Sure, I can dig some links out for you. Is it ok to post direct links to other MBs (not sure of the rules?). If not I could message them to you but in general I see plenty of scepticism/outright disbelief regarding the verdict.
Aye! It sounds like SCOOP: Spontaneous Combustion Of Opinion Poster. Will there be an inquiry or… a cover up!
Quite simply, in the Australian/English and (by the sound of it) Irish system the coroner is effectively like a judge: he isn’t required to be a subject matter expert, he is just required to receive all the subject matter expertise from others, and form a view on competing expert views if any.
As to the OP, I always think that SHC is really like a syndrome rather than a disease: it just means someone burnt up and the cause isn’t known, so we are going to give the situation a name.
Saying someone died from SHC is like self importantly announcing that the cause of a car crash was “SSS”. It sounds like it means something definite… until you later learn that just means Sudden Smash Syndrome and is a term used when there was a smash and no one knows why.
This one should have been a locksmith:
Or maybe he’s a polymath with dozens of specialties.
One thing that strikes me about “spontaneous human combustion” is that (aside from two poorly-reported, wild assertions in the Wikipedia article that notably did NOT result in SHC) no one has ever witnessed SHC start.
It appears to be exclusively an after-the-fact explanation attached to evidence left behind by something we did not see happen.
Whoops, wrong thread
Oddly (:eek:) only a couple of days ago I was reading an Ann Rule story ("The Truck Driver’s Wife) about a 1976 death in which the female victim was found badly burned in a bedroom which otherwise had not been severely damaged by the fire.
The victim had a bump over her eye which could have been trauma-related, she’d been involved in one or more extramarital affairs, was rumored to be connected to drug-running and had sex a short time before her death (her husband was out of town), but Rule had to “wonder” if spontaneous human combustion might be the explanation for her death.
But of course. :dubious:
One wonders why we don’t see evidence of spontaneous combustion in the wild - like charred corpses of chipmunks, deer and the like which have combusted without significant damage to the forest around them. We’ve got photos of Bigfoot, why not of Spontaneous Weasel Combustion?
Aha! Add Adele Waldack to that list who actually lived to tell about surviving spontaneous combustion in 2002. At least that’s what some people called it. So make that three (anybody wanna update the wiki?)
So, is she officially on the TSA’s no-fly list (it would be disconcerting to say the least to have the passenger next to you burst into flames)? Or do they just allow her to carry more than the allotted three ounces of liquids?
I agree-nothing supernatural about human combstion. But why does the fire go out? Why doesn’t the fire spread? I mean, if a copse is burning for several hours, why don’t the walls and floors catch fire?
If the fire is primarily of human fat, and it is only very slow, then it may not produce enough heat to set the ceiling and any walls on fire at a distance.
Even if the floor under the body is wood, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily going to catch fire and burn to completion. Fire doesn’t burn downward very well, and it also doesn’t burn large shapes (like continuous floorboards) well from above. Try getting a large flat slab of hardwood and lighting a fire entirely on top of it using small kindling. The kindling will burn up and char the top of the slab but probably won’t cause the slab to catch fire and burn to completion if at all.
Further, if the above occurs in a closed room, a lack of oxygen will make a small slow smouldering fire that does not easily transfer to other flammables nearby even more likely.
Don’t forget also that for every case where someone dies and catches fire alone and at home, there may be tens of thousands where this causes a substantial house fire and everything is burnt to a crisp. Such cases would just be described as housefires and no one would bat an eyelid. It’s only in the extremely rare cases where somewhat freakishly the human fire happens to occur in just the right situation that nothing else is near enough or flammable enough to set anything else on fire that it evokes comment.
No need for links or messages - just your overview as given here is what I’d like to know. Thanks for the feedback.
Very impressive reply, Princhester!