For 300 years, people have been found reduced to ash while the chair and room around them hardly burned. No flame, no witness. Is it 'spontaneous human combustion' — or a gruesome human candle?
Around 200 reported cases over three centuries: a body almost completely consumed by fire with no clear ignition source, often in a room left strangely intact.
In 1951 Mary Reeser was found as a pile of ash and a single intact foot still in its slipper, her chair gone but the apartment barely touched. The classic case.
The leading explanation: clothing acts as a wick, melting body fat becomes the fuel, and a small flame can slowly consume a body over hours.
A forensic walkthrough of how fire really consumes a body, and why the eerie 'untouched room' scenes have a grimly ordinary explanation.
A survey of the baffling cases and the mundane triggers — a cigarette, a sleeping or intoxicated victim, melted fat — that keep a slow fire alive.
Scientific American on the physics of the wick effect — why human fat ignites only near 250 C, and how researchers tested the idea on wrapped carcasses.
Britannica weighs the myth against the evidence — including Charles Dickens, who killed off a character this way and defended it as fact.