On May 15, 1986, a gentleman in Gwent, England, sat in front of his fireplace, stretched out his feet and burst into flames.
Or so the story goes.
All that remained for the scene-of-crime officers to find were a pile of ashes in the partially burned chair, a blackened skull and feet - still in socks. About a yard away, says The New Scientist, a British journal, was a settee, unscorched. Plastic tiles under the rug were undamaged.
Not that most logical, scientifically minded people believe such tales, but it's one of about 200 cases of spontaneous human combustion on record, says folklorist David J. Hufford of Penn State's College of Medicine. Hufford, who has done research on unusual medical phenomena, says the reports "appear to be" authentic - he's seen autopsy reports, news stories and photos.
While doctors attempt to unravel the mystery surrounding fumes that knocked out a doctor and five nurses Feb. 19 in a Riverside, Calif., emergency room, collectors of medical anomalies are taking note, reminded that truth is stranger than fiction, and sometimes the line between the two isn't clear.
"Medicine only really got going in the middle of this century, and there's a vast amount of legend and superstition," says Dr. Richard Gordon, author of The Alarming History of Medicine.
He's gathered dozens of examples, ranging from a persistent story that Napoleon was killed by arsenic in his wallpaper (he really died from stomach cancer, Gordon says) to the tale of Mary Taft, who "gave birth to 17 rabbits April 23, 1726," he says. "At Windsor Castle, they were talking of little else."
The simple explanation: "She thought she was going to make money and fame out of it," Gordon says. "The idiotic doctors believed her. She ended up in jail for 14 years for receiving stolen property, i.e. rabbits."
Of spontaneous combustion, Gordon says, "It's known as a very real thing. (But) it's not a real thing. It doesn't really happen. It's (been around) since 1681 when a man who drank lot of brandy in Germany suddenly, supposedly, ignited."
Paul Sieveking has become an expert on oddball medical stories as editor for 20 years of the Fortean Times, a bimonthly journal of the weird published in London, England.
Interrupted on deadline, he scanned his memory for recent tales. There's the one about the Congolese woman who didn't know she was pregnant and set off on a three-day, 60-mile journey. "She had triplets, each in a different place," he says.
And the undeveloped fetus removed from inside a baby in New Delhi; the Salt Lake City woman who removed her own tonsils; the girl who sneezed for two months; the blind man who tripped over his dog, landed on his head and could see.
"And there was a bloke who had a pain in his scrotum and it was discovered he had a uterus between his testicles," Sieveking says. "Theoretically, he could have fertilized himself."
A more common occurrence, he swears, is "foreign language syndrome, where people get hit over the head and begin speaking in a foreign language. That happens in America, all over the place."
Judging from the reaction of Dr. Jerome Kassirer, editor-in-chief of the prestigious and no-nonsense New England Journal of Medicine, a little skepticism might be in order.
"Spontaneous human combustion?" he asks. "Hahahaha! . . . out of the blue? . . . hahaha, that's terrific! I think it's a riot! I never heard of it. It sounds preposterous."
OK, well, how about getting conked on the head and suddenly speaking a foreign language?
"Hahahaha! You mean having never spoken the language before?" Kassirer howls.
So maybe those phenomena haven't yet made it into the peer-reviewed journals. Medicine is still a science and art, full of the unexplained, Kassirer agrees.
"The diagnostic process is a mystery," he says. "That's one of the exciting aspects of medicine, that there's substantial mystery in trying to figure out what's wrong with a patient. You bark up a wrong tree for a long time with tests, and you're simply off base. Sometimes, you find (the answer) almost by accident."
That's a far cry from exploding bodies, he says.
Still, reports of spontaneous human combustion have believers. Sieveking insists they may be more common than we know, "because coroners suppress it."
Descriptions, wherever they appear, are eerily similar, Hufford argues.
"It's often someone who lives alone, often an elderly person," he says. "And what you find is a body which seems to have burned from the inside, starting with the torso. It's the reverse of ordinary burning.
"It looks sort of like what you might get if there were a sudden burst of microwave radiation," Hufford says.
But, he concedes, "it's not much of an explanation, because where do these microwaves come from?"
Any other suggestions? Well, there's ball lightning - "a mystery, but is generally accepted to exist." Ball lightning, he says, is "a static charge that bounces around until it hits something."
Why it would attack humans in the torso is not clear.
Chalk it up to the unknown. Dr. Richard Cytowic, a Washington, D.C., neurologist who studies people with synesthesia - a rare ability to experience senses simultaneously, so they smell colors or taste music - says nature "shows her secrets through her exceptions."
He cites mysteries, such as heat meditation by Tibetan monks, who lie down and become "extremely hot. It seems spooky at first," Cytowic says, "but we know from biofeedback we can slow our heart rate, raise our body temperature."
Brain disruptions, such as epilepsy or small blockages of blood flow, can cause seemingly strange or paranormal experiences, like out-of-body sensations and transient amnesia that can be explained medically, he says. And, eventually, the case of the mystery fumes in California may be explained, too.
Or, maybe not.
"We think of modern science as the pursuit of objective data," Cytowic says. "Sometimes it takes something like this to change our way of thinking."
