Spontaneous Human Combustion

[Lon]

It was a Sunday morning in 1963 and I was on duty as a Licensed Embalmer Funeral Director. I answered a phone call telling me that there had been a fire at a home on Mt. Clark and they thought that someone must have died in the fire. My apprentice and I drove to the home in our removal vehicle and were surprised to not see any outward damage to the home. The home was situated on 120 acres of Apple Orchard. We entered the home through the front door which was not locked and immediately saw that there had been a fire. Directly in front of us was a television set that was on and flickering with no picture, a round blackened hole in the tongue and groove floor measuring maybe three feet in diameter, charred Sunday newspapers scattered around the periphery of the hole in the floor, a TV stand with a bottle of Scotch and a glass, but no chair in front of the TV or TV stand. I went back to our vehicle and got a torch and shone it down on the ground below the flooring which was maybe four feet. Going down into the hole wearing rubber gloves I was able to collect 8 to 9 pounds of cremated remains of what was once a man of 210 lbs. Most of the windows in the home were cracked from what was obviously intense heat, plastic items like tooth brushes and door bell chime holder were mishapened, but nothing was burned and no smoke residue or odor. The deseased was a prominent business executive for a major insurance company and had a substantial amount of life insurance on his life. He was also known to have a drinking problem. We called the police and fire department investigators and spent the next 14 hours scratching our heads trying to figure out how something like this could possibly happen.

Crematories use intense heat under pressure to creamate a human body that does the same thing, but how this could happen in a home with out burning every thing up was a real mystery to all of us.

The theory was that he was sitting in a Danish Modern chair (destroyed in the fire) watching TV and drinking Scotch and smoking a ciggaret. He passed out, the cig ignited his clothing and Kapok cushions on the chair and the WICK EFFECT took over.

Wick effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia