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Jac_quenne had just finished her cookery exam. It was a cold late January day in 1985 in W.idness, England, and Jacquel,ine was seventeen. She left the room to·wait by thie door for several minutes for two classmates to leave. They met andl headed off through the building complex. A couple of minutes' walking took them to some steps and as they descended in the company of other students, Jacqueline's back burst into flames. Her two horrified friends afterwards described how it appeared that a ball of .light fell down her back and broke out into fire. The flames were doused and she was rushed to hospital, but she died fifteen days later. At the inq,uest, the government chemist theorised that she must have leaned against a cooking flame which caused her catering jacket to smoulder unnoticed. He suspected that when she entered the corridor o.utside and down the stairs, draughJs in the building caus~d the jacket to burst out in flames. However, no witness to the fire saw any smouldering nor smelt any smoke until the moment of the fire. A report by ,the local fire brigade disagreed with the chemist's assessment. The press seized on this 'extraordinary incident and called it a case of Spontaneous Human Combustion. The official report blamed! the smou1ldering jacket and left unan swered the question of how a healthy seventeen-year-old couldl burst into names in the Open, in broad daylight, with no obvious cause. The case attracted ongoing media interest. It also sparked the interest of Jenny Rand['es and Peter Rough in doing some {irst-hand research into the mystery of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC). That research came ,to fruition in 199'2 with the publication of their book by the same name. I'm indebted to them for the opportUility to dlraw much material' for this article from their book. The very notion of a human body bursting into names spontaneously, i.e., without any obvious or outward means of combustion, is a strange One. It's hard to believe that it could Jilappen. Itjust doesn't appear on the fwnt pages of newspapers every day. Where is the evidence? -Where are all the bodies that burst into flame periodically to make this phenomenon believable? It might surprise you to know that, according to Randles and Hough, anything up to lOO SHC events per year may happen in the United Kingdom alone. That makes one every three days! Fire statistics in the UK for 1989 show 901 deaths from fire. More than hallf of these were from accidental fires in dwcllings caused by smokers' materials and match es. The highest death rates occur in the under five-year-oqds and over sixty-fives. Accidental fires in households and other occupied dwellings totalled 110,159. Of these, 2,589 remained "unspecified", which means there was not even circumstantial evidence to allocate a cause. The "unspecified" fires resulted in 90 deaths and 466 non-fatalities (Randles and Hough, p. 245). Multiply that figure of 90 unexplained deaths by approximately 50 (UK's population is around one fiftieth of the world's), and you get 4,500 cases per year. This figure must be taken as a rough guess, but nevertheless it shows hiow the occurrence of SHC, while small on a glbbal scale, may be more common thalli we realise. CHARACTERISTICS OF SFONTANEOUS COMBUSTION By far 'the most common description of death by fire in unusual circumstances fits into the following. The person's remains are usually found iu a bumt-out chair or bed. The furniture on which they were sitting OJ lying is often totally consumed!. Often only a small part of Ithe body ,is found-sometimes part of an arm or the hands, or just the bottom half of one or both legs. There are sometimes pieces of internal organs-some ashed bones or carbonised liver or other organ. The head is sometimes still intact or may be APRIL -MAY 1995 NEXUS • 55