(word processor parameters LM=8, RM=75, TM=2, BM=2) Taken from KeelyNet BBS (214) 324-3501 Sponsored by Vangard Sciences PO BOX 1031 Mesquite, TX 75150 There are ABSOLUTELY NO RESTRICTIONS on duplicating, publishing or distributing the files on KeelyNet! June 23, 1991 SHC2.ASC -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 Page 1 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 Page 2 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: Page 3 ...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... Page 4 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? 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Vangard note... SHC (spontaneous human combustion) has been an interest here for Page 5 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 -------------------------------------------------------------------- If we can be of service, you may contact Jerry at (214) 324-8741 or Ron at (214) 242-9346 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 6