Ah! 2 July, 71st anniversary of the day Mary Reeser’s landlady went to deliver a telegram and found her door handle too hot to touch. She called the police, and the photo of what they found launched a million childhood nightmares.
It was made most famous by that stalwart of 1970s coffee tables, The Unexplained magazine:
…and even popped up on the BBC’s QED (in an episode which sounds like it’s being voiced over by BAFTA-winning — but not for this — Anna Massey):
Was it spontaneous human combustion? Was that really a thing? Might it happen to me IN MY BED AT NIGHT? Probably not, although what happened is apparently still a mystery. Still, some explanations are more plausible than others…
All sorts of theories were sent in to the local police chief, including the magnificent
A ball of fire came through the open window and hit her. I seen it happen
Thankfully, the days of scientifically illiterate people saying any old bollocks in response to a news story are all behind us now
Eventually, the police in this case wrote to yer actual J Edgar Hoover and asked the FBI to look into it.
The FBI’s explanation — “that Mrs. Reeser’s own body fat provided the fuel for the fire that consumed her” — is still considered the most likely, but that doesn’t mean it was spontaneous:
Mrs. Reeser was visited shortly before her death by her physician son, Richard Reeser. She was depressed because she thought she wasn’t going to be able to travel north for the summer. She hadn’t eaten dinner and told her son she had taken two Seconal tablets and might take two more before retiring. According to the FBI, the sedated widow apparently sat down in an upholstered chair and fell asleep while smoking a cigarette. The cigarette set fire to her acetate nightgown and housecoat. Though the upholstered chair had fire-retardant treatment, it burned, too. At the end of the fire Mrs. Reeser was gone, and nothing remained of the chair but the springs.
Mary wasn’t the first. The first documented case was in 1635, with Countess Cornelia Bandi providing one of the most historically celebrated instances in 1741. She, too, left her legs behind:
(Whatever started the fire in her case probably wasn’t helped by her habit of regularly chucking camphorated brandy over herself as some sort of health remedy.)
Mary also wasn’t the last. Mysterious consumings by fire were still being reported in the early 1990s “but after that it sort of trailed off”. Why? Well, it might be that people don’t smoke late at night in highly flammable clothes any more.
…or (my theory) people are still dying this way in the same numbers, but journalists now are on average younger than those of us traumatised by that photo, so they don’t cover the subject to quite the same extent that previous generations did.
Anyway, to distract from all this unpleasantness, let’s look at a lovely children’s book. Oh dear, it’s Struwwelpeter, in which Harriet plays with matches, and leaves behind only her shoes…
Please don’t have nightmares. Do sleep well.
