Episode 44: From Within

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In 1987, in a small village in northwestern India, a young widow stood beside the funeral pyre that held the body of her husband.

She was just 18, and he had been 24.

As the flames climbed higher and cremated his body, she stepped forward and threw herself onto him.

Right there, in front of thousands who had gathered for the funeral, she burned alive.

And the people responded by building her a shrine.

What she did, as horrible as it sounds to our modern sensibilities, was a tragic yet common act in her culture.

It's an ancient Hindu funeral ritual known as Sati, and by practicing it, this young widow became one more participant in a very old tradition.

Sati, as a practice, dates back at least 2,000 years.

It wasn't an obscure practice either.

In the last 15 years prior to its ban in 1829, it's estimated that over 8,000 women committed suicide through sati.

And although it's illegal today, it still occasionally happens in remote villages that have yet to leave the old ways behind.

Maybe that's because it's a ritual that taps into a deep, ancient attraction we all seem to have toward fire.

For a very long time, fire was a thing of power, a thing of mystery.

Our ancestors' torches were used to frighten off predators and were then brought indoors to keep them warm on cold winter nights.

While humans might not have always understood it, We quickly learned that it was a tool we could use.

Ever since, fire has been something we've played with and harnessed.

Like sati, humans have worked it into countless religious and civic practices over the centuries.

Maybe that's why we tend to think that we're the boss, that we, and not the flames, are in control.

It's just a tool, after all.

We are the masters.

But that's a dangerous assumption.

Because fire has one other inescapable, undeniable quality.

Whether we want it to or not, fire burns.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Throughout the long, elaborate, complex history of humankind, there is a small handful of recurring themes.

They're universal, crossing the borders of culture and chronology, and they never seem to go out of style.

Power, death, love,

money.

These are ever-present ideals that play out time and again, like main characters in an epic novel.

And with them through it all, from the beginning of civilization up to the present, has been fire.

The ancient myths built stories to explain why we even had something as dangerous and helpful as fire.

The Greek story of Prometheus tells us of how he defied Zeus and stole fire from Mount Olympus, bringing it to humanity as a source of power and civilization.

And that idea, the notion of a deity or superhero who steals fire from the realm of the gods, is present in dozens of cultures around the world.

Across the Atlantic, and centuries later, the Cherokee would speak of Grandmother Spider and how she entered the land of of light and brought fire back in a clay pot.

Hebrew mythology tells of a fallen angel named Azazel who brings knowledge of how to use fire and grants it to humanity.

One of the Hindu sacred texts known as the Rig Veda carries the same theme with fire locked away from humanity until a brave hero retrieves it.

In all of the stories, fire is a possession of the divine, and when humanity gets a hold of it, they grow and advance and and change for the better.

It's not difficult to see then how the idea of fire evolved over time to become a sort of symbol of the divine.

Fire blesses us, in a sense.

It makes our lives better.

As a result, we've worked fire into every aspect of our modern lives.

It's the cornerstone of technology and has enabled us to evolve from cave paintings to cell phones.

Think about it.

The earliest examples of writing were on clay tablets.

If those clay tablets couldn't be fired, fired, they would have fallen apart and vanished long ago.

Fire, in a literal sense, made it possible to pass knowledge down to the next generation.

Early on, we also discovered another place in our lives for fire, our funerals.

Evidence for cremation dates back at least 20,000 years, and although it was never the sole method of burial, it was vastly more common than it is today.

The speed bump was Christianity.

When belief in the resurrection of the body spread across Europe and the New World, a distaste for cremation came with it.

In some places and times, it was even outlawed, carrying the death penalty.

Cremation is a mixture of science and symbolism.

In one sense, our bodies are just reduced to their basic elements, returning them to the earth as part of a greater chemical cycle.

In another, the afterlife, in the form of fire, consumes us.

Either way you view it, at the core of the the act is the ever-present force, fire.

Cremation is a powerful process too.

Even at temperatures in excess of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, it still takes the average human body almost three hours to burn completely.

When it's over though, all that remains is just a few pounds of bone fragments, which are then crushed and moved to an urn.

True to much of human history though, cremation is something we've managed to twist and bend to our own nature.

As far back as 4,000 years ago, the Babylonians used death by burning as a punishment for certain crimes.

That practice was echoed in ancient Egypt and carried on later in the Roman Empire.

By the 13th century, many European kingdoms had begun to make burning a legally required method of execution for certain crimes.

Wielded by Christian emperors, that punishment quickly became focused on people accused of heresy, for straying away from accepted religious norms of the time.

That's why, by the 1500s, witchcraft and burning at the stake had become as synonymous as chocolate and peanut butter.

Just, you know, a lot less enjoyable.

If there's anything to learn here, it's that humans have a long history of burning each other.

We burn our dead, and sometimes we even burn the living.

The key to both scenarios, though, is that we're in control, and we know the reasons why, whether they're honorable or horrific.

In every case, fire has been a tool in our hands.

There have been rare and unexpected moments in history, though, when that hasn't been the case.

When someone has been consumed by fire, and despite all attempts to explain why, we're left with nothing but mystery.

And it's happened enough that we've even given it a name:

spontaneous human combustion.

We didn't always have a name for it.

The term spontaneous human combustion first appeared in print in 1746, but there were stories told long before that fit the description.

One of the first, as far as I can tell, was written down in 1641 by Danish physician Thomas Bartelin.

According to Bartolin, there was an Italian knight in the 15th century named Polinus Vorstius.

The story goes that the knight was at home in Milan in 1470, eating and drinking with friends and family, and he apparently had a great love of strong wine, which he drank a lot of that night.

Bartolin described how the knight, fully intoxicated and stinking of alcohol, belched fire.

It probably surprised him as much as his parents, who were right there with him at the table.

And then, without any source of ignition, he burst into flames and died before their eyes.

More than a century later, a professor of philosophy named John Christopher Sturmius recorded a similar tale.

In one of his books, he tells a brief story of three men who apparently liked a party.

After encouraging each other, to get absolutely blitzed on wine, two of the men died.

The cause of death was that they they had been, and I quote, scorched and suffocated by a flame forcing itself from the stomach.

This idea that alcohol was to blame, and specifically the excessive ingestion of alcohol, was one of the most common explanations tossed around in the early days of these tales.

On one level, it was pretty logical.

Alcohol is a flammable substance, so if someone was found mysteriously burned alive and they were a known alcoholic, well, the story sort of wrote itself.

On the other hand, though, there was little science to support these claims.

Most of the stories about these events speak of the wrath of God and how the sin of these alcoholics brought judgment by fire.

It was a convenient theory, but it didn't hold water.

Especially when you take the story of Contessa Cornelia Di Bandi into consideration.

Di Bandi was an Italian countess in the city of Gisena back in the early part of the 18th century.

In an account from 1731, her story was recorded in detail.

According to the tale, at the age of 62, the countess ended her evening one night with a long conversation with her maid and then retired to bed.

The following morning, when the maid entered the countess' bedroom, she discovered nothing more than two legs and a pile of ash.

The legs, by the way, were still wearing cloth stockings.

And unlike other stories of spontaneous human combustion, this woman wasn't a heavy drinker.

In fact, she was known to abstain from alcohol entirely.

Most tales of events like this remain to the realm of speculation and whispered rumor.

And rightly so.

Every now and then, though, our superstitions sneak into more formal locations, like the courtroom.

And that's what happened in 1725.

Jean and Nicole Millais were innkeepers in France, and they had quite a reputation.

Nicole, so the story goes, was almost always drunk, and she was verbally abusive and difficult to work with.

And maybe that's why Jeanne was rumored to be sleeping with one of the young servants there at the inn.

They were an imperfect couple with a lot of issues to work through, apparently.

In late February of 1725, a surgeon named Claude-Nicolas Leca was passing through the area and booked a room at the Malaise Inn.

According to his account, the following morning, a small pile of human remains was found in the inn's kitchen, about two feet from the hearth.

It was Nicole, and all that remained of her were her unburned feet, her skull, and a few pieces of her spine.

Almost immediately, her husband Jean was arrested and charged with murder by fire of his wife.

But he protested the charges.

He told the court that his wife had gone to bed with him at 8 p.m.

the previous night, but had left the bed a short while later.

She told him she couldn't sleep, and she left the room.

He assumed that she had gone off to drink somewhere by herself and rolled over and went back to sleep.

Considering all the rumors about their unhappy marriage, the judge was slow to believe the innkeeper.

It was too convenient, honestly, and they were ready to convict.

And that's when the traveling surgeon, Leca, stepped in.

He spoke to the judge.

He told him that there were many documented examples of unexplainable burnings like this and that there were scientific logical causes behind them.

As a medical expert, he supported the idea.

Whatever the true cause of Nicole's death might have been, Leca told the court that her death seemed more like punishment from God for her heavy drinking and bitter attitude.

And with no physical evidence to support the charge of murder, they should let her husband off the hook.

And it worked.

Jean Millet was released, a free man thanks to a surgeon who was well-read and open-minded.

Or thanks to a judge who was gullible.

I'll let you decide.

That's a luxury we have when we're talking about stories that are three centuries old, after all.

That distance, that age,

gives us a bit of freedom in our interpretation.

When the story is just a few decades old, from the age of photography, forensic science, and modern medicine, it gets more tricky.

Not because it's harder to believe, though.

Quite the opposite.

Sometimes the evidence is so overwhelming, so documented, and yet so bizarre that it takes on a life and death of its own.

Mary had two visitors on July 1st, 1951.

Her son, Dr.

Richard Reeser, had been to her apartment that evening, and they'd been joined by Mary's landlady, Mrs.

Pansy Carpenter.

Mary was 67 years old, and she lived there alone in her apartment in St.

Petersburg, Florida.

So, this was probably a friendly social call.

Mary's guests left about 9 p.m.

that evening.

She stayed in her recliner in the living room, and they let themselves out.

And that was that.

Except for waking up at 5 in the morning to the smell of something burning, Mrs.

Carpenter had a lovely night of sleep.

There was a knock on her door at 8 a.m.

that morning, and she opened it to find the telegraph boy standing there.

This was the 1950s, well before personal computers and cell phones, so this was basically the mid-century equivalent of a text message, except this message was for Mary Reeser.

The landlady signed for it and then walked up to Mary's room to deliver it to her personally.

She knocked a few times and waited, but Mary was either asleep or already out.

She figured she would just set it on the kitchen table and remind her later, so she grabbed the doorknob and then pulled away.

The metal knob was hot to the touch.

Not only did it hurt, but it set off an alarm inside her head.

What if there was a fire?

So she dashed back down the stairs where two house painters were at work in another of the apartment units and asked for their help.

They followed her up and quickly forced the door open.

A wave of heat rolled out through the door and the apartment inside showed signs of fire.

Well, sort of.

Really, it was just a corner of the living room, centered around the recliner that Mary loved to sit in.

But the chair wasn't there anymore.

All of the wood and fabric had burned away, leaving just a few springs in a blackened pile on the floor.

And Mary had been in the chair when it burned.

We know this because when the police and firemen arrived, they found her unburned foot laying nearby.

Other than the burn marks around the ankle, the foot and the fabric of the slipper it was inside were both unharmed.

They found a few other pieces of Mary in the pile of ash.

Her liver was there, charred and fused to some vertebrae, and her skull was still intact, or at least nearly intact.

You see, it had somehow been shrunk.

Some anecdotal reports say it was the size of a teacup, but the official medical examiner's report just says that it was much smaller than it should have been.

An FBI forensic team was called in.

They took over and started to really examine the apartment.

As a result, things became even more and more confusing and mysterious, if that's even possible.

They determined that Mary had been smoking and that she'd been sedated with a sleeping pill, something her son confirmed was part of her evening routine.

They also determined that in order for her body to incinerate so completely, a fire of at least 3,000 degrees would have had to burn for over three hours.

And that's a lot of heat.

So you'd expect the apartment to show signs of a fire like that.

There were some, but it was mostly heat-related, and all of the visible damage was located about four feet off the ground or higher.

Above that invisible line, candles had melted into puddles of wax, a mirror had cracked from the heat, the plastic light switches had melted, and a greasy soot covered the walls.

The grease, they determined, was from Mary's body.

She'd weighed about 170 pounds at the time of her death, and the idea was that perhaps a cigarette ignited her clothing or bathrobe.

Then her body would have burned like a candle wick, using her fat as a fuel source.

Some scientists think it's possible, but it would still produce an intense amount of heat.

And that presented some problems for the investigators.

Because, yes, there was heat damage higher up on the walls and that greasy residue.

But right beside the spot where the recliner had once stood, there was a pile of newspapers that remained untouched by the flames.

The investigators were baffled.

How could a human being burn so thoroughly that only a handful of bones remained and not ignite everything else in the apartment?

Toward the end of the investigation, the police brought in a physical anthropologist named Dr.

Wilton Krogman.

Due to his research, he had a wealth of experience with the physical elements of events like Mary Reeser's death.

Later, he would write that he could not conceive of such complete cremation without more burning of the apartment.

As for the skull, that too left Dr.

Krogman utterly baffled.

In a newspaper interview shortly after the investigation, he told a reporter, I have participated in the investigation of some 30 fire deaths in the past 20 years.

Never have I seen a human skull shrink by intense heat.

In fact, the opposite has always been true.

Krogman later said that the case still haunted him years later.

It was the inexplicable nature of it all, the mystery, the clues and physics that just didn't seem to line up.

He later wrote, The apartment and everything in it should have been consumed.

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 would mutter something about black magic.

There's a dance dance we do with topics like spontaneous human combustion.

We want to unravel the truth, to untie the knot and make sense of it all.

That's very human of us, very logical and rational.

I fully support that kind of behavior.

On the other hand, though, we cling to mysteries like a beloved childhood toy.

Don't kill the mood.

Don't shatter the dream.

Just let me revel for a little bit longer inside this warm, cozy blanket of unexplainable conundrum.

That's you.

I'm right there with you, trust me.

We love knowing, and we hate knowing.

And these stories of knights and countesses and widows and drunks who have all burst into flames and been reduced to a handful of ash, well,

they do something to us, don't they?

That's why authors like Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens all use spontaneous human combustion to kill off characters in their novels.

Maybe science will one day point to the true source of these events.

Maybe someone in a lab somewhere will be able to reproduce the circumstances and results and brush every last bit of mystery off the box that we use to store these tales in.

Or maybe not.

Because sometimes...

We just never find the answers.

These stories are full of the unexplainable, unexplainable though, and that pushes us toward wonder.

Whether we tell ourselves that some natural external source caused the fire or that it came from within, we're still left with too many questions.

Why these people?

Why was there so little damage outside the location of the body?

Why weren't the houses or apartments burnt down around them?

And like all of the unexplainable tales that tickle at the back of our minds, we know we'll never get all the answers.

Thankfully though, the world sometimes tosses new stories our way to remind us that these things still happen and that love it or hate it, we still don't know the answers.

In 2011, in Ireland, the fire department entered the home of an elderly man named Michael Flaherty.

They were responding to a smoke alarm there.

and when they entered, they found a small pile of human ash on the floor.

Other than some heat damage close to the the ash and above it on the ceiling, there were no other signs of a fire.

The coroner listed the cause of death as spontaneous human combustion.

Back in 1966, another elderly man, Dr.

John Bentley from Pennsylvania, suffered a similar fate in his bathroom.

His cremated remains were found beside the toilet in his home.

His walker had toppled into the fire, but the rubber grips were completely untouched.

In 1986, Kendall Mott was worried about his retired father, George, who hadn't called him that day, so he went over to check on him.

He arrived to find the doorknob hot to the touch and the windows coated in a dark soot, so he let himself in.

George had died in bed while watching television, but there wasn't much left of him to examine.

The pile of ash was contained to the mattress and nowhere else.

Forensic investigators determined that a fire of nearly 3,000 degrees had incinerated the man over the span of hours.

Which explains the ash, of course.

But it doesn't explain the box of matches on the bedside table that were unburnt and perfectly intact.

Or the fact that George Mott wasn't a smoker.

Yes, the TV melted, but the rest of the house was untouched by the fire that had to have taken place.

As I said a moment ago, the only thing left of George Mott was a small pile of ash and a leg

and a skull.

A skull that hadn't exploded or fallen apart, mind you.

It had shrunk.

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This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marcette Crockett.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now.

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Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

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And as always, thanks for listening.