Possible Spontaneous Human Combustion Case in Michigan

The circumstances surrounding a man’s death in Michigan could be a case of spontaneous human combustion, a phenomenon which a human body catches fire without an external source and which you won’t find in a coroner’s report as an official cause of death.

Here’s the details of the case:

Officials are baffled over a mysterious fire that took the life of a 92-yr-old patient at Botsford Hospital in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

From Freep.com.:

An autopsy was planned for today for a 92-year-old Botsford Hospital patient who died Friday after being found on fire by a nurse in a case that has hospital officials puzzled.

Margo Gorchow, a spokeswoman at the Farmington Hills hospital, said police and fire investigators are interviewing hospital staff and family members in hopes of piecing together how the patient caught fire when nothing else in the room was ablaze.

-A nurse discovered the man who was on fire,

-Nothing else in the room was burned,

-The fire wasn’t started by nearby equipment or from smoking.

-The patient died the next day.

Authorities are hoping the autopsy will shed light on the man’s cause of death. Most likely, his cause of death will be listed as death by unexplained fire, cause undetermined.

According to How Stuff Works, “spontaneous combustion occurs when an object — in the case of spontaneous human combustion, a person — bursts into flame from a chemical reaction within, apparently without being ignited by an external heat source”.

Spontaneous combustion in humans have been recorded beginning in 1663 after a woman in Paris “went up in ashes and smoke” according to Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin.

The hundreds of spontaneous human combustion accounts since that time have followed a similar pattern: The victim is almost completely consumed, usually inside his or her home. Coroners at the scene have sometimes noted a sweet, smoky smell in the room where the incident occurred.

What makes the charred bodies in the photos of spontaneous human combustion so peculiar is that the extremities often remain intact. Although the torso and head are charred beyond recognition, the hands, feet, and/or part of the legs may be unburned. Also, the room around the person shows little or no signs of a fire, aside from a greasy residue that is sometimes left on furniture and walls. In rare cases, the internal organs of a victim remain untouched while the outside of the body is charred.

Scientists have yet to recognize spontaneous human combustion. Instead, there’s several “theories” such as a “buildup of static electricity” or the “Wick Effect”, both not proved through science, where body fat acts as a flammable substance.

In December 2001, a 73-year-old woman in Garden Grove, California, died from the third-degree burns that she had suffered over 90 percent of her body. Firefighters and the coroner’s office were left with the puzzle of how this could be possible when the fire took only four minutes to extinguish and was confined to a couch, a table, and the chair in which the victim was sitting.
-Unexplainedstuff.com

In 1938, a British case occurred after a woman burst into flames on the middle of a dance floor. The woman purportedly ended up in ashes on the floor in a matter of minutes.

By LBG