MARY REESER: A Case Study in Spontaneous Human Combustion
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June 23, 1991
SHC2.ASC
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MARY REESER:
A Case Study in
Spontaneous Human Combustion
----------------------------
The 1951 death of Mrs. Mary Reeser of St. Petersburg, FL, who was
found reduced to ashes in a practically undamaged apartment, was a
landmark case of spontaneous human combustion because it was the
first instance where every possible tool of modern scientific
investigation was used to determine the cause of this mysterious
phenomenon. Yet despite the efforts of the FBI, fire officials,
arson experts, and pathologists, a year after the incident Detective
Cass Burgess of the St. Petersburg police commented as follows:
Our investigation has turned up nothing that could
be singled out as proving, beyond a doubt, what
actually happened. The case is still open. We are
still as far from establishing any logical cause
for the death as we were when we first entered
Mrs. Reeser's apartment.
And Dr. Wilton M. Krogman, a physical anthropologist at the
University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine and a world-renowned
expert on the effects of fire on the human body, finally gave up
trying to figure out what happened. Dr. Krogman said:
I regard it as the most amazing thing I have ever
seen. As I review it, the short hairs on my neck
bristle with vague fear. Were I living in the Middle
Ages, I'd mutter something about Black Magic.
Here are the details of the case:
Mrs. Mary Hardy Reeser, an agreeable, motherly widow of 67, was
living in St. Petersburg, Florida, to be near her son, Dr.
Richard Reeser. On the evening of July 1, 1951, she had remained
in her son's home with one of her grandchildren while the rest
of the family went to the beach. When they returned, they found
that Mrs. Reeser had already left for her own apartment. The
younger Mrs. Reeser drove to her mother-in-law's to see if
everything was all right.
According to her testimony, there was nothing in Mrs. Reeser's
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appearance or demeanor to cause any alarm. Dr. Reeser visited
his mother later that evening.
She was mildly depressed over the fact that she had not heard
from two friends who were supposed to rent an apartment for her
in anticipation of a return trip to Columbia, PA, formerly her
hometown. His mother told him that she wished to retire early
and would take two sleeping pills to ensure a good night's rest.
Dr. Reeser left at about 8:30 PM and returned to his home.
The last person to see Mrs. Reeser alive was her landlady, Mrs.
Pansy M. Carpenter, who lived in another apartment in the four-
unit building (the two units between them were unoccupied).
Mrs. Carpenter saw Mrs. Reeser briefly at about 9 PM. She was
wearing her nightgown, a housecoat, and black satin slippers and
was lounging in a comfortable chair smoking a cigarette. The bed
covers had been turned back. Mrs. Reeser's last night was a
typical summer night in Florida: the sky was overcast with
occasional flashes of heat lightning in the distance.
When Mrs. Carpenter woke up Monday morning at 5AM, she noticed a
slight odor of smoke but was not alarmed, since she attributed
the smell to a water pump in the garage that had been
overheating lately. She got up, turned off the pump, and settled
back into bed. When she got up an hour later to collect her
newspaper outside, she no longer smelled any smoke.
At 8AM a telegram arrived for Mrs. Reeser. Mrs. Carpenter signed
the receipt and went to her tenant's apartment to bring her the
telegram. The doorknob, when she placed her hand on it, was
hot. Alarmed, she stepped back and shouted for help.
Two painters working across the street ran over. One of them
opened the door; as he entered, he felt a blast of hot air.
Thinking of rescuing Mrs. Reeser, he frantically looked around
but saw no signs of her. The bed was empty. There was some
smoke, but the only fire was a small flame on a wooden beam,
over a partition separating the living room and kitchenette.
The firemen arrived, put out the small flame with a hand pump.
and tore away part of the partition. When Assistant Fire Chief
S. O. Griffith began his inspection of the premises, he could
not believe his eyes.
In the middle of the floor there was a charred area roughly four
feet in diameter, inside of which he found a number of blackened
chair springs and the ghastly remains of a human body,
consisting of a charred liver attached to a piece of the spine,
a shrunken skull, one foot still wearing a black satin slipper,
and a small pile of ashes.
Coroner Edward T. Silk arrived to examine the body and survey
the apartment. Although deeply puzzled, he decided the death
was accidental and authorized the removal of the remains. The
scooped-up ashes, the tiny shrunken head, and the slipper-
encased foot were taken by ambulance to a local hospital.
The ensuing investigation included police and fire officials as
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well as arson experts. The facts that confronted them seemed
inexplicable considering the great heat necessary to account for
Mrs. Reeser's incinerated body.
Little of the furniture, other than the chair and the end table
next to it, was badly damaged, but the apartment had suffered
some peculiar effects. The ceiling, draperies and walls, from a
point exactly four feet above the floor, were coated with a
smelly, oily soot. Below this four foot mark there was none.
The wall paint adjacent to the chair was faintly browned, but
the carpet where the chair had rested was not even burned
through. A wall mirror 10 feet away had cracked, probably from
heat. On a dressing table 12 feet away, two pink wax candles had
puddled, but their wicks lay undamaged in their holders.
Plastic wall outlets above the four foot mark were melted, but
the fuses were not blown and the current was on. The baseboard
electrical outlets were undamaged. An electric clock plugged
into one of the outlets had stopped at precisely 4:20, but the
same clock ran perfectly when plugged into one of the baseboard
outlets.
Newspapers nearby on a table and draperies and linens on the
daybed close at hand - all flammable - were not damaged. And
though the painters and Mrs. Carpenter had felt a wave of heat
when they opened the door, no one had noted smoke or burning
odor and there were no embers or flames in the ashes.
Faced with such a mystery, the St. Petersburg authorities called in
the FBI. Laboratory findings showed that Mrs. Reeser's estimated
weight of 175 lbs. had been reduced to a total of less than 10
lbs., including the foot and shrunken head.
The final report concluded that no known chemical agents or other
accelerants had been involved in starting the fire.
Dr. Krogman has burned cadavers with gasoline, oil, wood, and all
kinds of other agents. He has experimented with bones encased in
flesh or stripped, both moist and dry. His tests have utilized
combustion apparatus ranging from outdoor pyres to the most modern
pressurized crematorium equipment.
He has demonstrated conclusively that it takes extraordinary heat to
consume a body, and that only at over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit would
bone become volatile enough to lose its shape and leave only ashes.
"These are very great heats", he said, "that would sear,
char, scorch or otherwise mar or effect anything and
everything within a considerable radius."
Another mystery was the slippered left foot, which Mrs. Reeser,
having been in some discomfort, was in the habit of propping up on a
stool. The foot was left unburned, apparently because it was outside
the mysterious four-foot radius of incineration.
Perhaps strangest of all, and unique to this case of SHC, was the
shrunken skull. Dr. Krogman commented:
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...the head is not left complete in ordinary burning cases.
Certainly it does NOT shrivel or symmetrically reduce to a
smaller size. In presence of heat sufficient to destroy soft
tissues, the skull would literally explode in many pieces.
I...have never known any exception to this rule.
____________________________________________________________________
SEE: Michael Harrison, - "Fire From Heaven"
Vincent Gaddis, - "Mysterious Fires and Lights"
Francis Hitching, - "The Mysterious World: An Atlas of the
Unexplained"
Frank Edwards, - "Stranger than Science"
Reader's Digest, - "Mysteries of the Unexplained"
____________________________________________________________________
The following conversation took place at 3:17 PM MST on October 16,
1985, between myself and Captain Jerry Hubbard, Public Information
Officer for the San Jose Fire Department. In reading the transcript,
pay special attention to these key elements that seem to crop up in
_MOST_, but not all, SHC events:
o The probable ingestion of alcohol
o The victim is usually a loner type, and/or is alone at time
of the event.
o An appendage is left untouched.
o Surroundings do not catch fire.
I'm not sure what we're dealing with, but I think it becomes clear
that it is not a non-event or misobservation. And this does not come
from the Enquirer.
____________________________________________________________________
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
JS Tony Russomano gave me your name.
JH I know Tony.
JS You know Tony, OK.
JH Channel 7.
JS Right. We've been investigating, sort of as a project,
Spontaneous Human Combustion.
JH Ah.
JS Tony tells me, a couple of years ago, you had a real
strange one.
JH We did.
JS OK, what can you tell me about it, was it...solved, or is
it still on the strange list?
JH No, it hasn't been solved. The situation is what we call
an accidental fire death. It was in a boxcar in a
Southern Pacific RailRoad yard. We were called
there, because somebody spotted from a Thrifty
store....said they saw smoke coming from a
boxcar...When we got there we had a dead body,
completely consumed, 100% all over...
JS Not one thing left?
JH Not one thing left, well, with the exception of, uh, a
quarter of an ankle or something, and where the
victim's head was laying against the boxcar. Now
the strange thing about this...
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JS Yes?
JH The only thing that burned was the body!
JS Uh, what about the clothing?
JH Oh, and the clothing burned off, yeah, and apparently we
are assuming that the person was in a sleeping
bag. That was completely gone.
JS The sleeping bag was gone.
JH Yeah. The only thing that was left was kind of a
skeleton-type thing, uh, burned charred bones, and
a foot, I believe, was burned off. But the boxcar
never caught fire.
JS The boxcar never...was it a wooden-floored boxcar?
JH Yeah, wooden floor, wooden sides. And, when we had the
body removed by the coroner's office, all you saw
strictly that, that was burned, was maybe a
quarter of an inch of charring. It never caught on
fire. Now what we're saying could possibly have
happened was that somebody could have gotten mad,
as winos or transient people do, could have soaked
the person in liquid, flammable...we have no
indication of [flammable liquid] at all. Ok, the
fire was contained strictly to the body, and the
sleeping bag, or blanket, whatever it may have
been. [But] if you had used flammable liquid it
would have ignited the entire boxcar....that
didn't occur.
JS Uh-Huh. Was there any kind of an oily residue on the
sides or walls of the boxcar?
JH Ah-hah, see, now you're getting good, that's interesting.
We'd probably have to look into the fire report on
that, to see if the fire investigator spotted that
one at all. Best I can recall is that, I went to
the scene, got there before the body was removed,
but the best I can recall is that, we could tell
it was a male,...
JS There was no identification made?
JH No. I don't know if the coroners, from this point on,
have discovered who it might have been through
dental charts or something.
JS Now you said before that there was nothing left, except
for part of an ankle. OK, now when you say that,
do you mean that there was nothing left as far as
skin, or his bones [were consumed] or....
JS No. He still had a skull intact and chest intact, but he
was charred completely all over his body. You
wanted just ashes and a foot, huh? <laughs> Can't
give that to ya. No, best I can recall is, that I
remember seeing an ankle and a foot, by itself,
and the only way that could have happened is that
that foot was sticking outside of the sack and
didn't get involved, but it [the fire] stayed
there and burned him _severely_, so that he wasn't
recognizable at all.
END TRANSCRIPT
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Vangard note...
SHC (spontaneous human combustion) has been an interest here for
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several years now. As a result, we have SHC1, a file indicating
a relationship between Deuterium Oxide and this mysterious
burning effect. It has been called the "fire from heaven" in
ancient times and was believed to have been punishment sent from
the gods.
The book and movie Alternative Three mentions the effect as
something which could be directed to a target using some form of
unspecified technology.
There is also the possiblity of it being some mysterious
combination of foods or other factors which produce a
tremendously hot and highly localized flame.
Finally, the work of George Crile led him to postulate the
existence of what he termed "radiogens". These were miniature
nuclear furnaces within the cells of all bodies consisting of
flaming iron suns. Crile estimated the heat from these
miniature suns as being on the order of 6000 degrees Celsius.
In addition, the nuclear energy generated in the cell helped the
body to fulfill the conversion of mass to energy as well as the
transmutation of one mass to another as in Louis Kervrans'
"Biological Transmutation".
The reason why bodies fail to incinerate from these tremendous
temperatures is due to the nature of the inverse square law. As
the energy radiates from the central mass, it cools due to
spreading over successively greater distances.
If for some reason, these nuclear furnaces "went wild", a
fissioning process could result leading to the end result of
"spontaneous human combustion".
We therefore need to seek the "triggers" which lead to such
fissioning.
____________________________________________________________________
If you have comments or other information relating to such topics
as this paper covers, please upload to KeelyNet or send to the
Vangard Sciences address as listed on the first page.
Thank you for your consideration, interest and support.
Jerry W. Decker.........Ron Barker...........Chuck Henderson
Vangard Sciences/KeelyNet
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