#chorley

Sightings - S3E05 - “Human Candles“ - October 9th, 1994

I have a few policies I follow on this blog. One is when I post about a real murder case, unless it's famous in some way, I never name or feature the victims and their families. This makes psychic detective stories even worse to cover. One is that I try not to feature children, though I'm gradually wondering if that's silly, not because it makes covering creepy kid haunting stories hard (though it does) but bc of the dawning realization that some of the kids in these segments could be grandparents by now.

The most unshakable one is that I don't feature images of actual dead people. This makes a spontaneous human combustion story hard to cover, because yes, it's mainly made up of all the photos you can picture in your head.

Anyway...

“For more than three hundred years, there have been strange reports of people who were found dead, reduced to ash while everything around them remains unburned. It’s called spontaneous human combustion, but that popular term is kind of a misnomer. In this phenomenon, people don’t suddenly burst into flame. Instead they appear to have been slowly devoured by intense heat from the inside out...”

We're finally tackling spontaneous human combustion, and we're going to England to cover it for some reason.

“We’re talking about a situation where the fire is so localized that within a inch or two of the body, which has turned to ash besides a few extremities perhaps, there is virtually no fire damage at all...the implication from that, although it is of course not proven, is that the fire begins internally and spreads outwards from the body...” says author Jenny Randles.

Our requisite skeptic is...famous paranormal skeptic Joe Nickell making his only (according to IMDB) Sightings appearance???

He says there is no way the human body can spontaneously combust because the body is primarily water and there is no mechanism to cause combustion

Cremator Pamela Byrne says that she's never seen a body cremated to nothing...and Nickell quickly swoops in to say you can't compare crematoriums to random fires as they're different phenomenon. He, too, points that while these are unusual deaths they're not unexplainable - after all, you can stand next to a campfire and suffer no effects. Fire is weird.

Retired fire chief William Cooney says a human is a box of combustible materials, and humans burn like anything else, which is a normal thing to say!

Investigator Peter Hough details a case from Chorley, England, in 1980: a elderly woman who lived alone was found burnt to ash in a unburnt room after black smoke appeared from the chimney.

Spontaneous human combustion used to be one of the classic mysteries, like the Bermuda Triangle, and one of the classic Things To Be Afraid Of, along with quicksand. But it's faded away in recent years, both in number of cases (though there's been a few - one was officially dubbed "spontaneous combustion" in Ireland in 2010) and in pop culture relevance.

This is odd because, like, it happens. This isn't blurry photos of Bigfoot. The deaths in question are 100% real, it's only a matter of debate what caused them. Nobody's come up with a clear theory explaining all of them; one theory holds that there is a "wick effect" where the victim's fat essentially makes them act like - yes, the power source for a human candle.

Danuary, day 25

Hivetale AU!

Hivetale’s frisk is Fraisier or Fritter. They are a nurse in pediatric and neonatal services in the skelefive AU. They/Them.

5/12/20