The Burning Query. . .

 

 

More than five decades ago – 1951 to be precise – in St. Petersburg, Florida, Pansy Carpenter raised an alarm when she went to deliver a telegram to her tenant, Mary Reesner and found the door-knob unusually hot to touch! The police barged into the apartment, only to find the charred remains of the lady (barring one of her feet in which she was wearing her slipper), along with the ashes of the chair on which she was sitting! The peculiarity of the event lay in the facts that the skull had shrunk to ‘the size of a teacup’ and that every other item in the room was unaffected, save for the plastic appliances which had lost their shape due to excessive heat in the room… This incident virtually proved the phenomenon that had been haunting mankind since time immemorial – the endlessly debated theory of Spontaneous Human Combustion or SHC. Be it fiction (typically when noted playwright Charles Dickens expostulated the theory, narrating the case of a German liquor shop owner in Columbus, Ohio, when he mysteriously burst into flames, about which Dickens wrote, he was “engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself”) or reality, SHC has evaded virtually the entire gamut of pertinent explanations and rationalising. Although a plethora of scientific theories have been put forth to validate the phenomenon, none have really pacified the confounded casualties. When the renowned British science fiction author, Arthur C Clarke remarked, “Some cases seems to defy explanation, and leave me with a very creepy, and a very unscientific feeling. If there’s anything more to Spontaneous Human Combustion, I don’t want to know”, he perhaps wasn’t the only one to feel in that manner!