Mary Reeser

On the morning of July 2, 1951, a telegram boy knocked on the door of a small apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida. The building’s landlady, Pansy Carpenter, was with him, trying to deliver the telegram to her tenant, a sixty-seven-year-old widow named Mary Reeser.

The doorknob was hot to the touch.

Alarmed, Mrs. Carpenter called for help. Two painters working nearby broke the door open. A wave of hot air rushed out. Inside the apartment, there was a little smoke, and a small flame burning on a beam in the wall. The room was hot, but not on fire.

Where Mary Reeser’s armchair had been, near the center of the room, there was a blackened circle on the floor about four feet across. Inside it were the springs of the chair, a few charred fragments of bone, a small skull that seemed to have shrunk in the heat, and Mary Reeser’s left foot, still wearing a black satin slipper, burned off at the ankle.

Almost everything else of Mary Reeser had been reduced to ash.

Mary

Mary Hardy Reeser was a widow who had moved to St. Petersburg from Pennsylvania to be near her son, Dr. Richard Reeser, a physician. She was a plump, cheerful woman, by her family’s accounts, and lived quietly in a small apartment.

On the evening of July 1, her son and his wife visited her. Afterward, Mrs. Carpenter, the landlady, stopped by to check on her around nine o’clock. Mary was sitting in her armchair, in a nightgown and a housecoat, smoking a cigarette. She told her son she had taken two sleeping pills and planned to take two more.

At about five o’clock the next morning, Mrs. Carpenter woke up and smelled smoke. She thought it was coming from a water pump in the garage that had been overheating, went to turn it off, and went back to bed.

A few hours later, the telegram arrived.

The Scene

What made the scene so baffling to investigators was the contrast between what had happened to Mary and what had happened to everything around her.

Her body had been almost completely destroyed. Bones that normally require hours at extremely high temperatures to burn had been reduced to fragments. Yet the room itself was only lightly damaged. A pile of newspapers a few feet away hadn’t caught fire. The linen on a nearby bed was unburned. Plastic objects in the room had melted, and the walls were covered with an oily soot above a certain height — about four feet off the floor — but below that height, there was little damage. A clock on the wall had stopped at 4:20 a.m., apparently when the heat melted its plug.

Investigators had never seen anything like it.

The Experts

The St. Petersburg police called in the FBI for help, and sent evidence to the Bureau’s laboratory in Washington. They also consulted a famous forensic anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Wilton Krogman, who happened to be in Florida.

Krogman was astonished. He had studied the burning of bodies for years and knew how difficult it was to destroy a human body by fire. Crematoriums, he said, used temperatures of around two thousand degrees for hours, and even then, bones remained. He wrote later that he had never seen a skull shrunk by heat, and that it was the most amazing thing he had ever seen. He couldn’t explain why the room hadn’t burned.

He reportedly said that if he had lived in the Middle Ages, he would have muttered something about black magic.

The Explanation

The FBI’s report concluded that Mary Reeser’s death was an accident. She had fallen asleep in her chair, drowsy from her sleeping pills, with a lit cigarette. The cigarette set fire to her nightgown and housecoat. As she burned, the fire was fed by her own body fat, which melted and soaked into her clothing and the chair’s stuffing, acting like a candle’s wax — a phenomenon later called the “wick effect.” The fire burned slowly for hours, at high temperatures, concentrated on her body and the chair, without spreading through the room.

Modern forensic scientists have demonstrated the wick effect in experiments using pig carcasses wrapped in cloth. They have shown that a human body can, under certain conditions, burn for many hours, slowly consuming itself, while leaving surrounding objects largely undamaged.

Many experts today believe the wick effect explains most cases attributed to “spontaneous human combustion.”

Spontaneous Human Combustion

But for many people, the case of Mary Reeser remains the most famous example of a strange and frightening idea: that a human body might suddenly burst into flames, with no external source of fire.

Stories of so-called spontaneous human combustion go back centuries. Charles Dickens used it to kill a character in his novel Bleak House. Over the years, there have been many reported cases of people found reduced to ashes with little damage to their surroundings. Believers suggest causes ranging from static electricity to unknown biological processes. Most scientists don’t believe that a human body can ignite by itself. In nearly every case, there’s an external source of fire — a cigarette, a candle, a fireplace, a heater — along with factors like alcohol, medication or immobility that keep the victim from escaping.

Mary Reeser’s case fits that pattern. And yet, even today, people point to the shrunken skull, the slipper, the unburned newspapers, and wonder.