Agnostic.com

3 1

Spontaneous combustion. Is it real ?

"Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life," author Terry Pratchett once wrote.

A few years ago it was in the news but these days not so much. can it actually happen ?

Moravian 8 Mar 26
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

3 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

1

Spontaneous combustion is real. Most commonly wet hay combusts when it dries igniting barns. Spontaneous human combustion is not real, unfortunately. It was just a misunderstanding of circumstances surrounding some bizarre accidents.

JimG Level 8 Mar 26, 2019

@TheAstroChuck Thank you.

2

Materials can be subject to spontaneous combustion in certain storage conditions. Human spontaneous combustion is less than likely. Significantly there has never been an eyewitness at any of these so called phenomenons. The victims have always been alone, beside some heat source and either drinking or smoking.

Those that were not known to be heavy drinkers tended to suffer reduced mobility, which appears to confirm this hypothesis.

2

Do you mean spontaneous combustion, which is a a real and explained phenomenon affecting a range of materials under certain conditions, or spontaneous human combustion? The latter seems likely to be a myth, caused partly by poor methods of investigation and partly by many proponents' deliberate selectiveness when recording data and facts.

Jnei Level 8 Mar 26, 2019

Agree...spontaneous combustion of materials definitely factual, spontaneous human combustion unlikely. Significantly no one has ever witnessed a spontaneous human combustion.

@Marionville It's known to affect bulk-stored pistachios, apparently. I eat a lot of pistachios...! 😀

@Jnei I worked for an International charity and we sometimes stored huge piles of collected bags of clothing....there was once an incidence of spontaneous combustion in one of the warehouses.

@Jnei You will need to watch out then! ?

I realise certain materials can self combust such as hay or straw stored when damp. I was referring to human spontaneous combustion.
There were a couple of cases of a completely burned out body found in a poorly ventilated room with fat deposits on windows. One theory was that the clothing of the person caught alight from a source such as a gas fire or cigarette. The fire then melted the subcutaneous fat of the body which soaked into the clothing and this then burned more of the body and so on in the low oxygen environment.
Of course it should not be called spontaneous combustion as there was an original heat source.

I agree that it is very unlikely but I would not discount it entirely

@Moravian I assumed you were. The process you describe in known as wicking, incidentally - interestingly, the hands and feet which both have much less fat than other parts of the body tend to be left unburned. In my opinion, there's probably very little reason to think SHC is a real phenomenon but as cases are very rare there's not a great deal of data and as a result it's not been possible to entirely refute it.

You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:318333
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.