Aburnt-out case

r Ackroyd

WOMAN IN FLAMES. A woman walk- Flt down a street in Chicago burst into Games for no apparent reason and was turned to death yesterday.' Daily elegraPh, 6 August 1982

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`I Processi of the damned. damn-

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h-' 1 meanon the excl uded . WeBy shallthe have a ,,Pi recession of data that Science has ex- Charles Fort, The Book of the kid here are some of them, walking in oh single file. In Chelmsford school hall, it" 27 April, 1938, a young lady who had :led waltzing on the dance floor was miveloped in 'bluish flame', according to Dail Telegraph, and was 'within notes Jah a blackened mass of ash'. On 4 iri!arY, 1939, an 11-month-old boy lying hIs cot was destroyed in a conflagration. A neighbour tried to open the door of the

child's room and it was 'as if I had opened the door of a furnace' (Daily Telegraph). The child was reduced to ashes, but the fur- niture around him was barely singed.

On rare occasions the fire can be halted. A Professor of Mathematics at the Univer- sity of Nashville, on 5 January 1935, felt a pain in his leg. He looked down and saw a bright flame, several inches in length 'about the size of a dime in diameter and somewhat flattened at the top', spurting from his trousered leg. He put out the flame by putting his hands over it. But if the fire can have meagre origins, it rapidly attains an extraordinary intensity. In July 1951 the re- mains of Mrs Reese were found. They 'con- sisted of a charred liver attached to a piece of backbone, a skull shrunk to the size of a baseball'; everything within a radius of four feet was reduced to ashes but beyond that circle nothing was touched. 'A leg encased in a black satin slipper was burned down to just above the ankle', and the foot itself ob- truded from the circle of destruction.

The familiar name for this phenomenon is 'spontaneous combustion', although it might be more accurately described as 'auto-ignition'. Believers claim for it these characteristics: that a human being can burn without the intervention of an outside agency; that there is a total consumption of the body except — characteristically — the extremities; that the fire is so violent that it reduces its victims to a heap fo greasy ashes but, paradoxically, it is strangely selective in its visitations and rarely damages the sur- roundings of the victim.

These, at least, are the characteristics which have been reported over several centuries: the first treatise on the subject, De Incendiis Corporis Huinanis Spontaneis, was publish- ed in 1763. But although this sudden destruction of human beings has been thoroughly investigated, by coroners just as much as by scientists, it remains part of popular folk-lore, more closely associated with superstition than with knowledge. (Or shall we say, from the innate knowledge which superstitions embody rather than the established theories which scientists manipulate?) It was this element of folk-lore which Charles Dickens tapped in the death of Mr Krook: the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes — or is it coal? 0 Horror, he is here: and this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him.' The horror abides, in the image of a human being consumed in flame, and the

echo of authentic human fears resonates through Dickens's prose, just as it does in those who affirm of deny the existence of the phenomenon.

It is of course scientifically impossible, inconceivable, that a human being could be enveloped in flame which has erupted without outside agencies. Professor Weinberg, of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, drew a graph for me; if a human body ,creates heat, it must also release it. Exp = (E/RT). In addition, `the gap between the least temperature at which you can get auto-ignition and the highest temperature at which human beings can survive must be at least 400 degrees'. In other words, auto-ignition is impossible. But what about the charred and greasy ashes of those who have been destroyed? Well, it seems that you should take a test-tube, wrap it in animal fat and then place several layers of cloth around it — if you then light it, it will burn for several hours, leaving just such a residue. What about 'bluish flames' emerging from the back or the leg? `Bacterial decay in the absence of oxygen produces methane', which can then be set alight. This is clear enough: no human being can catch fire spontaneously and without outside intervention. It cannot hap- pen. It has never happened.

It must be pleasant, these days, to be cer- tain about anything. The interesting ques- tion, however, is not whether it happens or not — I would hesitate to be dogmatic on either side of the argument — but why so many people insist on believing that it does. There are various ways in which you can doubt, or reject, scientific 'truth'. There are those who will fight against any orthodoxy, simply because it is an orthodoxy, and when told that something is impossible they will reply that they believe it because it is impossible. There are also people — a large part of the population, I would guess •— who have no interest in, or understanding of, scientific principles and are content to live with earlier and less articulated forms of belief.

ut there are those who do not reject or Llignore science, and who are concerned only to mark out the limits of its terrain. Science deals with verifiable and reproduc- ible phenomena — since spontaneous com- bustion is unreproducible and apparently unverifiable, science can play no part in its description or evaluation. Whereof they cannot speak, scientists must remain silent. But since spontaneous combustion (if it oc- curs) actively defies scientific laws, it can be associated with other phenomena — like that of poltergeists, to which it is often con- nected — which actively subvert the model of the universe which science has con- structed. We return to a world in which the language of 'impossibility' ceases to play any part. This represents in one aspect a kind of freedom — science, as Professor Weinberg explained, must work upon the premise that 'what happens today will hap- pen tomorrow' — but it also guides us back

to that primitive and mysterious sense el life which conceivably still lurks benea`rf the skin of our civilised exteriors. What " people do burn up for no apparent reas°11, what if (to choose familiar exaMPles: they can also levitate, disappear, or hat° the places where they died? There is another way of putting it. dye have all had the sensation of 'burning' w;„" embarrassment. We know that Yogis raise the temperature of their bodies at vi,"," We know that saints are conventional depicted with halos because of a quality v,°.. brightness associated with them — like fields of energy which surround livtg organisms and which are depicted by Ole; photography. We know, also, that there ,:-e people who can resist flame or heat ""e those who walk upon burning coals. S°11/,,5 adherents to the theory of spontane°". combustion would claim that the P0ssni. bilities of the human being are endless9„t: thought of, not susceptible to rationaa!"; tion; that there is an energy within all things which can only be interrnittenue glimpsed or employed. Why should th.ese energies not take the form of destrtle"of fire, and overturn the material certainties to the scientists? And if a scientist were then of accuse these people of vagueness hill, and satisfactorily perhaps they will ask "„„'d

nature e to

But ito would be misleading to sugges- leccxitp the real origin

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ylain t that the theories of spontaneous combustion ;5 implicitly pitted against scientific PrinciP of — there are, after all, detailed the phenomenon long before such Pr it ciples were established. For if it is a inYt",r, is one which reaches down into• tion and deeper instincts more — the vigor; of fire, and the consumed bodY, images of fears that have never satisfaewc a ly been laid to rest. It is, I would hazarish. guess, an image of vengeance — of P,t1,1.ble ment, but punishment of an inexP"e", be kind. It survives simply because it canri°1,1e hwuomrldanasp explained — and because its unfath001,4"0 nature brings us closer to the reality ol'of reports • wive' erts spontaneous combustion implicitly as the erwseonfaeleicitantod ob fe.jnhealfolinfecePt. h is darker and more mysterious than scientific vision of the world. fire The idea of selective destruction by the 'fire from heaven' — reaches ot"is into the roots of terror and of belief: t..1! in why its proponents remain unshakeahtists their adherence to it, and cannot with all their graphs and stattsibis challenge its validity. Dickens, in ended defen!. .1 preface to Bleak House, stronglY the theory of spontaneous cornbusti°H,lall shall not abandon the facts until there seti_us have been a considerable Spontaa:ich Combustion of the testimony on

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human occurrences are usually rece The fact that this remains the name Tsof

why scien._.ics

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'impossible' event, and that testimorn

its existence are still being received, so, it that the terrors and the possibilities whi,."oto us. represents are still not too far away "