Boiling Epsom Salts?

[pluto]

We had a Halloween tragedy here in Seattle this year. An older lady died from burns suffered when her clothes caught fire at a Halloween party.

She and some friends were celebrating with a medieval theme and were gathered around a fire, boiling epsom salts! When they tried to add rubbing alcohol to the mix the acohol spilled on this woman's clothes and she was burned.

Can anyone tell me why in the world these women were doing this? What was the point of the epsom salts? It wasn't clear from the newspaper article whether this was epsom salts dissolved in water or the actual salts being melted and boiled.

Have any of you medieval or renaissance types heard of this before?

[jessicala]

I don't know about burning Epsom salts, but here are a couple links:

http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/burn02.shtml
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ and scroll down to the link "One dead from fire at Bellevue party"

[jessicala]

aha, I just found this:

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/OM/L-hekaterecip.html

(Is this the same LunaSea that posts here?)

It talks about using Epsom salts and alcohol for an indoor cauldron fire and says:

This fire is safer for indoor use than one made of charcoal. Its by-products are carbon dioxide and water vapor, whereas charcoal will produce smoke and dangerous carbon monoxide.

[pluto]

Thanks, JayLa. The story I read was much less complete. Apparently they weren't boiling the epsom salts, but using them as ballast, more or less, in their dutch oven cauldron, with the alcohol as fuel.

Still, it's difficult to imagine how awful it must be to have a fun, celebratory get-together turn into such a tragedy.

[Tapioca Dextrin]

Originally posted by pluto
She and some friends were celebrating with a medieval theme and were gathered around a fire, boiling epsom salts!

And just how was this medieval? :confused:

[pluto]

Colin --

That was the point of my OP. The article I read mentioned the medieval theme and the epsom salts. I was hoping someone could make the connection for me, which JayLa did.

After further review, the writer of the news article could probably have found a more accurate term than "medieval" but only at some sacrifice of political correctness. There was obviously some, um, witchcraft (to use a non-PC term) going on but the article rightly chose to de-emphasize that in light of the tragic outcome.