On the morning of July 2, 1951 in St. Petersburg, Florida, Mary Reeser’s landlady went to the old woman’s apartment to deliver a telegram and noticed that her door was warm to the touch. Upon opening the door, she found Reeser almost completely reduced to a pile of ashes lying on the scorched remnants of her chair. A part of her left leg and her skull, shrunken far beyond its normal size, were all that remained.
Local authorities were unable to determine any cause of the blaze and the rest of the apartment was largely devoid of fire damage. When they sent the case to the FBI, they determined that Reeser had gone up in flames like the wick of a candle, with her own body fat steadily feeding the fire — but they too were baffled as to how the blaze started in the first place. To this day, it’s widely believed that this was a case of spontaneous human combustion.
