Is Spontaneous Human Combustion Real?

Late at night on Christmas Eve 1885, in the small farming town of Seneca, Illinois, a woman named Matilda Rooney burst into flames. She was alone in her kitchen when it happened. The fire quickly incinerated her entire body except her feet. The incident also claimed the life of her husband, Patrick, who was found suffocated from the fumes in another room of the house.

The tragedy left investigators baffled. There was no reason to suspect foul play. The Rooneys had been relaxing and drinking whiskey that evening. A farmhand who had spent a few hours with them hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. Furthermore, no source of ignition could be found for the blaze. Although the flames had been intense enough to reduce Matilda Rooney to ashes and a few fragments of bone, they had not spread to the rest of the room. The fire seemed to have started in her body and stayed confined to her body.



It appeared that the Rooneys had fallen victim to the rare and enigmatic phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion.

Spontaneous human combustion is a mystery with an impressive literary pedigree. Herman Melville and Nikolay Gogol used it to dispatch characters in their novels Redburn and Dead Souls, respectively. But the most notorious case in fiction is Bleak House by Charles Dickens, where the sleazy alcoholic junk merchant Mr. Krook ends up as a heap of ashes on the floor and “a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling.” In the preface to the book edition of Bleak House, written after the novel had already been published in serial form, Dickens defended his use of spontaneous combustion against accusations of implausibility, citing several famous cases and the judgments of eminent medical doctors that such a thing was indeed possible. “I shall not abandon the facts,” he concludes with typical Dickensian panache, “until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.



Descriptions of spontaneous human combustion date back to the 17th century, with a large number of cases recorded in the 19th century and a handful in the 20th and 21st centuries. Altogether, there are a few hundred recorded possible cases. Although the scientific support for spontaneous human combustion was weaker than Dickens stated, it was a widely discussed phenomenon in his time. The public largely accepted it as a reality on moral grounds. The victims were often alcoholic and overweight, and more were female than male, so there was a general perception that it was a kind of retribution for a debauched lifestyle. This idea was reinforced by lurid newspaper accounts of suspected cases. It made intuitive sense, after all, that a body saturated with a flammable substance—alcohol—would become flammable.