Bratislava - An incredible case of death caused by spontaneous combustion shocked Slovakia. On March 10 of this year an older woman from Bratislava burned without any evidence of external source of fire or evidence of involvement of another person. According to TV Markíza police investigators and mystery hunters have been agonizing over the case for the past month.
In the Bratislava apartment on Krížna Street firefighters and paramedics found the charred body of an older woman without any fire damage around it. It is not clear what was the source of the fire. Around the world there have been known cases of spontaneous human combustion, therefore there has been talk of this being the cause of death.
© Ondřej Lazar Krynek, Novinky
"A burned human body with no obvious source of fire was found lying on a tile floor. Apart from the chair on which the person sat nothing else was damaged by flames," said Milan Grossman the chief of fire-fighting operations.
According to preliminary results of the investigation, an older woman sat down on a chair two meters away from a stove and her body caught fire. Nothing was found in the apartment that could be seen as the cause of the fire, there were no candles, cigarettes, matches or plugged in stove.
More past cases of spontaneous combustion, scientists dismiss them
A similar case happened in Slovakia 50 years ago, when a pair of lovers caught on fire in a car. The bodies were charred but the interior of the car was undamaged. During the 20th century throughout the world about 40 cases of spontaneous human combustion have been documented. The fire usually started in the abdomen and moved upwards. Often the lower limbs remained intact and the fire did not damage clothing or objects near the body.
Mystery hunters talk about demon involvement, a disruption of electromagnetic fields or auto-aggression. Stories circulate about cases where a young girl at a dance began to burn in the arms of her partner or the dead body of a woman whose body began to burn in the hearse.
But scientists reject the theory of spontaneous combustion. They point out that the human body contains large amounts of water, therefore the possibility of spontaneous combustion is very unlikely. The theory of spontaneous combustion is also refuted by cremation furnaces. It takes seventy minutes for a body to burn completely at 1200 degrees.
made of hydrogen and oxygen which as we have "seen" is highly combustible