The Legend:
For as yet scientifically unknown reasons, times occur when an unsuspecting person can just burst into flames and be incinerated.
The flames begin within the victim's own body and are horribly complete in their work, reducing their human fuel to a pile of ashes in minutes -- sometimes seconds. The whole event is so quick and selective that objects near the victim show only minor heat damage, if any at all; sometimes, even the victim's clothes are left untouched.
These inner flames have been occurring for as long as mankind has existed; but most coroners, pathologists, scientists, and fire officials ignore such evidence, blithely choosing much neater and less controversial explanations for these unexplained deaths.
A Brief History
Many contend that Spontaneous Human Combustion is first documented in such early texts as the Bible, but, scientifically speaking, these accounts are too old and secondhand to be seen as reliable evidence. The first reliable historic evidence of SHC appears to be from the year 1763, when Frenchman Jonas Dupont published a collection of SHC cases and studies entitled De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis. Dupont was inspired to write this book after encountering records of the Nicole Millet case, in which a man was acquitted of the murder of his wife when the court was convinced that she had been killed by spontaneous combustion. Dupont's book on this strange subject brought it out of the realm of folkloric rumor and into the popular public imagination.
Continuing belief in SHC in the 1800's is evidenced in the number of writers that called on it for a dramatic death scene. Most of these authors were hacks that worked on the 19th century equivalent of comic books, "penny dreadfuls", so no one got too worked up about it; but two big names in the literary world also used SHC as a dramatic device, and one did cause a stir. The first of these two authors was Captain Marryat who, in his novel Jacob Faithful, borrowed details from a report in the Times of London of 1832 to describe the death of his lead character's mother, who is reduced to "a sort of unctuous pitchey cinder."
Twenty years later, in 1852, Charles Dickens used SHC to kill off a character named Krook in his novel Bleak House. Krook was a heavy alcoholic, true to the popular belief at the time that SHC was caused by excessive drinking. The novel caused a minor uproar; George Henry Lewes, philosopher and critic, declared that SHC was impossible, and derided Dickens' work as perpetuating a uneducated superstition. Dickens responded to this statement in the preface of the 2nd edition of his work, making it quite clear that he had researched the subject and knew of about thirty cases of SHC. The details of Krook's death in Bleak House were directly modeled on the details of the death of the Countess Cornelia de Bandi Cesenate by this extraordinary means; the only other case that Dickens actually cites details from is the Nicole Millet account that inspired Dupont's book about 100 years earlier.
After this brief flap blew over, general interest in the subject ran cold until 1951, when the Mary Reeser case captured the public imagination. Mrs. Reeser was found in her apartment on the morning of July 2, 1951, reduced to a pile of ashes, a skull, and a completely undamaged left foot. This event has become the foundation for many a book on the subject of SHC since, the most notable being Michael Harrison's Fire From Heaven, printed in 1976.