'Spontaneous' Combustion: Can Bodies Burn From the Inside Out?

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"There's absolutely no mechanism I've ever seen demonstrated that will cause a body to catch fire from within and burn by itself," says DeHaan. Through his work with the San Luis Obispo Fire Investigation Strike Team and his own company, Fire-Ex Forensics, DeHaan has examined hundreds of charred corpses, and for educational purposes, torched many himself.

"When the first reference everybody drops about a subject is Charles Dickens, you have to wonder about its veracity," DeHaan says. In Dickens' novel Bleak House, an alcoholic junk dealer spontaneously combusts, his remains resembling “the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes." This scene is cited frequently as classic literature's most prominent case of SHC.

"What many people don't know about Dickens is that he was an ardent prohibitionist," DeHaan says. "He devoted a tremendous amount of energy to campaigning against the evils of alcohol. He created Krook as an example of the bad things that can happen to an alcoholic."

As do most scientists, DeHaan credits alleged SHC to the "wick effect," by which an external ignition source -- say, clothes or hair ignited by a cigarette -- acts as a wick that splits the skin, penetrating the dermal layers to expose highly flammable subcutaneous body fat, which burns madly, shooting out flames that split more skin, exposing more fat, which burns madly.

"Candlewax burns fine," DeHaan says, "but only as long as you give it a wick."

According to his experiments, subcutaneous body fat has a heating value of 32 kilojoules per gram. So does ethanol, compared to candlewax's 44 kilojoules per gram, gasoline's 46 and muscle tissue's puny five. Human skin has an even lower heating value than muscle, virtually sealing the body in a watery sheath.

In one case he helped investigate, a California woman was last seen alive at 9:30am. By 2:30pm, smoke was wafting from under her front door. Her still-burning corpse lay inside, much of its upper half burned away, as was the carpet beneath it.

"There was no other fire damage. But leading from the kitchen to the front door, almost too small to see, was a tiny trail of melted plastic and cloth," DeHaan says. "One of the electric elements of her stove was still on. She had placed foil on a burner to create an improvised hotplate" on which she had tried to cook a plastic-wrapped meal.

"This lady was an alcoholic. The postmortem showed a .31 blood-alcohol level. Because of her inebriated state, she lost track of how hot her improvised hotplate was. It set fire to the plastic. Instead of throwing this into the sink, she picked it up and made for the exit. If you run while holding a flaming object, the air current moves that flame toward your body. The loose top she was wearing caught fire. She looked down, saw the flames and inhaled. Phoom!"

DeHaan says that in virtually all alleged SHC cases, "The so-called mystery is that the external ignition source is almost certain to be in another room where you might not think to look for it. People who are found burned through their bathroom floors probably set themselves on fire in the kitchen or living room and made for the bathroom, because that's where the water is." In the hotplate case, "if not for the little trail of burned plastic, you could never have traced it."

Inhaling flames causes instant death, the corpse then consumed via the wick effect. Don't look down at your burning shirt, keep your mouth shut, "and the flames divide up around the chin to the back of the scalp" rather than entering the respiratory system. Hellish, but potentially survivable, DeHaan says.