Your bizarre news story for the day:

[xiphias]

Spontaneous combustion killed Irish pensioner, inquest rules.

Now, this case has a lot of the hallmarks of the typical "spontaneous human combustion" case: given that the victim had Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, I feel comfortable speculating that he was overweight; he was elderly, and he was sitting next to an open fire. The one typical symptom that is not reported in the story is that the typical victim is also passed out from alcohol. But I'm willing to speculate that the victim was deeply unconscious from some cause or another.

We're taught that the human body is about 60% water, but that's for younger people. In the elderly, it's more often closer to 50%, and the water percentage in the obese is even lower.

The most likely explanation for "spontaneous human combustion" is the ignition of subcutaneous body fat, from some sort of external source of flame. Some source of flame touches the person, and stays in contact long enough to burn through the skin and render and ignite the body fat. The fire spreads along the rest of the fat, and burns the body. The fire is slow and cool enough that the chair or bed underneath the person burns through, and there is heat and smoke damage above the body, but the fire doesn't spread particularly far.

The lower body water percentage of elderly people makes this more likely.

As the flame MUST be in contact with the body for an extended period of time to make this happen, we've got to assume that the victim is deeply, deeply unconscious, or even dead, during this process; otherwise, he or she would surely have, y'know, put out the fire before it could set the body on fire.

Comments

[burgundy.livejournal.com]

"The state pathologist, Prof Grace Callagy, noted in her post-mortem findings that Faherty had Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, but concluded he had not died from heart failure.

His body had been extensively burned and, because of the extensive damage to the organs, it was not possible to determine the cause of death."

Does anyone else find that confusing? His organs were so damaged that they couldn't determine cause of death... but they still know it wasn't heart failure? As you say, in cases like this, someone may already be dead before they catch fire. I guess he could have had a heart attack or a stroke or something and just been comatose or otherwise incapacitated. But those two paragraphs are not well written.

Well, no...

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I don't find it unreasonable, in an area I'm admittedly not familiar with. Think of the corpse as a large, unevenly burned-over field. Heart failure would have left clear signs in Area A, which happens to have survived the fire well enough these signs' absence is evident. Other areas were more badly damaged, and the remaining material is consistent with either absence or presence of the signs.

Re: Well, no...

[burgundy.livejournal.com]

Oh sure, I can get it to make sense. I just think it wasn't presented clearly.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

And people with diabetes sometimes have nerve damage, to the extent they might not notice burning in extremities or outer layers of fat...

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was something else I was thinking, although I didn't put that in the body of the post because I felt that that might be making TOO many conclusions.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

50% water is still pretty damp. It can be hard enough to get dry wood to burn.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I've been interested in SHC for years. This phenomenon is called "wicking," because clothes act like a wick, essentially making the person into an inside-out candle that burns until it consumes itself. On one CSI, Grissom even enacts it with a pig's body (in a nightgown). This helps explains why often only the feet remain.

When I read about it, I thought all SHC had been explained. Except! In one case, there wasn't enough time--the witness might have been mistaken about how long s/he was gone, but s/he was pretty certain. Mostly, in at least one case someone did have spontaneous burns and lived to tell about it. So now most cases are explained, but there's room in which the world goes all wiggly again.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

That's a peculiar use of "spontaneous," considering that some external source of flame is involved. The whole point of spontaneous non-human combustion is that there is NO external source of ignition--no flame, no spark, no external heat like a glowing coal or incandescent bulb.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. That's somewhat my point: that in every case of "spontaneous human combustion", including this one, there's an external source of flame nearby. And so the idea that it's actually, genuinely "spontaneous" seems unlikely.