the open press, among the causes of pyrokinesis, the following were named as assumptions: black (invisible) ball lightning, "instant hypnosis" of the participants in the event, the nature of systemic relationships, pyromania diseases of people living in this place, as well as deliberate arson.
We believe that this problem requires scientific study, as it will expand our understanding of the structure of the surrounding world, man, his psyche. Even if pyromania is the cause of this effect, it remains, in one way or another, a phenomenon that requires careful study. The motivating reasons for unnatural actions, which for the most part are not recognized by pyromaniacs, and their very activity, mainly hidden from others, is a mystery, the disclosure of which will help the treatment of the disease, the development of methods of psychological protection and the prevention of such anomalies, which cause considerable damage.
The phenomenon of spontaneous combustion that we investigated took place at the address: XXX
D. I. P. - the owner of the farm, D. E. F. - his wife, Natasha - their granddaughter, born 1977
Study of the phenomenon of pyrokinesis
The farm where the pyroelectric effect was observed is located approximately 2 km from Horomsk. The owners of the house D. I. P. and DEF … have been living on this farm for about 8 years, before that they lived in the same area on another farm. Their daughter, Natasha's mother, is divorced from the girl's father, and currently lives with her second husband and second child in another village.
Promotional video:
D. E. F. sick with stage II hypertension. In the first minutes of contact with us in the first and in the second case, she noticeably tensed, worried and fussed, which, however, is typical for patients with this disease. However, she did not avoid contacts, she is sociable, talkative.
D. I. P. there is a tumor on the face on the right wing of the nose of unknown etiology. He drinks, moreover, attacks of delirium tremens occur. On the eve of our second visit at night after drinking there was such an attack. According to DEF … ran around the room, shouting something unintelligible. In the morning D. I. P. I didn't remember anything about it. According to him, he has bouts of memory loss: “I’m looking at them (DEF and Natasha), but I don’t remember their names. D. I. P. bad because of a stuffy nose, it was difficult to make out his words. She gestures a lot, speaks abruptly, but her facial expressions are frozen. He expresses his thoughts with difficulty, quickly moves from one topic to another. However, he is sociable, talks about everything with pleasure. Careless in clothes. According to D. E. F. and Natasha is stubborn and deliberately does not want to dress more neatly.
We saw Natasha only on our second visit on May 29, 1988. She looks like a sociable, contact girl, she obviously likes it when people pay attention to her, she quickly combed her hair and changed her clothes when we arrived at the house. She tried to be in full view of us, but never left her grandmother. Her speech is also not very well organized, perhaps the environment affects.
However, according to her and D. N. F., she studies well. On our first visit on February 28, 1988, she was in a sanatorium. According to D. E. F. her heart ached and the teachers got her a ticket to a sanatorium so that she could leave the disturbing situation in the house. According to Natasha, spontaneous combustion in the sanatorium did not occur.
The first cases of spontaneous combustion on the farm began in March 1987. There are certificates of the arrival of fire brigades for 22, 23, 29 March and 24 October 1987. D. I. P. also remembers the date April 10, 1987. The witnesses do not remember other dates … The last spontaneous combustion took place in January 1988 before Epiphany. From that time until May 29, 1988, spontaneous combustion was not observed. They were also absent last summer.
The first spontaneous combustion occurred in the absence of the hostess of the house, D. E. F., she was in the hospital for treatment in March-April. D. I. P. notes that in March 1987 there were 8 spontaneous combustion, i.e., according to calculations, every day.
During the first spontaneous combustion, according to D. I. P., the washed things, which were piled on the corner of the bench on the back of the group (a stove serving for heating and standing in the center of the house), caught fire. Then other things began to flare up, in particular, shoes under the bench, window curtains, things in the closet.
D. I. P. at that time suggested that the things on the bench caught fire from a very hot group. According to D. I. P. he also had a case when he was lying on the trestle bed on the other side of the group; his sweater sleeve allegedly decayed from the heat from contact with the stove. The hole in the sweater was shown, however the sweater was very old and had been torn in several places. It is possible that D. I. P. the heat felt through the torn sweater.
We were shown some of the burning things, most of them had already been thrown away. Some things start burning from the edge. For example, the unfolded sheet was, as it were, lined with burnt-out stripes, forming rectangles, i.e. the folded linen burned around the edges on all sides. The mattress, the bed, the crimplen coat were burnt on the edge - his entire lower part was burnt out, the man's shirt - only a sleeve remained of it. However, many things have holes, i.e. burning took place from the middle of the fabric.
Unexpected things also burned, for example, D. E. F. tablets, spread out on the table (there are burning spots on the table, the table surface is painted with enamel), washing powder in a paper bag, cereals in a plastic bag, a woolen cap on Natasha's head, wet rag. The carpet on the wall in the bedroom burned out strangely. The carpet, judging by the description, is made of linen or thick cotton fabric. The fire crossed it vertically in the center, and then moved to the sides, destroying the fabric. After burning, there are practically no traces left on the wallpaper, only a small yellowish spot is noticeable, but the structure of the paper in this place is not disturbed. There is no obvious soot on the ceiling in this place.
There are no obvious signs of a fire in the house. There are a lot of burnt things, some burnt furniture, but the wallpaper and ceiling are relatively clean without soot. Only in some places the burnt wallpaper was torn off and the charred ceiling, window frames, frames and wooden edging of windows and doors, painted with white oil paint or enamel, were cleaned. In these places there were burning window curtains, curtains, a towel and, probably, the paint was charred.
In most cases, the owners extinguished the resulting flame by swatting it with a palm. Moreover, we have clarified the following fact. Some lights appeared right in front of the owners, and they extinguished them in a matter of seconds. At the same time, there was always a hole at the burning site. So the fire was extinguished on the corner of the pillow and on the knitted woolen hat on Natasha's head. We thought in this way: if there were a spontaneously combustible substance, then it first burns out, and then the fabric starts to burn. In this case, the fabric itself is clearly burning, even pure wool and wet.
The corner of the house above the icon was burned in a strange way. D. I. P., on the recommendation of his neighbors, took the icon around the house. When he put the icon in place, a painted towel flashed, as is customary hanging around it. At the same time, the wallpaper and the ceiling were burnt. While extinguishing the fire, the icon fell and the glass of the frame shattered.
According to D. I. P. combustion is preceded by a crackling "like from a battery". On our first visit on February 28, the hosts lived in constant anticipation of new fires. Most of the things were packed in bundles, the furniture was partially moved closer to the exit, in one of the rooms the door was removed from its hinges, the lights were not turned off at night and they did not sleep in turn - they were on duty.
On the second visit on May 29, it was clear that the owners had switched back to a normal lifestyle.
To our humorous question, asked on February 28, “Has anyone here conjured up a spell?”, D. I. P. told the following story. From the abrupt, not always intelligible speech of I. P. we realized the following.
Before the start of the fires, Natasha received a letter from a girl from the village of Berezhnoe (about 15 km from Khoromsk) Alena H. The letter had two sheets. On the first - the usual "children's letter" about school and grades, about how she met Natasha. The second sheet had two different texts on both sides. The first text by D. I. P. called "holy letter", the second - "black letter". The “Holy Letter” was written in children's handwriting and was a text of one of the sects with a story about a certain saint (like St. Alexy), that there would be a trial, and demanding to rewrite the letter and send it to someone else.
“Black Letter” was written in a different handwriting, smaller and with a different slant. In the statement of D. I. P. and translated into Russian it had the following content:
“Glass bottles, flasks … The first bottle is white, in red peas, the second - black in white peas … They will bring bowls, or two … glass bowls and spoons, also glass. Half will be poured out of the white bottle (which - he does not know), from the black - all … And they will sprinkle the house, and what is closer to you … and curtains and more … and last of all they will sprinkle images. Do not tell anyone, or they will kill you … Do not keep the letter in the hut, there will be great grief."
According to D. I. P., Natasha showed him this letter after the start of the fires. D. I. P. he threw all the sheets of the letter into the drowning group and in it "it was already banging like hell" ("it was humming like from diesel fuel").
Natasha met Alena by chance on the eve of the summer (1986), when D. E. F. worked on a collective farm planting cabbage. They saw each other only once, they did not exchange addresses. Alena learned Natasha's address from her grandmother, who lived in Khoromsk, and sent her this letter. Alena and Natasha are the same age, Alena is also 11 years old and she is also in 4th grade.
We met with Alena's mother and Alena herself. The mother said that the news that Alena had sent Natasha some strange letter had spread throughout the district, that the children scared Alena that she could be taken to the police and interrogated like Natasha (the farm was often visited by police officers even after the start of spontaneous combustion, Natasha, D. E. F. and D. I. P. were also summoned to the police station), so she does not confess that she wrote this text. Alena in a conversation with us categorically asserted that she did not write any texts, except for the usual children's letter, did not send and never saw or read such texts.
When talking with Natasha, when we asked where the sheet of paper with the "holy" and "black" letters came from, she replied that it was in Alena's letter. We wanted to lead her to another answer, if it was a lie: "Maybe you found this sheet somewhere, or someone else gave it to you?" Natasha nevertheless categorically asserted that this sheet was from Alena's letter.
We asked about the content of the letter. Natasha said loudly and clearly: "If you tell anyone, they will kill you." She could not say anything more about the content of the letter. In response to all our questions regarding the letter, she was silent. The encouragement of my grandmother did not help either: "Well, tell me, Natasha."
By the time of our second visit, E. Rudakov's article "Miracles" in Khoromsk "appeared in print, where the author wrote that on the eve of the spontaneous combustion, D.'s relative, an eighth-grader Lena N., was pouring out some liquids in their house and then sprinkling them All items. The actions described and the type of bottles (black and white) were associated with "black writing". In order not to frighten Natasha, we told her that we understand these actions as a child's play and asked questions about what this game is. Natasha also answered all these questions with silence. Only at the end did she say in a very low voice: "Lena did it", "We did it as it is written on a piece of paper."
It is possible that the statement “We did it as it is written on the piece of paper” could have been provoked by us. One of our questions stood like this: "Maybe you played as it is written on a piece of paper?"
Our question is: “How can we find Lena? Where does she live? , Obviously confused Natasha and she again remained silent.
It was noticeable that Natasha was embarrassed by issues related to the "black" letter and actions. We did not bother her any more and turned the conversation to another topic.
We decided to contact the journalist E. Rudakov in order to clarify information about the letter and about Lena N.'s actions. The conversation took place over a long-distance telephone. E. Rudakov lives in Brest. He was in Horomsk, but after the peak of events. There was no spontaneous combustion with him. He only confirmed the information presented in the newspaper about the version that arose during the investigation. Once again he pointed out that during the confrontation with Lena N. Natasha was very embarrassed, cried, began to apologize to her and said that she had come up with everything about her actions of mixing liquids and sprinkling them on things in D.
We also talked with the chemist MM, who was conducting research on the farm at the beginning of the events in the spring of 1987. She told us some facts, as well as her observations and version of this phenomenon.
1. She saw a lot of burnt matches scattered on the floor of the house (however, an objection arises: DIP smokes, he is careless and throws out matches at the place where cigarettes are lit).
2. She personally found a matchbox with matches behind the cupboard, their heads cleaned off. In her opinion, a self-igniting substance can be made on the basis of the composition that makes up the match heads.
3. The version of the use of a self-igniting substance is indicated by the fact that the ignition occurred locally and in the middle of things. A chemical analysis of unburned parts of the tissue revealed an increased content of nitrites and nitrates. These substances are found in some self-igniting formulations. However, it is possible that the increased content of nitrites and nitrates is due to other factors, for example, the composition of the water in that region or the type of washing powder.
4. M. M. found out that on the eve of the first fire in the house the following events took place. Natasha was going to enter the pioneer organization and was preparing for the holiday. At that time her friend, a seventh-grader, was visiting her. This girl began to frighten Natasha that misfortune might happen because she did not rewrite and did not send someone a "holy" letter. In this regard, she did not advise her to buy a tie and join a pioneer organization.
According to M. M. this seventh-grader attends a chemistry circle at school and may well have known the composition of some spontaneously combustible substances, the action of which is often demonstrated at school.