Spontaneous Human Combustion and the Mysterious Death of Madge Knight
Believing the Bizarre: Paranormal Conspiracies & Myths
Tyler and Charlie
4.7 • 781 Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2023
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The idea of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) has been puzzling and fascinating people since the 1600s. It got really popular after Charles Dickens wrote about a character dying from SHC in his novel "Bleak House."
The theory claims that people can just burst into flames from the inside, without any outside spark or fire source. But scientists are pretty skeptical - they point out that the human body is mostly water, with only small amounts of flammable stuff like fat and methane gas.
Plus, the crazy high heat needed to reduce a body to ashes doesn't match up with how little fire damage is usually seen around SHC cases.
Scientific analyses keep poking holes in the likelihood of SHC. Our bodies are soaking wet on the inside, not exactly tinderboxes ready to combust.
Even if someone did randomly catch fire, all that water would probably douse the flames pretty quickly. Comparing it to cremation, which takes temperatures over 1600°F for a long time, makes spontaneous combustion seem highly improbable based on things like tiny cigarette tips as the ignition source.
While SHC tales are gripping in novels and urban legends, the scientific consensus leans hard against it actually being a real phenomenon - more like an unsolvable mystery than something that happens.
So as fascinating as the whole spontaneous combustion concept is, most serious scientists think it's simply implausible based on human biology and the laws of combustion.
Mysterious ashes and burn patterns alone don't override our physical reality. Still, that lingering "what if?" makes spontaneous human combustion an irresistibly spooky idea that will probably keep getting retold for centuries to come.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are there particular deaths that have stumped experts for decades? |
| 0:03.9 | What would you do if you heard a sleeping loved one scream in the middle of the night? |
| 0:08.5 | Is it possible for humans to suddenly burst into flames? |
| 0:13.3 | Today, we test the leaveability of the death of magnite and spontaneous human combustion. |
| 0:45.9 | Thank you. of Madge Night and spontaneous human combustion. Welcome to Believing the Bazaar, where we dive into the unknown and the unusual. |
| 0:48.3 | And tell you whether or not we find it believable. |
| 0:55.5 | That is right. It's another Tuesday. I hope for all of y'all that celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. If you're Canadian. If you're Canadian, yours is last month. Oh, yeah, |
| 1:01.5 | you didn't get a shout out. That's, that's Halloween time. And Thanksgiving time for them. |
| 1:06.8 | But ours is tomorrow. In real life. |
| 1:13.3 | As of the recording of this, it is tomorrow. |
| 1:13.9 | That is correct. |
| 1:15.5 | And my birthday was the day before this. |
| 1:17.4 | Oh, happy birthday, Charlie. |
| 1:17.8 | Yeah. |
| 1:20.8 | I'll post something, I'm sure, unless I forget. |
| 1:22.3 | And I'm going to go to New York this weekend. Very busy. |
| 1:22.9 | Oh, yeah, you're going to go see Sweeney Todd. |
| 1:24.1 | I am going to go Sweeney Toad. |
| 1:26.1 | See it. I'm going to see it on Broadway. |
| 1:28.3 | What if they just like, what if, like, the guy who play Sweeney hurt his ankle? |
| 1:33.1 | And they're like, isn't there? |
| 1:34.0 | I know that's why they have understudies. |
... |
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