Jacqueline was a 17-year-old teenager studying at Halton Technical College in Cheshire, England. According to her teachers, she was a cheerful girl, very popular and hard-working. On January 8, 1985, Jacquie, as she was known, was chatting casually with her classmates in one of the school corridors when she suddenly told one of her friends, Karen Glenholmes, that she was beginning to feel unwell and had a burning sensation in the back . In an interview with the BBC Karen said that “there was a smell like a slow fire and he started screaming for help, saying he was burning. We didn’t see fire on her clothes but when we ripped it out we saw that it was burning under her clothes.”
Teachers and students were able to put out the fire with wet towels and rushed her to the hospital: 18% of her skin was burned . Two weeks later, he died of burns.
During the investigation of the incident, everything recreated was recreated; A mannequin was even placed with clothes similar to the one Jaquie wore. County fire marshal Bert Gillies said during the hearing that “there has to be some explanation, but we should consider spontaneous human combustion as a possibility.”
Burn for no apparent reason
Spontaneous human combustion looks like something out of a movie, but it is not a new phenomenon. The first known accounts date back to 1641 and since then there have been about 200 moderately documented cases of people who have set themselves on fire for no apparent reason. The phenomenon is so striking that it appears in novels such as Redburn by Herman Melville, Dead Souls by the Russian Mikolai Gogol or in the most famous The Bleak House by Charles Dickens, where a sordid alcoholic merchant, Krook, ended up as a pile of ashes on the floor and “a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. Dickens was accused of killing a character in an unbelievable way and the writer defended himself by saying that this death was inspired by a real case: “There are records of about 30 cases, the most famous of which, that of Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate, investigated it and described it with great detail Giuseppe Bianchini, a patron of Verona, a distinguished person in the world of letters, who published a story about it in 1731 in Verona and later republished it in Rome”.
If we ask a scientist if a human body can burn, he will suddenly say no. Since the human body is made up mostly of water and the only things that are flammable are fatty tissue and methane gas , the possibility that this is a real phenomenon seems very remote. Many dismiss it as real, claiming that an undetected flame source, such as a match or cigarette, is the real culprit. Victims are usually found near a source of fire, as happened in 2010 with Michael Faherty, a 76-year-old man whose burned body was found near a fireplace in a room that was unharmed. For this and other cases, the so-called ” wick effect ” is often given as an explanation: a small flame, like a lit cigarette, reaches the victim’s clothing, penetrates and burns the skin, releasing some subcutaneous fat that the burned clothing absorbs, acting as a wick This fat, once heated, soaks into clothing like wax into a candle wick, providing the fuel needed to keep it burning. Initially the water in the body could prevent combustion but, as it is a slow combustion, it also slowly evaporates. In general, the human body has enough energy stored in the form of fat to completely burn the body. The wick effect also explains why limbs appear intact : since they tend to have less fat, they do not burn. Similarly, it explains why many of the victims have been obese people.
An explanation that does not hold
The wick effect was experimentally tested in 1998 during a BBC program with a pig wrapped in a blanket: the body took time to catch fire but after burning for five hours the parts that had been in contact with the fire, including bones, were reduced to ashes. But this explanation still suffers from quite a few problems: one is that the experiment required an initial flame and an accelerator . The defenders of spontaneous human combustion counterattack by saying that if we are dealing with a slow process, why don’t the victims run away when they burst into flames? If you are burning you move, throw yourself on the floor, push furniture… and in many cases it seems as if you have stayed there, calmly, watching your body burn.
The mystery of Jacquie’s death still lingers. Suspicion fell on the cooking class he had before he was burned. Even Jacquie herself, when questioned at the hospital, said it had to have been the kitchen fires, and the grand jury found that to be the cause.
Reference:
Strange and anomalous phenomena (1985), New Horizons Research Foundation
