1951年，佛罗里达一位老太太，在屋里只剩下一堆灰和一只脚

On the morning of July 2, 1951, in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA, the landlady of an apartment building knocked on Mary Reeser's door, holding a telegram for the tenant. No one answered. She gripped the doorknob; it was hot.

She called over two workers passing by, and they burst the door open. A wave of heat burst out; the inside was hot like an oven.

Mary, sixty-seven years old, lived there alone. She sat in an armchair; the chair was almost completely burned, leaving only the springs. She was left with only a small pile of ash, a piece of skull shrunken to the size of a fist, and a left foot wearing a slipper, still attached at the ankle, untouched by fire.

The other things in the room were almost fine. The newspaper on the table beside her was not burned; the lamp was fine; there were smoke stains on one wall, and a layer of soot on the ceiling. On a wall not far from her, a plastic socket had melted, and the wires were burned through. A clock in the room stopped at 4:20.

The police, the fire department, and even the FBI sent people. They speculated: Mary had taken sleeping pills that night, sat in the chair smoking, fell asleep, and the cigarette butt ignited her nightgown.

But for a human body to burn down to just a pile of ash requires very high temperatures; in a crematorium, it takes one or two hours. How could a fire on a chair produce such a result?

An anthropologist who studied human skeletons was called in. After looking at the scene, he said he had never seen anything like it.

Later, someone proposed the "wick effect": human clothes act like a candle wick; once the body's fat melts, it is absorbed by the clothes, burning while supplying fuel, allowing it to burn slowly for hours, while things around it, because the fire isn't large, are not easily ignited. Later, someone conducted an experiment using a pig wrapped in cotton cloth, set it on fire, and burned it for several hours; the result was very similar to Mary's scene.

However, those who believe in "spontaneous human combustion" were not satisfied with this explanation. They felt that without an external fire, how could a person possibly catch fire on their own?

The term "spontaneous human combustion" has since remained on the list of supernatural cases, and even today people still bring it up to tell the story.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #世界奇闻